In this case, Humane would likely go bankrupt rather than pay out the refunds your regulation would require, so it would still be ineffective in protecting consumers.
An average person does not do or know how to do the due diligence of product validation, and I'd argue even the tech-savvy of us are unable to figure out if a product is going to stick around or not since what info is being given to us for analysis is limited, and heavily watered down.
I don't understand how libertarians look at the current state of things and conclude that fewer regulations would solve the problem.
Worse. It requires that doing so is effectively free. Otherwise, a successful strategy is to lower your product quality compared to your competitors by an amount just shy of the cost of discovering the lower quality. This leads to a race to the bottom.
Making a product cheaper to produce without affecting what people care about (or, equivalently, improving the performance without increasing the cost) is what drives productivity growth, and the relentless competitive pressure to do so is what produced the modern world. It’s not fun or easy, and yes, sitting on your ass would be easier. Oh well!
This is a completely new product, in a category that never existed and no one was desperately demanding. It was bought with the disposable income of wealthy people who enjoy trying new technology and knew exactly the risk they were taking. Are you seriously going to dispute that? Why is this a space that needs to be regulated?
If you’re not saying that, then what is so hard to understand about the conclusion that we could solve some problems by repealing bad regulations?
Food and water safety certainly fall in that category! Ensuring that early adopters of useless $700 widgets are “protected” against startups going bankrupt or otherwise discontinuing / canceling the product doesn’t seem worth anyone’s concern.
Some people’s reaction to observing anything in society that they don’t like is “that should be banned!” I don’t think that’s an appropriate reaction.
The proposed regulation would dramatically increase the risk of any investment in a new consumer hardware startup. And, there are not that many of these startups in the first place, because they’re risky enough as it is! So, the net result would be less innovation and less startups doing hardware, and I don’t think that would be a net improvement.
I had a meeting last week whose sole purpose was for me to re-describe something a couple times which I had already described in text. And which also could be found in vendor documentation.
I also know someone who seems to think that (almost?) anything pushed on the Internet must be true.
This regulation will transfer that requirement from the consumer to the maker so that the maker can choose to create products they issue full refund when they can’t guarantee perpetual software availability or they can choose to make all the software available with the product. It also avoids dictating how the product should be designed when doing all that.