Regulations _could_ change the incentives, and create a market for long term servicing. Regulations are hard to get right though...
- Old devices are phased out sooner.
- Moving away from linux towards proprietary embedded OSes that do provide support.
- No doubt some companies will try just ignoring the regulations
It is nice that it makes the cost of not supporting things visible to the users. Assuming “phased out” means the device will actually stop operating; “Company X’s devices have a short lifetime” is an easy thing for people to understand.
I suspect consumers will look for brands that don’t have this reputation, which should give those well behaved brands a boost.
Although, if it does turn out that just letting devices die is the common solution, maybe something will need to be done to account for the additional e-waste that is generated.
Moving toward proprietary OSes; hey, if it solves the problem… although, I don’t see why they’d have an advantage in keeping things up to date.
It is possible that companies will just break the law but then, that’s true of any law.
A smarter regulation would have been required non-commercial use firmware source disclosures to allow non competitive long term maintenance by owners.