"That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story."Whilst that's certainly true the Phoebus cartel's most negative aspect was that it was a secret organisation, its second was that it was actually a cartel. These disadvantaged both light bulb consumers and any company that wasn't a member of the cartel—a new startup company that wasn't aware of or a member of the cartel would be forced out of business by the cartel's secret unfair competition.
Without the cartel manufacturers could have competed by offering a range of bulbs based on longevity versus life depending on consumers' needs. For example, offering a full brightness/1000h type for normal use and a 70% brightness/2000h one for say in applications where bulbs were awkward to replace (such product differences could even be promoted in advertising).
Nowadays, planned obsolescence is at the heart and core of much manufacturing and manufacturers are more secretive than ever about the techniques they've adopted to achieve their idea of the ideal service lives of their products—lives that optimize profits. This is now a very sophisticated business and takes into account many factors including ensuring their competition's products do not gain a reputation for having a longer service life or better repairability than their own (still a likely corrupting factor that originally drove the formation of the Phoebus cartel).
Right, the philosophy's not changed since Phoebus but the sophistication of its implementation has increased almost beyond recognition. There's not space to detail this adequately here except to say I've some excellent examples from the manufacture of whitegoods and how production has changed over recent decades to manufacturers' advantage often to the detriment of consumers.
In short, planned obsolescence and the secrecy that surrounds it has negative and very significant consequences for both consumers and the environment. When purchasing, consumers are thus unable to make informed decisions about whether to trade off the reduced initial costs of products with a short service live against those that have increased longevity and or improved repairability. Similarly, shortlived products only add to environmental pollution, witness the enormous e-waste problem that currently exists.
As manufacturers won't willingly give up panned obsolescence or secrecy that surrounds it, one solution would be to tax products with artificially shortened service lives. In the absence of manufacturing information governments could statistically determine product tax rates based on observable service lives.