Luis said:
Not at all, this is a business model like any oher out there and a viable
alternative for the countries in development where not everybody can have
access o a computer. Nobody force anybody to use this model like nobody
force you to use a prepaid telephone card. It's all about CHOICE.
It's also part of trend, some would say conspiracy, by corporations to
fundamentally change the capitalist paradigm away from the ownership
model to a service model. The ideal is a consumer who owns nothing, but
pays an increasing proportion of their income to corporations for
services.
DRM is another part of this. Once upon a time there was a thriving
second hand market for video tapes, books, and records/CDs. Soon that
will no longer be possible, because you will not take ownership of the
item, merely have use of it in a limited structure decided by the
copyright owners. To aid this, the copyright laws have been distorted
to favour the rights owner over the consumer.
Of course, this has been going on a long time. Pension plans and
Assurance Savings plans were amongst the first to trade on the basis of
you paying money for something that you'll never own, and have no
guaranteed benefits as a consequence. Meanwhile the Pension and
Assurance companies use your money to buy shares and stock in other
companies, retaining the ownership of that stock for themselves.
How many of you will own a car, free and unencumbered from finance?
Balloon payments and Lease plans will put paid to that. Housing is
starting to move into the non-ownership model, as they move
increasingly out of the reach of a normal income.
Soon there will be a time when the ordinary person will own next to
nothing, but pay for everything. Whether that is a good or a bad thing
is a matter of perspective and I'm not condemning it, just observing
the fact of its existence.
