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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

What we really need are a variety of certifications enforced by the FTC, not blanket regulation. Like you can put a sticker on your product, which would be illegal for non-complying products to have. One seal could be for Open Source, another for Cloud-Free, Firmware Rollbacks, Telemetry-Free, E2EE, 10 years of replacement parts, etc.

It's clear just from this thread that different people care about different things. And I'd rather see a certification that never gets used, than a whole kind of product removed from the market because the FTC got it wrong, and now it doesn't make sense to produce it.

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Without regulation, I'd be afraid that it would simply become impossible to find a product that doesn't have customer hostile features. Companies don't need to fear lacking stickers if their competitors lack them as well (or if they don't have viable competitors).

Make it like EnergyStar. No sticker? Then government can’t buy it!

Granted this doesn’t always work but since many state and local governments have similar rules for EnergyStar it does drive a lot of compliance with a completely optional certification in many industries.

Why would someone not just start a competitor to take advantage of the market vacuum? If consumers desire something, have a means to tell if they're getting it, and are willing to pay for it, the market is remarkably good at providing.

Electronic waste is an externality that I am ok with the government regulating.

My VCR still plays cassettes 30 years after it was made, but my 1st Gen iPad stopped playing YouTube videos 5 years after it was made.

That's not a good comparison. VHS was a standard that the VCR makers themselves helped create so of course they'll be inter compatible forever. Youtube didn't make iPads and Apple didn't make Youtube so there's no guarantee for them to be compatible forever. A better comparison would be how long Apple chooses to provide OS updates to iPads and Macbooks since they're all made by the same company.

The idea of free market being "remarkably good at providing" things is completely conditional on the very specific properties of that specific market. Via your logic, monopolies would never exist, nor would anti competitive business practices, and yet they do, because the first thing companies do in a free market is do their best to make it unfree where possible as it's more profitable that way.

The only way to solve this problem is to regulate markets that become unfree where observed to be necessary to do so.

Sure it is, but manufactured goods is one of those markets that has generally proven to have relatively low barriers to entry and lots of competition. That's why first the Japanese, then Chinese, now Southeast Asians have been so successful at displacing American and British incumbents. There's no natural monopoly there, no real consumer lock-in once people write off their bricked-by-software paperweights, and the technological expertise is spread fairly widely across a hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals. You do have economies of scale and pretty large capital costs, but capital is not that hard to come by.

You don't need regulation to fix this, you need startups to go compete with the entrenched firms that are bricking their customers' devices.

Scratch an abusive monopoly and just beneath the surface, you'll usually find not a "free market", but a government with its finger on the scale.

Any industry that involves leveraging copyrights and patents to keep the incumbents in power, for example.

Abusive monopolies really work just fine without big bad government, with mechanisms such as raw power and threat of violence, ownership of key resources (property laws are always fine according to government bad ideologies) and the related natural monopolies, cryptographic-technical barriers, pricing shenanigans to kill new competition, anticompetitive contracts with distributors...

You clearly set out to disagree with my post, but based on the examples you've cited, I'm not sure you succeeded. Threats of violence can simply be handled under the same laws that address it in non-commercial contexts, anticompetitive contracts require government action to enforce, and 'pricing shenanigans' can only exist in a monopoly that is (again) likely to have arisen due to regulatory interference.

At the risk of being paternalistic, the problem with this attitude is basically always that consumers value short-term benefits too highly over long-term ones. Open source software is basically as long-term in the manner of benefits as it gets.

> If consumers desire something

Consumers are stupid. To most, computers are still Magic Box.

Free market dynamics like you, and others, describe only work IF the consumers are able to have the knowledge easily, cheaply, and instantly. You'll find in modern society, with complex products and supply chain, this is becoming harder to satisfy.

Look at the FDA. Why don't consumers just desire lower calorie products and go towards those, why does the FDA need to force serving size suggestions? Because Comsumers can't spent 10,000 dollar and hundreds of hours burning every single piece of food they buy to deduce the calories.

You can apply the same argument to the existence of the stickers itself (rather than looking the FTC to define them), for which the obvious answer is that we're dealing with a market failure.

Because you're assuming that a meaningful amount of customers care about these things. Why wouldn't someone just start a competitor without these proposed regulatory changes?

Stickers still need regulation.

Europe has the CE marker [2] which indicates that the product meet EU safety, health or environmental requirements.

However, China created the "CE" marker (China Export) which looks very identical to the Europe CE marker [1]. ChinaExport does not imply any regulations.

So if you buy a power supply from China you might think it is safe due to the "fake" CE marker.

1: https://www.kimuagroup.com/news/differences-between-ce-and-c...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking

Your source no. 2 disputes your source no. 1:

> In 2008, a logo very similar to CE marking was alleged to exist and to stand for China Export because some Chinese manufacturers apply it to their products. However, the European Commission says that this is a misconception. The matter was raised at the European Parliament in 2008. The Commission responded that it was unaware of the existence of any "Chinese Export" mark and that, in its view, the misunderstanding had arisen because a producer had failed to respect the precise dimensions and proportions of the mark as prescribed in the legislation.

That just throws the burden back on consumers. Many products already come festooned with stickers or logos printed on packaging, and most of them are little more than flair. I can also politicians demanding to know why taxpayers' hard-earned money is going to promote products that are 'anti-innovation' (telemetry-free) or 'support criminality' (E2EE).

The standardized energy consumption stickers, EU mandates are really useful and a huge selling point in shops around me. I was shopping for new kitchen appliances this year and haven't heard a single customer asking about features or smart functions but everyone was comparing design, noise levels, and energy usage in that order. These stickers make it really easy.

Good idea! Like a nutritional label for electronics. The FDA is very strict about nutritional labels, as they should be.

missing the /s

Those labels don't mean much because companies have really worked around and lobbied to make it all a very murky label.

"Organic" labels, for instance, don't mean they haven't used pesticides or other harmful things – just a certain list of them.

Nutritional facts labels, specifically, are very strict about the contents of the package. “Organic“ is not a nutritional facts label. I apologize for not giving the full, official name for that label. For decades, it’s been the go-to place to see what macro and micro nutrients you’re eating. I think an “electronics facts” label which was similarly rigorous and covered important areas that the OP mentioned would be great.

https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-education-resources-mater...

What’s wrong with the nutritional labels that GP mentioned?

> because the FTC got it wrong

Ok. What if instead of the FTC getting it wrong, they only put out rules and regulations on very obvious situations, where it isn't really possible to get it wrong?

People do this very weird thing where they bring up the downsides of government regulation, but they don't recognize that some problems are easier to solve than others.

Not everything is a matter of "well, its just trade offs! What if customers prefer to have their hardware purposefully sabotaged and they bought the hardware because they want to be screwed over".

A much better explanation, is that sometimes consumers don't expect to be completely screwed over, they don't know what they magic seals or pages of fine print mean, so they buy the thing anyway, without knowing the consequences.

Once again, this argument can perfectly reasonably be applied only to the extremely obvious situations, where we don't have to go all in on the libertarian, perfectly rational actor arguments.

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