Consumerism? Squint at it in the right light, and it looks a lot like communism. Certainly, that's how parts of the American political establishment seem to view Europe, the world's regulatory superpower. All those rules denying the God-given rights of free people to have their data protected, their privacy secured, and their phones recharged by USB-C. You know what the C in USB-C actually stands for? Communism! Wake up, sheeple! Having qualified itself for two hours on Joe Rogan, this column must reluctantly disqualify itself by introducing some actual facts. One of the EU's most recent regulatory moves to enforce the right to repair has been a thudding failure. It aimed to force mobile device makers to register full technical documentation and spare parts through online portals, only to be stymied by the subtle yet powerful strategy, well known to married couples, of saying "Yes, dear," and then doing whatever you want. After a year on the books, the registry has about 2,300 entries but only about 18 percent are anywhere near compliant. The rest are full of gaps, misdirections, or useless data. Deliciously, the manufacturers doing best from this attempt to foist socialism on the world are from its remaining nominally Marxist-Leninist superpower: the People's Republic of China. Don't panic. After all, according to the Black Duck 2026 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis Report, 68 percent of audited commercial codebases contain open source license conflicts that could create legal exposure or compliance failures. Missing attribution, incompatible licenses, and unmet copyleft obligations can all amount to an abuse of the spirit and letter of open source. Which it is. It also doesn't matter. FOSS is no more threatened by these numbers than a single elephant is threatened by a hundred mosquitoes. Raw numbers mean little out of context. FOSS has huge momentum. The right-to-repair movement is newer but gaining momentum of its own. It has impeccable aims: enforcing the right to own what you buy and promoting sustainable resource management. The secondary effects – creating a pool of technical competence, innovation, and forward thinking – are also hard to gainsay. Manufacturers dislike the loss of control and the ability to make a quick buck, but slow bucks over time can work a lot better. Regulatory systems can also work better over the long term than the short term. Self-certification can be moved to a more formal process once certification is on the books, and this will certainly happen here. There are plenty of worked examples. The FCC already requires documentation and test results before granting equipment authorization and issuing an FCC ID, and it is not much of a stretch to include repairability information alongside the other requirements. Then require ecommerce sites in the EU and US to include the relevant approval number in product listings. We've certainly got the automated analysis tools these days to check all such type approval numbers for accuracy. We also need to develop robust approval systems, as ecommerce, global commerce, and rapid development and production have changed the retail environment with implications far beyond right-to-repair compliance. The things you can buy online that can cause actual harm are as numberless as the stars at night. Laptop, USB, and e-bike chargers, battery packs and power strips, lighting and heating appliances... the list of booby-trapped gadgets and gizmos is constantly refreshed. If you're familiar with the term Deathdaptor, you'll know this. Then there are counterfeit electronic components, so common that buying anything you have to solder is a game you can only lose unless you go to the big distributors. Let's not even go into the meadowlands of fake pharmaceuticals. The failure of the European right-to-repair legislation in its first year is no failure. It's the first iteration of a new front in a very old war to protect citizens from harm. Or, if you believe freedom usurps protection, to provide citizens with the information without which freedom of choice is meaningless. Regulators must enable, educate, or protect – preferably all three. The right to repair aims at all three targets, in a marketplace of unprecedented fluidity and complexity. It will take years to home in on those targets. Given long-term vision and the willingness to use tools equal to those deployed by the fast-buck brigade, it can be the model for safe, trustworthy commerce for decades to come. ®
