> And I'm not talking about the difficulty of replacing a glued-in battery, but rather the cost and expertise required for component-level repairs on the motherboard, something no regulation is going to magically make disappear

Fair, on the hardware side, but why shouldn't we try to improve things on the firmware/software side, if it can be regulated at negligible cost? (the vendor releasing things instead of simply not)

As the Penny Arcade quip opined about engineered artificial scarcity: 'It's like we were given a universal assembler, and the first thing we chose to make was cancer.'

> There are also cases where manufacturers rely on intellectual property from third-party vendors and simply cannot release or open-source the code

I don't buy the 'but third-party IP' argument. If regulation existed that forced, then third parties that want to sell into the mobile market would license / assign IP under the terms they have to. (Or they'd get out of the market)

The unreleasable stack due to third party IP is a contract/market problem, not a fundamental universal truth.