Check your coke can. Look for the word "flavor". That's not an ingredient. That's their secret recipe stuff. They don't have to disclose it on the label. They can make a "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) determination in-house and exempt themselves from disclosure of a trade secret. These are often submitted to the FDA for approval, but not always. If the substance can be determined as gras based on publicly-available information they need not submit to the FDA. It's all about allowing companies to keep their trade secrets ... which is very much similar to the situation with vehicle electronics.
The legal fallout if Coca Cola claimed rat poison as GRAS would be nothing less of major incident. The expert panel that they are required to hire would likely go to jail on fraud. The documents to the FDA would be proof of intentional deceit, basically guaranteeing that who ever submitted it will get the harshest punishment available to the court. All of it would be enough of a deterrent that companies only do this for the most critical company secrets which they are 100% sure is safe, and everything else can be inspected by the FDA. A pragmatical and reasonable method to make life critical products as safe as possible.
However the major part of Coca Cola (and its flavour) is in the recipe - the technical process that yields final product, not the chemical composition of the ingredients.
I don't have a reference handy, but I am going to present you with an analogy for french fries. I hope you can understand my point from that case (which is even more illustrative of the phenomena I am trying to highlight).
http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
There are plenty of fields where the Car Companies can compete - and software quality should absolutely be one of them. Therefore killing DRM does everybody a favor.
Open source means a license which grants others permission to modify and share the code in a non-discriminative way. This is not that.
> asking for free software code...
Free software also add patent grants and the right to run the software for any purpose. While anti-DRM has been called for in other articles, code inspection doesn't need to be done by volunteer researchers and can simply be done by government inspections. This leads me to...
> why not demand that Coca Cola also make their formula and their entire manufacturing process public
I am sure Coca Cola allow health inspections into their manufacturing process. They are also required by law to provide an ingredient list in order to be sold for human consumption, including a nutrient list which further details what Coca Cola is made from. If they had sneaked in some illegal substances, say rat poison, we would be here asking why current regulations were not enough.
> we need a better emission testing system
We can always claim that the testing systems need to be better, but it is not enough to just do black box testing when the product itself can identify and change behavior during testing. If society keeps the current system, we would need to at least add criminal liability for deceiving during testing.