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Title: Norway's Consumer Council Calls for Right to Repair and Antitrust
Enforcement - and Mocks 'Enshittification'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/01/2332...

The Norwegian Consumer Council, a government funded organization advocating
for consumer's rights, released a report on the trend of "enshittification"
in digital consumer goods and services, suggesting ways consumers for
consumers to resist. But they've also dramatized the problem with a funny
four-minute video about the man whose calls for him to make things shitty for
people. "It's not just your imagination. Digital services are getting worse,"
the video concludes - before adding that "Luckily, it doesn't have to be this
way." The Consumer Council's announcement recommends: Stronger rights for
consumers to control, adapt, repair, and alter their products and services,
Interoperability, data portability, and decentralisation as the norm, so the
threshold for moving to different services becomes as low as possible,
Deterrent and vigorous enforcement of competition law, so that Big Tech
companies are not allowed to indiscriminately acquire start-ups, competitors
or otherwise steer the market to their advantage, Better financing of
initiatives to build, maintain or improve alternative digital services and
infrastructure based on open source code and open protocols, Reduce public
sector dependence on big tech, to regain control and to contribute to a
functioning market for service providers that respect fundamental rights,
Deterrent and consistent enforcement of other laws, including consumer and
data protection law. The Norwegian Consumer Council is also joining 58
organisations and experts in a letter asking the Norwegian government to
rebalance power with enforcement resources and by prioritizing the
procurement of services based on open source code. And "Our sister
organisations are sending similar letters to their own governments in 12
countries." They're also sending a second letter to the European Commission
with 29 civil society organisations (including the EFF and Amnesty
International) warning about the risks of deregulation and calling for
reducing dependency on big tech. Thanks to Slashdot reader DeanonymizedCoward
for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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