Five Common Sense Tech Regulations That Would Make Our Lives Better.

An Unusual Cinq Personnes post on the tech regulatory sphere's impact on our lives.

Something that I have strong feelings about is that tech is under-regulated, or perhaps improperly regulated.

As someone with a Computer Science degree and a long history of passion for tech, the issues that regulation and legislation could solve have long been visible to me, but it wasn’t until spending a lot of time with some reform-minded folks that it really clicked that we could actually implement those frameworks and guardrails.

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You might wonder what this has to do with self-improvement or Cinq Personnes, and that’s fair.

In 2025, I think it’s fair to say we live in a world deeply embedded in technology: I mean, you are reading this on an online blogging platform from a person that makes their livelihood on the internet!

While the technological world we live in is great in many ways, there are obvious ways it falls short, and while on Cinq Personnes I frequently push people to look inward to solutions for the problems they face, the reality is sometimes legislative tools are what’s needed — and advocacy; even just in the social sense of telling your friends why certain policies make sense is a way of growing personally and taking a stand. While I am a supporter of all kinds of solutions to large societal problems, as I discussed in my plastic waste politics post, sometimes the leverage difference in creating laws is so big and the outcomes so overwhelmingly positive that it just becomes an undeniably important tool.

You can try to spend your money responsibly while buying devices, but devices — even from reputable companies — eventually break, and when they do, you just shouldn’t have to throw out most of the device that’s still working so that a corporation can force you to buy a new thing you don’t need. Companies can do great good, but they are optimizing for profit and rarely consider externalities — for a big company, the cost of throwing out a mostly-functioning device is either a non-factor or at least just a wishy-washy “we care about the environment! (to the extent we can while also making lots of money)” commitment.

Metallic. ƒ/4 1/500 70 mm ISO100 - Edited

Rules and regulations do need to be balanced against their costs and potential impacts to innovation — I am extremely sensitive to that, but as the novelty of many technologies wane and they become commodified, I think the costs overwhelmingly flip to support more regulation no matter your personal views, especially in cases like social media where there are huge and obvious harms.

Right to Repair As Law

Right to repair is kind of the classic example of this, and it’s probably the one people are most familiar with — there have also been a lot of wins here. The idea is that you should be able to repair products you own and that companies shouldn’t interfere with this using software trickery, and should also do things like make repair manuals public (so repair providers can compete and parts can be engineered) and make parts available.

The breadth of this legislation or idea is huge. It’s not just consumer electronics, but goes as far as things like tractors. I know growing up hearing people talk about things like TV repairmen going the way of the dodo, and while we are starting to make progress on some of the issues — smartphones being almost disposable for example, it’s amazing the extent to which damage is happening elsewhere — for example, when was the last time you heard of a TV repairman? This is not to mention other appliances like vacuums, which have rapidly turned into non-repairable consumer electronics devices.

While there have been wins and I don’t want to gloss over them — many companies now offer replacement parts and manuals, and companies like Framework (computers) and Fairphone (phones ... duh!) have spun up to serve demand from people who find the whole situation ridiculous outside of the space of repair companies, and they’re also increasingly both using recycled materials for large parts of their products, and providing incentives for consumers to return old devices.

These companies have also shown what is obvious to most people, despite having limited resources they have created pretty great repairable products and businesses around them. Imagine what would be possible if larger companies took this stuff seriously.

And yet ... Companies like Apple show that malicious compliance — where they follow the law to the letter, making resources available but so expensive and impractical that nobody would actually do it. For example, switching a screen the Apple way involved getting Apple to send you a giant metal kitchen appliance-looking thing and jumping through other hoops, which gets us to our next topic.

Repairability in Design Requirements

What becomes pretty clear once you start looking at the various devices around you and trying to fix them is that even if you tell companies to let people repair stuff, often it’s not designed to be repaired.

Sometimes, as companies will say, it’s because using glue instead of screws or creating waterproof seals creates a cheaper, more durable device, but there’s obviously lots of stretching the truth there. Both because they know it’ll make repair harder, but also because it allows lazier design — all kinds of decisions are made in design that have downstream consequences.

An example I like are the cordless handheld Dyson vacuums which so many households in Canada now have (I used to I admit think they were very cool!), but which are designed to incorporate the battery cells right into the vacuum body; this makes repairing the device a pain in the butt even for the small number of people that will try. The design solution to this problem is to make the particularly expendable components like batteries a separate detachable component, like you see with power tools (which both because of heavy use and financial realities particularly when used by businesses are a place where companies realize they can’t play games with “the battery died, buy a new tool”). It’s not actually clear to me that this has to be bad for business: power tool companies now create whole ecosystems of interesting things to plug their batteries into — leading to some real innovation, while at the same time consumers win. Regulation forcing more devices to be architected this way probably wouldn’t stop innovation, but instead funnel it into innovation that is functional for consumers, instead of trying to figure out how to make a tool that is most impenetrable if it breaks.

A natural regulation that could make sense for something like this is forcing various power tool companies to come together to create an interoperable standard, then they would be competing on the quality of their batteries and devices, and if a company decided to stop producing good gear, people could migrate away from them instead of being locked in. This would build a competitive and productive market.

For what it’s worth, Dyson has notably started including exchangeable batteries on some of their devices, but I think it’s clear that this could all go much further much faster with legislative intervention. Fixing these problems is complex and requires different solutions depending on the type of device and nature/probability of repair.

Device End-of-Life and Support Requirements

Right now, we are living through the experiment of so many electronic devices breaking not because of something wrong with their hardware, but because they may rely on a variety of service-side software that may be yanked at any time. Sometimes that yanking is the result of insufficient resources, sometimes it’s indifference, and it seems sometimes it’s actually malice.

What’s clear is that at the end of a device’s life, or its support life (something which probably should be regulated so that companies can’t create massive amounts of waste by kiboshing product support earlier than expected when their priorities change) is that users should have some clear rights and pathways.

For example, perhaps software support should be guaranteed for a certain minimum number of years with additional years added based on large sales numbers or company size. At the same time, companies should be encouraged to design products in ways that makes support more economical. When they do reach end-of-life, companies should be required to go to some effort to open products up, allowing users and the broader technology community to open source support and hack to their desires. If a product really must be bricked, companies should be required to compensate customers.

Some will say that the inevitable outcome of this is less product selection and different design. Large companies might not make a niche product if they have to risk actually supporting it long-term, and that’s sort of the point. This would require more thoughtful product development but also open up more space for upstarts for whom a niche product could be a big deal.

Device Ownership Standards

Sort of tying in with support, I think there needs to be a total reckoning with what it means to own a device. Right now, you can buy a device, be forced to accept a terms of service that nobody reads, and really not have the freedom to use your device and do with it what you want even within the bounds of the law. Of course, this gets to many of the points we’ve talked about in this post — repair, support, and the like, but I think it’s really important to ground all of this in a completely rethought imagining of what ownership means.

Companies should be required to trim and simplify terms of service, basic usability of a device should not require signing anything (and maybe governments need to indemnify or otherwise protect companies to some limited extent to enable this) and in general the principle of a transaction where a customer gets something of somewhat durable value from a transaction needs to be reinstated.

Material Standards

Increasingly across consumer goods, more attention is being given to the materials used in products, the impacts of their production, and their impacts at end-of-life.

Unfortunately, we have no standard way to understand this complex subject as consumers. Material disclosure is complex and inconsistent. Imagine if products were scored like foods are in some countries based on production line waste, degree of virgin material use, recyclability, the amount of bio-based material etc. Like several of these points, we are seeing a lot of legitimate progress here, or at least the marketing of progress, and that’s what makes having systems to make clear what is real and what is fluff so important.

There’s also the reality that if we want to accelerate the creation of an actually circular economy, with more end-of-life device recycling, and high amounts of recycled material in new products, we have to create frameworks that make the many disparate players in the consumer products space work together.

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All of this is to say, I think there are huge legislative opportunities to take progress that is clearly desired from the public and governments, and help to better align the real initiatives the private sector is taking with them. I also think with tech companies making such unbelievable amounts of money (especially software companies dabbling in hardware) that there is real space for interventions which could be very positive. In many ways, I think if we want to move the world up along the value chain, we need to make consumer electronics as standardized and consistent as the infrastructure that preceded them, and these kinds of policies could do just that.