alt Hacker News> Tie-in sales between software and services is not different from price dumping.
I disagree, in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together. And in many cases do not work independent of eachother.
There are countless cases of this, that what you are paying for is a thing that is made up of a piece of software and a serverside component. MMO's (and gaming in general) being a major example of this, but so are many of the apps I pay for subscriptions for on my phone.
The actual technical implementation of how it works is irrelevant when it is clear what it is you are paying for.
> "Both parties are okay with the terms" is far from being sufficient to make something "legal".
True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
> in many cases what you are specifically paying for is the combination of the software and the service that are designed to work together
And in many cases like Claude Code and the Anthropic models, they can and do work perfectly independently.
> True but the opposite is also true, just because you don't like the terms it does not make it illegal.
This is not me "not liking it". Like I said somewhere else in this thread: these types of tie-in are illegal in Brazil. This practice is clearly not done to favor the consumer. You can bet that if the US was anything closer to a functional democracy and the laws were not written by lobbyists, this would be illegal in the US as well.