Comment by shakna
13 hours ago
The ACCC is more than happy to explain unenforceable terms, if you'd like to do business with Australia.
Feel free to consult Steam, Google, Meta and others, if a software license is enough to ignore consumer rights.
13 hours ago
The ACCC is more than happy to explain unenforceable terms, if you'd like to do business with Australia.
Feel free to consult Steam, Google, Meta and others, if a software license is enough to ignore consumer rights.
I look forward to them sternly changing Bambu Labs' practices!
They will just fine them into oblivion; they are known to fine companies AUD10M to AUD50M for this sort of thing, and from 1st April this year they can now fine up to AUD100M.
Will this mean that Bambu will withdraw from the Australian market? Possibly maybe probably, but the ACCC takes a very hard stance against bait and switch.
It's a whole lot better than the US, but AUD100M isn't enough to scare a lot of companies. A law with real teeth would go after an increasing percentage of their revenue for each offense.
The largest ACCC fine to date for a company undertaking anti consumer practices is $483m against an educational provider for misleading students.
I'd be reasonably happy to lodge a complaint if I could find a version that's reasonably articulated. As a Bambu customer in Australia I switched my printer to local mode and its been great.
Australia is a small enough market to not matter much
Australian customer protection laws were the initial reason why Valve introduced refunds into Steam.
Then why did those company fight, and not just leave...?
Worth pointing out also that the US is the odd one out, here. Europe also enforces consumer rights.
A small, more ethical company filling the void Bambu Lab left can grow much faster and eat into Bambu's market share in a relatively short time.
Yes, it's not as simple as that, but it's not that impossible either.
The only place you can change contracts at will on the company side is the US, and even there it probably depends on the state.
This kind of firmware update to remotely disable feature is also illegal in the EU