this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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But the movie is not on the computer in your house.
This would be closer to buying a house, and a washer/fridge are both installed, just turned off, until you pay extra to switch them on.
The hardware and software are already in the car, and you would have already paid for both when buying it. Adding a subscription to enable them after is just skimming off the top.
It might be a different story, if the price included them installing the relevant hardware onto the car separately, but not in this case.
That exactly the house white goods in Cory Doctorow's "Unauthorized Bread".
We already built the expensive Internet infrastructure that allows any digital media, including movies, to be delivered to your computer for virtually $0 extra cost. However, even though the infrastructure was built you are “not allowed” to access the digital media unless you pay some arbitrary price.
In your example, having a washer/fridge installed in the house is not that different from having an Internet router installed in your house. In both cases the infrastructure is readily available and costs nothing to use but you cannot access the services for artificial reasons.
I’m obviously not defending Audi as I think it’s a ridiculous concept but this is already happening at a large scale.
However, the sole function of the internet infrastructure of your house is not exclusively for movie distribution. You can use it for other things, and do, so the example doesn't quite line up.
Your example might be closer when it comes to rate limiting for ISP services. The network bandwidth that you could get from the actual hardware is often greater than what you paid for, and you only get extra if you pay the ISP more.
But even then, that analogy falls apart a bit, since there is a scaling cost to the ISP associated with you using the internet more. It actually costs them more to do that, since it puts extra load on their servers/network, which would both put wear on hardware, and require them to purchase more powerful hardware to account for the capacity.
Not so for Audi. The hardware and software are already in the car. They have no ongoing costs to pay associated with many of those systems, since they're local to the car itself. Smartphone integration, I could see a case for, if they do it by routing the connection through their own servers, but not a lot of the other things, like the adaptive cruise control, or Carplay/Auto.