this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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This is honestly ridiculous. The security concerns are unwarranted. Any surveillance that these drones could accomplish if hacked can just be bought off of any GIS website.
"But military bases" go fly a drone by one and see what happens. This already isn't a surveillance concern.
This is going to set the hobbyist and professional drone market back a decade.
Only in the US. The rest of the world buys them. It still is a major market lose, but China still makes Huawei phones.
Good point. Unfortunate that US consumers keep getting screwed by these bans
I have a DJI drone and I agree. I would know if it’s collecting weird telemetry I have a DNS filter which would spot it all. It doesn’t. Just normal shit.
I have pulled mine apart too. I have an old one from before the tracking law and I didn't find anything nefarious. The one I have from after the tracking law went into effect is transmitting its location and ID but I didn't find much else even on a network intercept.
Maybe there is some way to open a stream to China buried deep in the firmware, but I don't see what use China would have for that. They have other methods of surveillance
Sry for the late response but agreed!!
Not hobbyist. There is high chance hobbyists drone makers will benefit from it.
I can assure you that we won't. There has not been a time in the history of this country that lower competition has resulted in improved products or prices.
There is zero US based competition in the hobbyist and consumer spaces unless you DIY. US companies mostly do products for emergency services, large commerical operations like spraying pesticides, or military. There are a handful of brands making smaller drones, but they're all a decade behind DJI in features and quality control, or they cost $20,000.
I'd be fine with a ban if there was a legitimate security concern, but there isn't, this is just part of the trade war and it only stands to harm US consumers and small businesses. The entire aerial photography industry is going to collapse and one's only option will be large companies with hex rotor drones and Red cameras.
I was thinking about DIY.
True.
Oh if you're thinking diy then yeah this won't affect DIY at all. DIYs are all Frankensteins anyway
makers maybe, but what about users?
Maybe they will learn drone making at least from off-the-shelf parts. Making own drone gives greater freedom than buying prebuilt.
Idk if you vastly overestimate the available data on GIS or underestimate the data which can be obtained by drones.
Also, DJI has 70% of the global drone market share, so banning this company might actually help innovation.
That's... Not how innovation works. Why would other companies want or need to innovate if their main competitor disappears? If anything, the opposite will happen - they won't have to try as hard to make a great product, since they no longer need to be better than the market leader.
Lmao you think destroying a global monopoly will decrease competition?
You heard it here, folks, drone production is over forever. Nobody will ever make drones again without the Chinese and their superior cheap plastic and tiny electric motors. It's all joever. /s
Show us one example where shutting down a company increased competition among the remaining companies. That's just not something that happens.
Smaller companies compete by building products that are better than the current market leaders. If the market leader disappears, they no longer have that incentive, as people are going to buy their products even if they don't improve them in any way, since the customers don't have a choice.
I'm not saying there won't be drones any more. I'm saying that they won't be competitive with DJI in terms of quality or value of money because they don't need to be.
Show me one example of shutting down a company who held a monopoly? Generally they just get broken up into smaller companies which directly increases competition but that is in no way analogous to our current situation.
We know that in every single example so far that Monopoly and Competition inversely correlate by definitions.
A direct (not inverse) correlation between them happens all the time in tech. Smaller companies get sick of the market leader or monopoly for some reason, produce a better product, and people switch over.
For example, Internet Explorer had a web browser monopoly. Around 98% of web users used it. It lost that monopoly not because it was shut down, but because other, better browsers were released and people organically switched over. Increasing the competition reduced its monopoly.
The same could be said about Teamspeak users moving to Discord. Teamspeak had a monopoly on real-time gamer chat, but people moved to Discord because it was better.
So you're saying it stopped being a monopoly when competition was created, and you somehow construe that as "monopoly equals competition" ??
Yes
No
My original comment was saying that getting rid of a monopoly doesn't necessarily increase competition. That's still what I'm saying. Decreasing the number of competitors never increases competition.