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What boots it that the public won't stand for it when intrusive IoT fridges designed to pack up after 3 years are the only kind you can buy? The free-market argument of capitalism has failed because there is now a cartel of massive suppliers, who collude in establishing control of the marketplace.

So, you need a fridge. And you can choose from Smasung, LG, Hisense, Westinghouse, or Fisher & Paykel. All of who make basically the same fridge with the same limitations and the same IoT spying ability.

What do you do? Your options are to buy one of these smart fridges or give up on refrigerated food - which I can tell you from youthful experience comes down to eating out of cans. You can bitch and moan and say you won't stand for it but you still had to buy one and the company still made their money.

Suppose an upstart startup decides to exploit the market for "non-smart" fridges, assuming there is one: while Reg readers seem to be universally opposed to this whole IoT shit, the great unwashed don't give a fuck. They're already spewing every detail of their lives out on Facebook anyway, so why would they care about IoT privacy? But, suppose this startup decides there is a privacy-conscious market after all and starts making fridges to cater to it. The big manufacturers, as soon as they see their intrusive surveillance-capitalism model threatened, simply contact all the big box stores and tell them that if they stock this startup's non-smart fridges they'll lose their supplier discounts. Bam - said startup now has no way to sell fridges, short of online, which is going to restrict their market since most people still like to browse a big-box store for large whitegoods and major appliances.

So if these bastards want to get into your home, how do you stop them? In an earlier post I mentioned a cottage industry springing up to strip out the smart stuff from these things aftermarket - but I can see that becoming a sketchy underground setup like console modchips, that soon would get shut down by an army of corporate lawyers. When was the last time you saw a modchip provider for the latest consoles? It wouldn't be long before "de-smarting" shops would suffer the same fate.