Naturally people don't want to pay for it, but it costs money to provide it, so what do you want?
The best thing the government could do is provide the same service for free.
It's a stop-gap solution, yes. Unfortunately, AFAIK there's nothing like this in my country, at least not trustworthy. For general electronics, I trust WireCutter and have never been anything but completely happy by just buying one of their top recommendations in a given category.
The question is, is the complexity of our lives all necessary, or is most of it incidental? And regardless, the point is: existence of this complexity makes the market mechanisms of ranking of products and services quite weak.
So this is a separate question entirely. And it's not a bad question -- why is there so little true scarcity of necessities but so much scarcity of time? There is actually quite a lot of artificial scarcity keeping everybody running on a treadmill. Like, how many hours are you working just to pay for the increase in housing costs caused by restrictive zoning rules? How many hours are you working just to pay off student loans from artificially inflated college tuition costs?
It's quite important that we address these things but it's kind of a different problem domain than consumer router security.
> And regardless, the point is: existence of this complexity makes the market mechanisms of ranking of products and services quite weak.
I would think it would be the opposite. If people have lots of free time and resources to read specifications and understand the inner workings of what they're buying then you don't need to pay someone to do it for you because you can do it yourself. It's when everybody is busy that someone trustworthy can make money by selling or identifying products of a given minimum quality, because people find their time more scarce than money and are willing to pay somebody so they don't have to do it themselves.
But in that case you would tend to have more dissatisfaction and buyer's remorse, because general purpose recommendations and minimum quality standards don't yield as good a result as you making an informed choice yourself. "One size fits all" is never really as good as choosing the right size for you. But government regulations can't fix that any better than consumer product ratings because they have the same problem -- a minimum standard still doesn't help you choose between a zillion different products that all meet the minimum standard, even though some of them are significantly better in your specific circumstances. The best product for some people may even be one which is below the so-called minimum standards, because they have atypical requirements.
Which I guess brings us back to your original point. Maybe we should do something about everybody being completely swamped for time.
Check to see if your local library offers Consumer Reports access! Mine does, and since the library is part of the municipal government, I suppose you could say that your statement has already come true (at least for some people).
Choice has a cost, and we're all completely DDoSed by issues in our lives.
So yes, the router turns out to redirect NXDOMAIN to a page full of ads. Also, my back aches, I'm burned out at my job, my spouse has a bad mood today, I should've bought flowers in the morning but I forgot (maybe if I leave work 20 minutes early I'll manage to get them on the way back?), I've just discovered my bank is severely overcharging me for my account relative to the competition, the city council has just passed a bullshit increase in garbage collection rates, also the asshole who owns the apartment above has put it on AirBnB and we can't get a good night's sleep now, and .... and yes, my router is redirecting NXDOMAIN to a page full of ads.
There's this belief that people are too whiny these days. I start to feel it's opposite: we're too saturated with bullshit to have time to be whiny enough - enough to turn it into meaningful purchasing choices.