Comment by shadowgovt

> If some piece of software I'm running is the only reason for you to refuse the connection, then you should be obligated.

In general, the obligation has been soft: "If everything adheres to the protocols, it will interoperate" is how we got the Internet. And the Internet was generally useful and so self-incentivized making software work with it with minimal stumbling blocks; nobody was gating FTP clients on only working with Oracle-branded FTP servers because then you couldn't access all the other FTP servers.

But that's not the only model, and I don't see an obvious argument for why should enters into it here. How does that "should" work? Is there legal compulsion? On what moral or philosophical grounds?

> It's slightly similar to how protected class laws work. You can block me for no reason, but not that reason.

Yes, and instituting those laws was a messy uphill battle over immutable properties of human beings. That is a far philosophical cry from "No thank you; I'd like to use all that Apple cloud tech without buying an Apple computer please." I suppose, unless we break the back of capitalism as a societal structuring model, in which case... Yep. We can make whatever laws we want if we throw out the current system.