Remember that freedom isn’t a resource that a society can have more or less of. Freedom of one person or group always comes with a restriction of freedom of someone else. It’s a delicate balance, not a “do whatever you want” kinda thing.
I wouldn't say "always"; the freedom of gay people to have gay sex in the privacy of their homes doesn't affect anyone except themselves, and certainly doesn't infringe on the freedom of others. In other cases the restrictions of "freedom" are not really legitimate – e.g. the "freedom" to not see interracial marriage or something like that (and I did see some twat complain about that on HN just a few months ago).
But in some cases, yes, there's an interaction of conflicting freedoms and finding the right balance can be tricky, and consumer protection laws are a good example of that.
I think it will always inherently affect some "freedom" but some of them may so contrived and the competing concerns so unevenly stacked between the "freedom to X" and the "freedom from X" that there's legitimate case to be made. Your interracial marriage example would clearly be one - it has significant impact on the quality of life on one side, and no remotely similar impact on the quality of life on the other side.
It's only when the "freedom to" and the "freedom from" are legitimately at least somewhat evenly stacked in how it affects people that it ought to be an issue given careful consideration.
> That freedom of gay people does affect the freedom of religious fundamentalists to prevent what they consider sin from happening.
Except that this is not a good faith or legitimate freedom. Hurting people is not a freedom to anyone but a complete sociopath. The fact that the law forbids me from detonating a bomb in times square is not a restriction on any part of my ability to live life.
And yet for centuries, the freedom of the sociopaths, as you described them, was valued higher than the freedom of gay people. We decided that we should protect the latter from the former by restricting the ability of religious people to act in accordance with their worldview very recently.
Under that framework, we're talking about shifting the balance towards customers, at the expense of reducing freedom for a corporation to squeeze their customers and suppliers.
Yes, in this case the freedom of the company to milk the customers AND the developers on its platform is restricted, but the freedom of consumers is protected.
This is possible because of the powerful regulatory body that is the EU. Regulation and interventionism give the public more freedom. This might be hard to swallow for a proponent of lessez-faire policy.
Yes, I remember a nice quote from some book, some French complain about slavery in the land of the free and the american responds something like "america is land of the free, we are free to have slaves"
So freedom for Apple is more free in USA to screw customers, like those Aplle custoemrs are prevented to be shown some informational text, if users know to much is bad for Apple.
I have done some reflection on core democratic values. Especially to whether there is a more fair key than 1 person 1 vote. Eg. land is the main mandate for a country to controle. Should land be the key? The one with more land gets more votes.
Whenever I think it out these systems collapses. If it was land that was the key for votes, the society would inevitable converge to a single entity owning all the land and all the voting power - that is not democracy anymore.
In the end all democracies need to strive for equal voting power to all participants.
In the framework freedom can be quantified to be in alignment with what the populous wants. In the US case, "freedom" rights tend to benefit only a few people. This is not a balance, or a zero sum game. This is an absolute reduction of freedom.
