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rickdeckard 8 days ago

This is already in place in the EU via the WEEE directive (Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment), but the costs have apparently been absorbed just fine already by this industry, so it doesn't seem to hurt them sufficiently to be incentivized for longevity.

As much as I hate it, the strongest incentive would maybe be to legally define vendors who supply hardware with a non-interchangable OS-ecosystem as service-providers and put restrictions on the price they can charge for the hardware to render the service (like i.e. a cable-modem from an ISP).

This could force the large players to decide between high-margin hardware or high-margin OS-ecosystem instead of aiming for both.

Come to think of it, these market-dynamics would be interesting to observe...