Planned obsolence by the cloud

Unprecedented heatwaves, wildfires burning in France, electricity and water shortages in Hungary... And we only keep going churning out products with lifetime limited by design like no tomorrow. There just not going to be a tomorrow if we don't at least try addressing, well, a huge lot of things. The Right to Repair laws in the EU are great that they exists, but I feel we really need to go further. Much further. And frankly not just for the environment.

By their 2025 Sustainability report, Apple's CO2 emission was 14.5 million metric tons. To put this in perspective, that's slightly over Lithuania's 13 million with a population of 2.9 million. And that probably doesn't even include the footprint of processing the e-waste after the end of life of their products (uh.. Okay, tossing it in a garbage pile in a 3rd world country doesn't release CO2, problem solved?).

If it was even "only" smartphones, but it quite much isn't. There is a lot to this problem, here and now I am looking at one aspect of it which relatively recently started to spread wide. Getting more an more products on the cloud, even things like fridges, washing machines. And would say, possibly even cars.

Stop Killing Games - a failed attempt

The Stop Killing Games initiative in Europe at the time of writing seems to have failed. May seem unrelated at glance, but I feel it very much is, in many ways. It is a similar problem, trying to address that by now probably a majority of big publishers tie their games to online services which they eventually shut down and due to the proprietary nature leaving no means to keep the game alive.

I personally don't like that it needed to become a thing the first place, wishing the people themselves by their actions would be preventing it (don't "buy" games from publishers with this practice - there are alternatives!), but human nature is just such that this doesn't happen.

With a lot of physical products, there may be less alternatives. Sometimes it may not even be clear if the product needs an online service to do its function. Or again, people may not be aware that the fact it needs a smartphone app means it is communicating with a server operated by the manufacturer as well as the machine itself.

Stop Killing... Everything

I feel to tackle this, "Games" need to be replaced with "Everything", basically. Fat chance, but with the world literally burning around us... And even if it wasn't, we really shouldn't give corporations this degree of control over our lives. Push for fairer, cleaner technology.

My thoughts here on possible strong regulations:

• Applies to products which require online service to operate as advertised, directly or indirectly.
• If the service or part of it is discontinued less than 10 years since the customer purchased the product new from a retailer, the customer is entitled to return the product to the manufacturer at the manufacturer's expense along with receiving a proportional refund of the purchase price.
• If the service or part of it is discontinued more than 10 years since, same, but no refund (the manufacturer remains only responsible for collecting and disposing waste fully at their expense).
• Exemption: If the necessary protocols are made fully open at least two years before discontinuation of service, without any encumbrance by patents, copyright or trademark, including the necessary technologies for third parties to implement equivalent open source service, the manufacturer is exempt from these requirements.

Any product which provides open, unencumbered protocols and technology from its release is of course exempt.

Pitfalls, side-effects

Of course such regulations would quite likely have a cooling effect on any connected technology. Which to be fair I see as a good thing even if it seems a step in a somewhat backwards direction (at least for those who see internet of things the future).

I very notably don't see this hindering technological progress in general. For one, this is just consumer technology. For two, working on the field (SW engineering), I see proprietary closed environments less and less accessible in this regard. It is becoming like feudal-era guild systems (look up Venetian glass-making around the 13th century), the complexity of technology and evolution of cryptography used for lock-down allowing it to become so (in fortunately less violent ways than the glass-makers did though).

One major risk though I could see is that even if a manufacturer intends to produce an open product (such as the Fairphone), malicious use of patents may trigger this law if a patent (previously unknown to the manufacturer) surfaced preventing using the product in some way. Long-term, could possibly be tackled by communication raising general awareness of this possible use of the patent system, pushing towards reforms.

Manufacturers would certainly try to block such regulation on various grounds. Security is one seen with Stop Killing Games. With a physical product it is reasonable to deflect this also on the basis that stopping supporting a physical product, they create waste. So either they continue support or cough up the money to collect and properly dispose of the mess they did. And no, they aren't forced to open their technology either. They can keep the server running and then they don't have to.

Going further

Along with such regulations, changing terms of service, particularly forcing people into a subscription model should be tackled. Probably - likely will need to be tackled, as that might be the very next step manufacturers would try to pull off to shirk these responsibilities by pushing people to abandon the old product themselves.

So to add regulations to ensure that a product only changes by the owner's request during its lifetime (I feel it is important to emphasise on "request", not "consent", the latter is just a recipe to drown people in hundred pages Terms Of Service updates hiding the fine details). This includes such as:

• If the product has no monthly subscription when the customer purchases it, it remains needing no monthly subscription. Including prohibiting such practices like offering a year of free use (it could be buried in a hundred page TOS after all).
• If the product has no advertisements when the customer purchases it, it remains having no advertisements through its lifetime (looking at a certain smart-fridge brand).
• Security updates are permitted with user consent only. They must not change the features of the product nor come with updated TOS.

Undeniably this would have a cooling effect, such as by certainly requiring supporting several releases with security updates (to retain feature set and terms the user had when purchasing the product). This is technologically perfectly doable, though of course I myself seen such situations where the state of code or its versioning was crying out Nope all over - that's the company's fault!

Or alternatively - don't create a "smart" product the first place, all the problems averted!

Smart devices - the ethical way

Basically I would say, just open-source the protocol and related technologies the first place (which is not the whole of the product). And of course design those with inherent safety in mind.

This might not be the case today, some companies might rely on digitally signed and possibly encrypted communication to ensure safety of operation. Within that model, crying out that they can't open source it due to safety could well be valid, but in my opinion such design is wrong the first place. The device should be protecting itself. A smart feature should not be considered at all if it cannot be provided in a safe manner robust against any sort of external input.

Open source would ensure that the lifetime of the product is not arbitrarily limited by a proprietary service's existence, it can be kept alive as long as the people using it like to do so. This could also propel curiosity and creativity, promoting inventiveness to discover new ways of using these products in a network which is generally a good thing: we should promote making people think, not just consume.

Together with Right to Repair, this could be a good step towards a future with less electronic waste, which (among a lot of other things) is desperately needed and as always, we are late with.