Comment by ericjmorey 2 days ago
More concisely, why should anyone who, due to these explosions, does not trust devices branded as Gold Apollo care about a distinction between a product using a licensed trademark vs a product that has been contracted out for production of products using the brand name they own?
I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.
I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.
Or to really drive the point home, the only reason we give companies exclusive control over certain names (trademarks) is so that they can build a reputation. If companies are going to just license out the names to whoever gives them money anyway then we might as well get rid of trademarks entirely and let anybody produce crap knock off products without having to pay a trademark owner.