In an ideal world, IoT and smart device manufacturers would be required to pay for “end of life” insurance.

Ridiculous that a company can brick your devices by shutting down their servers and/or going out of business. Some people have suggested forcing companies to open source their software on death so that someone, somewhere might be able to keep the smart devices alive but this is difficult implications for capitalizing hardware companies and probably causes more problems than it’s worth.

That’s why, instead I think we should make hardware companies which produce “smart” devices dependent on their software to function should be required to do what we make banks do: pay for the risk of their own failure.