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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

For B2B contracts of this kind of size a solution is to insist on clauses with very steep damages in the event of evidence of specific measures to prevent third party service or similar, coupled with never again dealing with a manufacturer like this.

The bigger problem is when manufacturers pull stunts like this on customers who can't afford and/or don't have sufficient financial incentive to figure out the underlying problem.

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Steep damages is in many cases not enough because the likelihood of being found out is so low. The damages then have to be extremely steep for this behavior to not be incentivised. Basically to bring the expectation value negative, the damages has to be larger than the profit gain by this behavior, divided by the probability to be caught. Often this will be more than the value of the company, and then the damages do not matter as they simply bankrupt. In that case, the rational business practice is to go for it and hope to not get caught. Any other behavior will eventually lead to bankruptcy in a competetive market.

Which is why it's only really helpful for B2B contracts where there's reasonable power parity to the point where you can realistically 1) refuse to sign a contract unless the damages are significant enough, 2) any resistance to doing so is a strong signal they're up to no good, and 3) you as the buyer can actually afford to do what the operator did in this case and put significant effort into identifying the cause.

I don't think there are many actual cases of manufacturers pulling this without ensuring it's covered in their contract, because being caught out even once will trigger a lot of 1,2 and 3 from future buyers if they still consider you an option at all.

And remember in this case the maximum potential gain is only maintenance contracts from that subset of operators that opt to have other companies do the service.

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