> regulate them out of existence When the main players of an industry demonstrate unwillingness to take it upon themselves to resolve problems that negatively

> regulate them out of existence When the main players of an industry demonstrate unwillingness to take it upon themselves to resolve problems that negatively affect society at large, something needs to be done for sure. I am generally in favor of regulation, and it might be the answer in this case also. However, I worry that the regulations that would be introduced to fight router vulnerability might lead to a situation where router owners no longer have the possibility of flashing third-party firmwares such as DD-WRT. In my opinion, being able to flash third-party firmwares is more important than a lot of people might realize. Firstly, router makers necessarily target the market as a whole, and as such the factory firmwares found in consumer grade routers are generally lacking in advanced features that only a small portion of the market has a need/desire for. Secondly, open source firmwares can more readily be audited for backdoors. Of course, backdoors could still exist in parts of the router hardware that are not controlled by the main firmware though... Anyway, the reason I worry that regulation might threaten the possibility of running third-party firmware is two-fold: 1. The regulations might specify that bootloaders need to be locked down, etc. 2. Router makers might decide to lock down the routers even if the regulations don’t directly require it, in order to be able to prove that security demands are met. 3. Router makers might use regulation as an excuse to lock down routers even if there is no real reason to do so.