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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

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).

nostrademons 2y ago
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.
- LightHugger 2y ago
  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.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    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.
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      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.
      - ahartmetz 2y ago
        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...
        CamperBob2 2y ago
        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.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  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.
- xboxnolifes 2y ago
  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?
- mindslight 2y ago
  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.
- hermannj314 2y ago
  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.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    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.
- consteval 2y ago
  > 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.
bradfa 2y ago
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.

nostrademons 2y ago

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.

LightHugger 2y ago
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.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  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.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    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.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      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...
      - CamperBob2 2y ago
        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.
sunshowers 2y ago
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.
xboxnolifes 2y ago
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?
mindslight 2y ago
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.
hermannj314 2y ago
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.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  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.
consteval 2y ago
> 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.

bradfa 2y ago

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.