Freedom of Choice or Freedom Versus Choice (or When All Choices Are Incompatible With Freedom)
Choice and freedom are not the same thing. Choices can exist where all of these choices are against freedom. We experienced a taste of that last week.
The late George Carlin gave a routine/skit on "The Illusion of Choice" several decades ago. He would repeat portions of that in some TV shows many years later. The original said: "The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there are a handful insurance companies, there are six or seven information centers.. but if you want a bagel there are 23 flavors. Because you have the illusion of choice!" In the 70s he said: "So they told me I had a choice, they said you can either have the Wallace joke or the genocide joke, but you can’t have both. So I said take out the Wallace, give me the genocide. It seemed like a better joke. So that’s, uh, all I can tell you."
That's not freedom of speech. Either way, compromises like these boil down to choice. But having a choice is not necessarily freedom.
When it comes to software, being able to choose between Firefox and Chrome is not freedom; the two options are still limiting. Similarly, when companies demand that people "upgrade" some software or when companies "upgrade" their "Web interface" (which one can only access using the latest browser version and only particular browsers) they offer no real choice. Now that physical media is being phased out even further it seems like they're taking away what people got accustomed to in the VCR era. How many new laptops even have an optical drive these days?
When some business asserts that it gives people different options, then it can rightly argue that it offers some choice/s, but that is not the same as freedom. █