"They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly" -- The Duke of Wellington, on early steam railroads.
This is how the content industry perceives us. We are viewed as peasants tied to the land, sheep contained within fencing. We are supposed to stay where we are so that we can be sheared effectively.
I don't think it's quite that bad. It's more that implementing a system that will be convenient for users while simultaneously keeping the copyright cartels shut the fuck up, is difficult at best, from a legal and technical point of view (practically, impossible, since the copyright cartels never shut completely the fuck up).
But seriously, neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Google think of you as sheep. Facebook? Maybe.
Microsoft's XBox ecosystem is a fenced pasture, same goes for Apple's app store but I believe that these are only split into regions under external pressure, therefore are outside of the scope of my original rant (I reserve the right to rant about them on another occasion :) )
My rant was about what you call copyright cartels and I called, perhaps less precisely, the content industry. These are the ones who like their sheep neatly separated into physical pastures (geographical regions) and push for crap like DVD region coding and keeping the geographical fences on the virtual pastures of other companies (like Apple or Microsoft.)
This is how the content industry perceives us. We are viewed as peasants tied to the land, sheep contained within fencing. We are supposed to stay where we are so that we can be sheared effectively.