I feel that “don’t bother to comply” is perfectly fair language. The article talks about misleading self-assigned scores, links that don’t actually provide information, useless reported price ranges, and other shady practices.

The reason this deserves to be a big story is that this wasn’t even a matter of hardball or softball; the law practically set the ball on a tee and the manufacturers are refusing to swing while saying “yeah, I hit it out of the park.” These laws exist to address the shitty, shady practices employed by most manufacturers, and they can’t be allowed to get away with more shitty practices when the requirements are so low. If we wait for them to follow the law only when there are more regulations to follow, then we, the customers are going to be left playing whack-a-mole with even more violations when we could have already at least put offending manufacturers on notice.

Anything less than calling this shit out right now is gifting shitty manufacturers and shady politicians the ability to later throw their hands in the air saying, “these are too many requirements all at once. How is anyone supposed to understand all this???” And then, instead of pressuring companies to fall in line with the standards, the laws and standards will be reduced, and the consumers will lose yet again.

Disclaimer: I doubt anyone cares, but I know my views as an American are likely far more skewed, but I’m still a consumer who benefits from your laws, even though my country is one of the greatest offenders of deregulation. If you don’t wanna end up like the USA, don’t go after your manufacturers with kids’ gloves like we did. They’re multi-billion dollar companies with big boys and girls working there whose entire pay scale justification is to deal with this kind of shit. Make them do their jobs.

They way I see it this is the less important part of the regulation so saying that manufactures are just ignoring the rules set by EU is alarmist and clibaity. Same thing happened with GDPR: there was a mess with consent popups, some companies ignored the requirements, EU started giving out fines and things improved. I wouldn’t expect anything different here. So far we’re talking about sticker requirements. Now that the law requires manufacturers to actually provide replacement parts we have to let EU enforce them and things should improve.

I don’t think politicians set this law to fail on purpose. The alternative would be to create some certification authority which would add a lot of red tape. This could turn out to be a good compromise. We’ll see.