Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Liedtke critiques “digital feudalism,” where tech companies replace true product ownership with revokable, subscription-based licenses and software-locked hardware. He argues that Canada lags behind global regulation, harming consumer autonomy, local repair shops, and the right to repair.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Full Transcript
Gene Valaitis: It’s a Tuesday morning, and at this time, it’s time for another edition of Liedtke’s Got a Take. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Fantastic take this morning, I can tell you this one already. We’re talking about digital devices. You know, we consume content on our devices, we drive to work in cars that are, you know, more like cars than—more like computers than cars. Everybody has a smart device in their home. But then we see headline after headline of people having their digital movies suddenly wiped from their libraries, features locked on their cars, even printers stop printing if you don’t pay for your subscription and order your ink online. Why does it feel like we’re paying for things like rent on things that we already own?
Jon Liedtke: Well, because we are. Thanks for having me on, Gene. You know, I’m writing a piece about this right now. I’m calling it “You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy: How Digital Feudalism is Replacing Ownership.” And, you know, we—we are paying rent. We just didn’t realize that we signed the lease on it. From a corporate perspective, though, I get the business strategy. Why make money off of a customer just once when you can bleed them dry every single month in perpetuity? But here’s the reality check. Back in, you know, the physical era—DVDs, VHSs, Blu-rays—if a movie studio lost the distribution rights to, I don’t know, Terminator 2, they wouldn’t be sending a repo man to kick down your front door, raid your living room, and snatch the disc off your shelf. But today, you click a shiny, giant button on a site that says “BUY” in all caps, but buried inside of the 65-page terms of service agreement that no one reads, you actually find out that you actually just rented a temporarily revocable license by the company itself. So the second a corporate licensing deal expires or a server shuts down, poof, it’s gone! You paid the full retail price for the illusion of property, and Silicon Valley is sitting back laughing because we voluntarily turned our homes into rented storage units for their software.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, now, hey, listen. I know why tech companies like this. Back in the day, we used to call this “autoship” on products. And continual revenue is a lot better than a single sale. But when companies install things like, um, extra horsepower in your car at the factory, but then you have to—charge a monthly fee to unlock it, you know, where—where’s the line between smart modern business and flat-out extortion?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, that line has been crossed like five exits back on this highway to dystopian madness, Gene. I mean, when we build out, you know, the physical seat heating coils in a car, for example, at the factory or the self-driving mode in Teslas, the cost of that part that was into it has been baked into the sticker price of the vehicle. So when it comes to, you know, something like actual horsepower being unlocked or heated seats, you already own the metal, you own the wires, you’re paying for the gas and the electricity to haul the dead weight of that around from A to B, but then the automaker turns around and says, “Hey, if you want to use that stuff to get warm in the cold Canadian January winters, hand over 20 bucks a month.” And this is not innovation; this is holding our own property hostage. 15 years ago, Intel tried this with, uh, chips in their computers where you could buy a scratch-off card with a code to unlock 25% of the chip that you already had. That was laughed off back then, but fast-forward to today, the tech bros are looking at that failed extortion racket and going, “Why not make that the entire business model?”
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You call this “digital feudalism.” And, um, you know, with a handful of, uh, tech guys holding—I guess we could call them remote control switches over our living rooms, cars, and entertainment—how big of a threat are we actually dealing with here?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, look, you know, corporate tech took the dystopian prediction from the WEF, uh, World Economic Forum, that “you’ll own nothing and be happy,” and they turned it into an enterprise revenue model. And we have become digital nomadic serfs. We wander platform to platform, holding out our digital bowls like Tiny Tim, begging, “Please sir, could I please have a little bit more access to the things that I’ve already bought?” I mean, it’s the absolute worst manifestation of unfettered capitalism that the socialists yell about, and they’re right in this case. This is operating like a high-interest payday loan, but for basic everyday utilities and entertainment. And when a handful of our, you know, Silicon Valley tech cartels can hold these kill switches over our living rooms, our appliances, and our cars, and they can brick them with a single line of code 3,000 miles away, that’s not an inconvenience. That’s an erosion of private property rights and, you know, sovereignty and autonomy. And if government regulators don’t step in soon to crush this, we’re going to end up owning nothing we touch.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Well, you know, this doesn’t just squeeze individual consumers. It’s also hitting independent mechanics, repair shops, small businesses. When companies use software keys to digitally lock replacement parts directly to a motherboard, preventing anybody except an authorized corporate dealer from fixing it, what does that do to the local economy and our—and our basic right to repair?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, this is the biggest problem, right? I mean, it’s an absolute small business killer, Gene. This practice, this—this, uh, hardware serialization through software as well, it’s corporate sabotage, and it’s not security. Mean, if we crack our screens or need a basic part replaced in our car, we go to a local independent mechanic or a neighborhood repair shop if we want to. Um, but now, uh, that’s how it used to be, but now, with, you know, all these computers in it, you’re being forced to go right to your dealer. And it’s the same way with these phones, and it’s a problem because the serial code on the chip doesn’t match the office’s, you know, kill switch that they have there. The software will cripple the ability to have it repaired. So this is designed to do one thing: it wipes out local competition, it crushes our local repair shops. I think to your region in Niagara, and like how much better it could be if we had actual right-to-repair laws and legislation put into place with real teeth to put an end to this, um, you could see a whole new economy start to flourish.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Now, if you take a look at Europe, regulators are hitting, um, monopoly digital storefronts with massive antitrust lawsuits. Um, you know, it’s—it’s all about, uh, telling—they want to pass laws telling buyers that they’re only renting, not owning. Meanwhile, Ottawa’s not doing too much. How slow are we compared to the rest of the world when it comes to these sort of laws?
Jon Liedtke: We are glacially slow, and the problem for it is that we have always acted here in Canada as an obedient child waiting for permission from the Crown before taking a step. I mean, look at our history, right? I think we’ve talked about this before through a different lens. But I mean, we didn’t have the US’s wild “manifest destiny, go west my son.” We didn’t have the imperial muscle of the United Kingdom itself. We waited for Ottawa and the railway to tell us when it was time to move further west. And that passive, polite, bureaucratic DNA is still baked into our federal government today. So while the EU is handing out multi-billion anti-trust—dollar antitrust fines to tech monopoly, and while California is actually passing legislation that matters to ban misleading “BUY” buttons, we’re just sitting and waiting to see what works in other jurisdictions, almost like waiting for the grown-ups in Washington or Brussels or London to solve the problem and tell us what we should do next. And meanwhile, Canadian consumers are stuck in our consolidated, low-competition, market-dominated, big telecom, legacy retail market that squeezes us from every single angle. So we got to grow a backbone here, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Uh, very quickly, I mean, I’m out of time, but I just have to bring this up briefly. Uh, five states are taking Facebook, Meta, all the, uh, social media apps to court today, suing them for $200 billion alleging it was all designed to get kids addicted to social media apps. Now, if these states win, that could have an effect on every single app we know that’s out there.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, it very well could, and I think they have to, you know, realize that their chickens might be coming home to roost. Let’s be honest, I’m sure you use social media just like I do. These apps are designed to get you addicted. And we have to be honest, it’s not just children that are addicted, but the problem is, is when you get hooked as a young person, it becomes a lot harder to get out of it.
Gene Valaitis: Yep, the first one’s free, as they say.
Jon Liedtke: Absolutely.
Gene Valaitis: Another great take this morning. Thank you, my friend.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, Jon Liedtke, Liedtke’s Got a Take. We’ll talk to him again on Friday morning at 9:15.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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