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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. The market will not decide on that, at least for the nintendo product. Your or your kid want the switch and the pokemon and mario and others game, you're buying the switch, you don't switch to something else because the something else allows battery switch.

That's Nintendo's entire business model and the reason why they've been thriving since for ever in gaming and even the bad times where actually positive cash flow wise. They're not losing a single sale because the battery cannot be replaced, unless that sale was far from guaranteed to begin win.

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I don't think customers need to be protected from themselves. If they don't like the hardware but buy it anyways because they really like the game, that's a choice. And I feel that when we're dealing with luxury goods, we should give consumers very broad discretion to vote with their money.

This is victim blaming. The customer is not the one deciding make the batteries non-removable. This is protection from Nintendo.

I just don't need a government to declare that I'm a victim by treating me like I'm not capable of saying, "no, the Switch 2 isn't cutting it for the pricetag. I'll skip this gen's Pokemon." This isn't bread. It's a luxury good.

Yes but eliminating unnecessary e-waste is a good thing for everyone.

This isn't about the government being your nanny, it's about the government, long term, building a better more sustainable society for everyone, as it should be doing. And I don't think there's a reasonable objection to that.

The government is the one already saying that bob can't sell me a switch 2 with whatever differences I want because that would infringe Nintendo's IP laws. Thus the government is also the correct place to fix the consequences of that.

"Vote with money" is such a funny talking point in this discussion. It's a metaphor for actual voting, with votes, which the people already did, for politicians who are now protecting their interests. You just don't like corporations being told what to do.

"Vote with your wallet" in a K shaped economy simply becomes the slogan of modern feudalism.

Funnily enough, these regulations were made by policy makers who were voted in with votes, and put such a regulation to its own vote. It's the most democratic way to approach this.

"Voting" with money is an extremely direct way of influencing something - you clearly want it or you don't want it. People definitely wanted Switches already, hence Nintendo is a going concern.

Voting for politicians (if you even bother) who might someday vote for or against something like this is a far, far weaker signal, if any at all. Politicians can easily do things that are vastly unpopular - e.g. in the UK the mass immigration that is clearly deeply unpopular but politicians refuse to change it.

Companies like these enjoy artificial monopolies thanks to IP laws. Why don’t we have the freedom to copy their products and make them the way we want?

As a regulatory decision, this isn't about protecting the consumer. It's about preventing an externality being handled by all of society, specifically reducing e-waste.

Rather than using the coloring of "protected from themselves" I prefer to view consumer protection boards as a collectivized bargaining unit for the consumers as a whole. Similar to unions the deals they strike won't be maximally optimal for all workers but a good consumer protection agency can balance the concerns of consumers and bargain as a single entity with the company. Otherwise the imbalance of bargaining power makes it extremely difficult for change to be enacted.

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