EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
So what use is a consumer modem without an internet service? How would the law banning “all physical devices that require a subscription to be functional” differentiate between products that work with one or multiple services? It’s still a subscription to a service either way.
Phones, arguably, don’t perform their primary function without cell services. Where in this proposed law are we going to draw the line between ‘functional enough’ and ‘useless brick’? Come up with any line in the sand and it is trivially easy for a company to comply with the law while changing nothing about the actual functionality of the device. In many cases this would look like additional chips on the board that ‘work’ but don’t add any value to the device. Think 7/11 selling single roses in glass tubes… that just so happen to be the perfect dimensions of a meth pipe. It’s just a rose so it doesn’t need to comply with any drug paraphernalia laws, right? Well now it’s “Car Thing the Radio Mixer” (with optional spotify). Now there’s even more e-waste and nothing has changed. At best the law does nothing, at worst it actually makes the problem worse.
I totally agree with you about Car Thing being e-waste because of its software, that’s why I think it should be root-able, serviceable, and speak in standard open protocols so that you can point it to your own servers/service of choice. But poorly thought out legislation will only hurt consumers, the industry, and the planet. Blanket bans on buzzwords with no consideration for practical nuance is foolish.
Public companies obviously intentionally want to make everything as shitty as possible, just to extract money, but lets accept the hypothetical that subscriptions will actually be banned. Wouldn’t that be great?
You would basically be treated the same as Tier 1-3 ISP’s, pay for the cost of the routing to the company. That phone plan that costs ?? €/$ a month becomes “Pay as you use it”. Flat fee per gigabyte / message etc. These plans were at least here in Finland, and I think my phone bills were around 4-5 EUR a month and a cap that you cannot exceed that month, though smartphones and data plans weren’t a thing. Now everything is a subscription.
Now back to hardware vs software. You obviously pay for the software also when buying the hardware, but for whatever reason the user doesn’t own any kind of rights around it. This has obviously become much worse the past few years (TV’s have ads etc). I really don’t think that the issue is anything you listed, the issue is that greedy companies want to use the subscription model rather than play fair. Phones and modems are EOL at best in a year. I have a PFSense router that cost me less than a router from my ISP used and it’s EOL and security is something I don’t have to worry about.
Modems and routers have most of their features dedicated to home networking and are not usually made by the ISP. Them connecting to the internet is one of the smallest features they have. The other features are related to offline networking and tight security, you can actually just plug an ethernet cable to the wall and get connection from your ISP. Same as using a modem and putting it in “bridge mode”, which will completely bypass the features of the modem/router.
The issue here is that the companies don’t want to provide value, they just want to extract as much money as possible, which is wrong. Laws and regulations are desperately needed and even something as radical as banning subscription services for user devices would be a net positive. Renting Tier 1-3 operator infrastructure for your router/modem to work is completely different than “You have the device and the software, but we block you from using it, since you don’t pay”, which in my opinion is ransomware, not subscriptions.
For right to repair and owning these devices, I completely agree with you.
I actually totally agree with all of that. I think it even supports my sentiment. The issue I have is that to make the system work well like it does in Finland you need a ton of well thought legislation that all works towards those goals. What I am specifically opposing is half-measures that are easily subverted and poorly thought out. I’m actually totally fine with banning subscriptions, but that alone doesn’t guarantee neutral access to equal rates, or reasonable $/gig or even network mobility. You need a large suite of laws all designed to be pro consumer from the ground up. I like the sentiment of “ban devices that require subscriptions to function” but that just isn’t a well thought out or realistic idea. If that was all Finland did then solving our issues in America would be much much easier. We need to do a lot more.
You can still use it to network with other computers over the telephone network. Heck you don’t even need to do that via the actual telephone service you can just run some wire.
But I think what was actually meant by OP is “tied to a specific subscription service” as well as “disables features that don’t need a subscription service when you aren’t subscribed”.
You can use them as e.g. smart home remote. The cellular modem is going to go unused (at least apart from emergency services) but that’s only a small portion of the hardware, and modems were only ever locked to subscriptions (at least over here) if the phone is subsidised by that subscription. I don’t think they even do that any more, they replaced it with minimum contract durations. In any case even back in the days you could unlock it after some time or coughing up some money.
Yep I wish rootability was included in the new EU regulations, it would solve so many issues at once. OTOH: It would solve the issue for people who are tech savvy enough to do such things, gotta be careful with our own elitism there. Enjoying consumer rights should not hinge on being a grease monkey.