Ramblings of a Madman

Improving consumer protection laws, especially here in the States. There are countless corporations and businesses that are actively attempting to screw over regular people due to some practice or change.

Spotify recently told everyone who bought the Car Thing that they were discontinuing it with no recompense or making the code open source. They told everyone that they had a block of e-waste.

Every single cell service provider just got “fined” by the Federal Trade Commission for selling everyone’s personal information.

Ubisoft just shut down The Crew without providing anyone with the means to play it offline.

Asus is constantly mired in warranty claims issues.

Another major issue that flows along these same veins is that of repairability. For the longest time, we haven’t been able to make simple repairs to our cell phones and Apple has been found on a couple of different occasions slowing older models on purpose solely to force people to upgrade.

Then there are the arbitrary and “mandatory” changes to Terms of Service that are occurring. Changes that corporations are making that give them unfettered access to your computer or device for the sole purpose of syphoning as much useful and sellable data they can find.

The problem here, is that the vast majority of the population don’t read the TOS, so they wouldn’t even know what was in there in the first place. They just hit ‘agree’ to move on to using their device or program.

All of this, I believe, is a major symptom of moving into the digital age. As things become less analog and more digital, they become more difficult to own and repair and easier to control by outside sources.

An example of this is Samsung. They bricked a bunch of cell phones in Mexico recently because said devices were sold on the “gray market” outside of official providers and they were therefore “dangerous.” Yea, okay. They were just mad that they didn’t get their “cut” of those sales.

For as much shade I throw at the European Union, I also have to give them props in this regard. I feel that they are taking consumer protection seriously when compared to the States.

They forced Apple to install USB-C on the iPhone (a move they should have made already, as they’ve had it on the iPad for a few years now). They told Meta they couldn’t advertise to those under 18 and they also couldn’t sell their data. And I’m sure there are more; these are just the ones I can think of immediately.

A lot of these issues could be solved if the Federal Trade Commission could hand out penalties with some teeth. The cell carrier case I mentioned earlier? Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T all received fines that came out to less than 1% of revenue. That’s a negligible affect on their bottom line.

They can’t hit them where it hurts. They can’t take bonuses away from the c-suite executives. If they could hand out actual punishments to the corporations when they pull this kind of nonsense, then the corporations would stop and they would actually change.

We just need people in Congress to step up and actively change and implement consumer protection laws so they actually protect consumers.