Playing devil's advocate you have to have to ask is it reasonable for a business to pump more money into development costs for new drivers on a device they haven't sold in the past 10 years?
-Carol Haynes
Yes, but it's not as old as 10 years, and anyway it is hypothetical and thus:
(a) of academic interest only, and
(b) unlikely to be a useful/valid argument for anything practical, as it stands.
Similarly, I suppose some people could play devil's advocate to justify the dumping of waste tech products in Africa (thanks for raising that point), but I wouldn't dream of doing so - because it would be a red herring and trivialise the issues. In any event it wouldn't alter the fundamental issues - discovery of the root causes of the problem and addressing those.
That is, the root causes that gave rise to such as, for example, the objectives of the good psychopathic Corporations involved - e.g., including Lock-in, Planned Obsolescence, maximisation of profit, and externalisation of any side-effects (including massive damage to adults and children alike in some 3rd-world economies).
The Western economic model and legal systems that created and allowed such as those dumping monsters to be self-sustaining and self-perpetuating is arguably the domain (root cause) that needs to be addressed (QED per
The Corporation).
Fining Corporations for what they would (and generally do) see as legitimate actions, as you suggest above, might be all very well. However, though I rather like the idea of the fines, it would only be likely to address the
symptomatic problems, not necessarily
the causal problems. It would be like Hydra - cut off one head and another one (a new symptomatic problem) would pop up somewhere else.
I am not a strong advocate of State control of Capitalist enterprise, as history shows what happens when State/government interference and control becomes excessive - QED the Communist command-economy of the USSR. However, you cannot always demonstrate that laissez-faire works any better either. So, let Corporations be self-governing as they might like, but where they have demonstrated the types of situations where they have
an essential incapacity to do this, then regulate and
change/reduce their legal rights as a legal person/Corporation, so that they become legally prevented from committing the same class of error in another form - e.g., lightbulbs - forming cartels that fined a manufacturer for making lightbulbs that lasted longer.
Change, not punishment or retribution.
If communities in the US/Canada can take responsibility and collaborate effectively in taking action to do this (QED per
The Corporation), and succeed, then we already know which direction we could move in to address the causal problem.
Examples of relevant regulations, standards bodies and codes of practice in the UK that already have achieved some effective control over Corporate psychopath behaviours could include:- The Sale of Goods Act 1979.
- The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP).
- The Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP).
- The Office of Fair Trading.
- The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
- The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.
If these things became compulsory not only on the operation of a Corporation in the UK but also its operation overseas, then we might be getting somewhere.
Unfortunately, I don't quite see how to implement that in a consistent fashion and with certain results, so I think you would need to go back and review the structure of the Corporate Charter, and probably regulate that.
