Do consumer laws apply to businesses in Australia? Because afaik, in the EU regretfully a lot of laws that protect consumers against abuse from vendors, do not apply to B2B/enterprise transactions.
On the other hand, there have been people who have warned about the dangers of CPU vendors putting Management Engines in their products, which are outside of the control of end users (by design). One of those concerns was the ability to rig sales or even kill off second hand markets markets all together. Apparently, this have already become a reality now.
I'm not surprised it's sold as security feature, just as terrorism and child pornography have been magic words in other fields. But at the end of the day, vendors stand to substantially increase their control on sales and with it their profits, with features that may only be significant in edge cases. That smells a lot like an antitrust issue to me. That all vendors are likely try to move in this same direction, as an opportunity to make more profit, doesn't make it any less devious. All the more reason for antitrust investigators to start looking into this.
> Do consumer laws apply to businesses in Australia? Because afaik, in the EU regretfully a lot of laws that protect consumers against abuse from vendors, do not apply to B2B/enterprise transactions.
Yes. Consumer protections apply to everyone. Within Australia, those protections are considered the "bare minimum" that must be implemented by every business, across the board.
Certain industries have other protections they must implement atop of those.
If that's true, and I have to admit that's a big surprise for me, then I'm glad to hear that. At least for Australia.
I'm not even sure if the following is uniform across the EU, but I have always assumed (maybe even been told) that it is. Where I come from (The Netherlands), (afaik) when you do business with another business then consumer protection laws don't apply.
The rational appears to be that as a business you don't need the same kind of protection as a consumer. It's considered the risk of doing business, and companies suing each other in court (e.g. for fraud) is considered to be less unbalanced than it would be for private individual (consumer) against a company, in terms of (financial/legal) means.
In reality there probably are different (less savory) historical reasons behind it too, maybe even the preservation of the "natural power distribution" (euphemism for the already wealthy to stay that way) between smaller and larger businesses. That's at least how I have heard it being justified politically. Meanwhile, good luck suing a large company if you're a smaller business yourself. Either way, as I already implied, I think that's more or less by design.
Great if Australia is more egalitarian on that subject. If not for all of nature tring to kill me at every second there, I'd seriously consider immigrating over this xD
