Cultures are extremely hard to change, and there is a culture in hardware manufacturing to expect a product lifecycle of production, distribution, sale, and ret

Cultures are extremely hard to change, and there is a culture in hardware manufacturing to expect a product lifecycle of production, distribution, sale, and returns if something physically breaks. The Internet connectivity is not the real problem, but it is the greatest show of the problem in commodity hardware (and this does apply to a lot of computers, particularly phones - the more disposable the device the more prevalent the behavior) that manufacturers believe it is ethical to produce a product nobody can maintain or repair on their own. These companies also have limited to no long term plan for support. The problem is that general purpose computers are not suited to fire and forget when interacting at levels of abstraction as large as TCP networking. I don't think this will ever be solved, because average consumers are incredibly ignorant of why it is a problem to begin with, and thus they do not care if they don't have rights to repair the software running their devices. At least until something goes wrong, then you get isolated outrage that fades away when the computer is too "complicated" or "magic" to understand and thus the ignorance drives people to simply assume it isn't a solvable problem, when it really is - we have communities maintaining support for chipsets manufactured in the 70s with modern software, but they can only emerge and grow when devices are either popular enough to incentivize the massive effort require to reverse engineer the software entirely or have publicized documents on how to modify them. As long as it isn't generally considered unethical to provide black box software running the hardware you buy (when likewise the design documents of said hardware are also often proprietary trade secrets) then nothing will change. People are offended if they are sold a car whose engine they cannot open and whose parts they cannot replace (up right until said car has a computer in it, at which point all expectations of right to repair go out the window because the computers are "magic" in ways belts and radiators are not) but they happily buy phones they can never disassemble.