I live in Canada where there are Ombudspeople and tribunals for many dispute resolution processes. Getting them involved usually lights a fire under a company's ass in my experience.

it is far preferable to hashing everything out in court (or not, if you aren't swimming in cash).

I wish the lawmakers would just step in and regulate gatekeeping on devices, rather than reviewing every dispute. I would be perfectly happy with the same model they use on my macbook for unapproved binaries. If I download a non-approved app, just let me know that it is donwloaded from the internet/not approved safe by Apple, and let me run it if I so choose.

Australia also has a consumer protection bureau. It does exactly the same when you complain -- lights a fire under the ass of the maker. There are so many posts from Ozzies here about being "saved" by that bureau from a bad product.

> Australia also has a consumer protection bureau

Australia does have relatively strong consumer protection laws. There is both a federal agency that does consumer protection and competition law (the ACCC, roughly equivalent to the US FTC) and also each state has an agency (my state’s is called Fair Trading NSW)

> There are so many posts from Ozzies

Random aside, I’d never thought about it before but it’s true - as someone pointed out on the Assange post, we Australians generally don’t call ourselves “Ozzies”, nowadays the standard spelling is “Aussies”

Hat tip about "Ozzies". I'll make a note!