[AnthonyMouse]

> But the only other real possibility is to legislate that such updates be made available for N years as part of the purchase conditions.

What would be better is to require that the firmware be replaceable with something like DD-WRT or OpenWRT. One of the biggest issues with hardware like this is that the original manufacturer goes out of business and yet millions of people still have their devices.

You can't require updates from a company that no longer exists, but that's not really a problem if their hardware can run the latest versions of half a dozen different open source router firmwares.