Make a law that requires them to give you a full refund for all hardware that you can’t use and all software purchased over the lifetime of the account.

That will make them incur a cost that makes it worthwhile for them to be more careful.

Edit: Downstream commenters make a good point. You'd have to put in a formula for "depreciation" of the refund, so you can't just get a refund years later.

Since we are talking about online games, the topic of how to deal with people caught cheating (as in using third party cheating tools) comes to mind. It is typical to ban those people. If a ban was synonymous with a refund, there is little incentive to not cheat.

If the law allowed for exceptions like this (e.g. banned with cause), then it'd be pretty hollow as the company is also the final arbiter of what cause is.

It is possible I am missing something though as this is not something I have put a lot of thought into.

I like jedberg's depreciation idea, too. Maybe a combination of these answers all scenarios.

For the cheating exception, I don't think it would be a problem. Most of those games have subscriptions, so there wouldn't be a lot to refund.

Sellers should not be able to take away goods after the sell; that's pretty much universally understood as theft.

[0] https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer-topics/buyin...

Ensuring it can be used without an online account is actually reasonable.

Yes. They should be able to ban you from their online platform if you misuse it and don't behave yourself but they shouldn't have a right to brick the device you've bought, no matter what you do.

If this was the law, then companies would change the way their products work or the way they ban people. Instead of banning, on Facebook, they would prevent the user from posting and interacting with other users. You would in essence get a very nice advert-only feed but not banned.

I don't see how that doesn't indicate that outlawing a requirement for an account is so much more preferable.

The bigger problem is that no individual would have any realistic hope of successfully suing facebook to prove unjust account termination.

The dirty secret of the Internet - going back decades - is that it's concept of moderation mostly relies upon unstated or understated rules half-enforced and adjudicated by volunteers or underpaid contractors with the power of judge, jury, and executioner. This is arguably by design: the vast majority of what moderators are dealing with is spam, which has the properties of being cheap to execute and difficult to filter for. Hence, anti-spam efforts are swift and merciless. More modern efforts to deal with things like foreign election interference and fake news are arguably extensions of this same ongoing effort to summarily hang and execute spammers.

Facebook is not alone in this either: Google's done it from the very beginning and their death penalty stings far harder. There's a few exceptions to this, such as Wikipedia's ArbCom or other collaborative Free Software projects with code-of-conduct rules and moderator transparency. However, even those platforms will summarily execute spammers.

Those paying customers are already incredibly unlikely to be spammers. They cannot be handled the same way free accounts are.

Yes, the current Oculus / Facebook situation sucks.

However, blanket statements like "Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed." Would ban very legitimate products such as Amazon's physical buttons for restocking supplies.

Sure the Dash buttons are discontinued, but there's definitely an interesting area of products that might be developed in the coming years for other products in this wide domain.

OK, rephrase it slightly and say that it must not require an online account from a specific provider. If I can come up with an API endpoint that I want to use instead of Amazon, and I want to reconfigure my Dash button to use it, I should be legally and technically allowed to do so.

The regulation doesn't need to ban any categories of products, or mandate any features. It just needs to say that if your product depends on online connectivity for a significant part of its functionality, then it must not employ technical measures to prevent interoperability. Hardware that's sold to consumers already needs to meet various compliance standards, such as RF emissions testing; this doesn't seem like a heavy burden in comparison.

Of course, such a policy is very unlikely to be enacted in the US any time soon, but hey, I can dream.

Some people seem to believe Internet is the new electricity. Even if this is so, electricity doesn't have colour - only voltage, amperage and frequency. My toaster doesn't restrict me to use only electricity from a specific power plant. I can power it up even from a car battery, if I tinker with it a little. Similarly, a device like the Dash button should use whatever endpoint that implements the required API, and not be restricted to a specific provider.

Those weren't innovations, those were solutions in search of a problem. Probably contributed to their discontinuation. Also, what "innovation" of the past 20 years has been truly innovative, life-changing, and a net positive for humanity? Pretty much everything that has come out of Silicon Valley has been at best neutral for society (creating new markets and revenue for businesses aren't a positive in my eyes).

We need to stop pulling the "stifling innovation" card. Not stifling innovation has led us to society's cancerous relationship with technology.

Wouldn't impact its intended use case at all. Other than the fact that it could now be used for something useful I guess...

But if you can ban me from using a piece of hardware that I bought then you should be required to refund me and pay shipping for the return.

That way for things that may well suit having linked account - fine, but not curtailing that avenue. Basicly making having it linked to an on line account - optional via consumer choice, as it should always be.

You have just outlawed Roku. An online account is required to make it work, because that's how it was designed to work. It's a rather useless device without the online account.

I would choose to disagree on this concept; from a business perspective, the hardware engineering design going into making the device has a targeted purpose from the outset, and is (cost) subsidized by that company specifically for their service (meaning, they could take a loss on the hardware and make up for it on the Service). Roku and RSA are extracting money for their service, not for their hardware - just like the Amazon Prime TV stick, or imagine if you will a Netflix stick made and sold by Netflix directly. The value to these companies is your service fee month over month, not the hardware they're providing - the hardware is just a delivery vehicle.

That does not mean the devices cannot technically do something other than what their primary intended purpose is; the alternative "TV in a box" projects can run on things like an Amazon Stick with a bit of work (I did it myself to mine, was neat to play with) just that it's not their primary purpose from the OEM. So can you use a RSA key without RSA? Maybe, but that's not what our primary argument is about here. The GP to this thread stated:

> Hardware requiring an online account to work must be outlawed.

This is what I'm discussing - the GP would have the government require a device which is designed to work with a very particular online service be able to work... without their service. "Netflix, your Netflix TV stick which is designed to work with the Netflix service must also be able to work without Netflix service." That is what the GP is proposing be made a law, which I very much don't agree with - it literally ignores the entire point for the existence for certain types of hardware such as a Netflix TV stick.

My YubiKey works just fine without an RSA account, go figure

GDPR requires that algorithmic decisions get this kind of oversight. GDPR is the way to get redress here.

Oh, your driver's license is only available as an app for a device you just got permabanned from. I guess you're not a citizen anymore.

My health care provider is now asking users to move away from physical credentials to use an app. I am livid.