Your washing machine stops working after a software update. Your car won't start until you pay for a subscription. The video game you bought five years ago gets deleted from your library. These are not hypothetical scenarios.Norway's Forbrukerrådet, the government-funded Norwegian Consumer Council, published an 80-page report on February 27, arguing that companies across the tech industry are systematically degrading hardware and software after the point of sale to extract additional revenue from locked-in consumers.
The report uses the termenshittification, which describes a gradual, three-stage process in which a company initially attracts users with a genuinely useful service, then degrades that service to benefit business customers, and finally squeezes both groups to maximise returns for shareholders. The concept is not new; tech critics and academics have observed the pattern for years. What makes Norway's formal investigation significant is that a government body has now documented it with concrete examples and called for policy intervention.
The report singles out connected devices, printers, video games, and cars as categories where the practice is most acute.Companies can degrade the functionality of your car or effectively destroy your connected washing machine with a software update, and the report goes on to call out printer ink cartridges, smart home devices that lose features or require subscriptions post-purchase, and connected vehicles where functionality is gated or removed over time, such as Tesla's self-driving feature which has switched to a subscription-only service as of February 14.
The financial incentive is clear.Digital products are uniquely vulnerable to this cycle because manufacturers can alter them remotely after purchase through software updates. Once a consumer has paid for a product, the maker faces a choice: maintain it or use updates to force new purchases. From a shareholder perspective, the latter makes rational business sense. From a consumer perspective, it feels like theft.
This is where the centre-right concern about institutional accountability enters. Markets work best when information flows freely and contracts mean what they say. When a manufacturer sells you a product, there is an implicit warranty: the thing will function as intended. Degrading it without consent violates that basic principle. The company is extracting value from the consumer through software manipulation rather than honest competition.
Yet the counterargument has weight too. Maintaining software costs money. Cloud services need to be paid for. If manufacturers must support every old version of every product indefinitely, development costs rise, and smaller players exit the market. Progressive advocates rightly point out that some degree of service evolution is necessary and that completely freezing software would itself harm consumers.
The Forbrukerrådet and 28 co-signers, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Access Now, sent an open letter to EU policymakers on February 27, urging stronger enforcement of existing digital laws and pushing toward the EU Digital Fairness Act, which the Commission included in its 2026 work program with a proposal expected in Q4 2026. The act is expected to target dark patterns, influencer marketing, addictive design, and unfair personalisation across digital products and services.
From a regulatory perspective, the EU is moving quickly.The EU's new Product Liability Directive explicitly includes software, AI, and digital services within the definition of products subject to strict liability, and non-compliance with cybersecurity requirements or failure to provide security updates can constitute a product defect.The Product Liability Directive will take effect on December 9, 2026.
The practical reality is that neither pure deregulation nor heavy-handed intervention offers a complete solution. Consumers deserve transparency about what they're buying and protection against deliberate degradation. At the same time, manufacturers need reasonable latitude to evolve their products and retire legacy systems that become genuinely expensive to support.
The most pragmatic path forward combines three elements. First, clear disclosure: companies should be required to tell consumers upfront which features might change or disappear after purchase. Second, a meaningful right to repair or downgrade: if a software update removes functionality, users should be able to revert to the previous version. Third, enforcement: competition authorities should scrutinise whether degradation is being used to lock consumers into ecosystems or force unnecessary upgrades.
Norway's report is a useful reminder that markets do not self-correct when power is asymmetrical. But the solution is not to abolish product updates or micromanage software development. It is to ensure that the basic deal consumers think they are making is honoured, and that companies cannot use technological sophistication to hide what amounts to breach of contract.