"Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data"

Why is it so often Australia with the "We must force unnecessary things upon people" attitude?

This would be a consumer protection law like any other such law.

Forcing the vendors to sell only products that do what they are advertised cannot be considered in any way as "forcing unnecessary things upon people".

Any computer without ECC memory is a computer that does not compute from time to time and you have no idea when that happens.

Originally, any IBM PC or compatible had memory error detection.

All this problem of the computers without ECC memory has been created by some evil Intel employees, who have conceived around 1994 a scheme for market segmentation between "Pentium" and "Pentium Pro".

So they removed memory error detection support from the Pentium chipsets (Intel Triton), so that this would remain a marketing feature exclusive to the "Pro" Intel products.

Obviously the removal of this feature from "consumer" products was done without any price reduction, which made happy also the memory vendors, because this trick increased their profits.

So in the next years this market segmentation method became the "standard" business practice, preying on the naivety of most computer users.

A consumer protection law should force that any computer or motherboard must support ECC, which adds a completely negligible cost.

The end users may buy non-ECC modules, if they choose so, but non-ECC modules should be sold like cigarettes, with a visible advertisement that using such modules may cause unpredictable errors in your computer.

How is it unnecessary. Australia has tons of laws about faulty products. All developed countries do

That particular quote did stand out to me. I think the counter claim is that if everyone uses software everywhere for everything, there is a very real societal cost for damaged data and if it's hard to detect then there is no way to prevent or measure harm. I think the "invisible hand" free market is showing some serious strain in modern times. People stopped using leaded-gas because it was causing measurable decreases in IQ for generations. I don't care how much you want to save a few dollars if it harms a lot of people and is difficult to measure. Everything else seems like a race to the bottom price so pushing the market in this manner doesn't bother me in the least. If you are running a server with others' data at stake, it seems like an obvious benefit for society on the whole to address the problem rather than serve some cheap datacenter operators.

Because despite geographical location, Australia is a western country, and all western countries are like that.

I think it's a pattern that reinforces itself, as a nanny state develops it's opinion of it's people worsens and it's more willing to use force to compel them.