I'm absolutely a (paid up even? Maybe lapsed) free-market conservative, but that's not a complete argument really. What motivated dropping it? Save the pages for more langauges and self-certified compliance labelling? As if British customers (say) were demanding manuals with 2 pages of English and 296 of other.
The cost of distributing information is basically free these days, so that's not the motivating factor. All the design information for e.g. a laptop will easily fit on a single DVD. Instead, it's because they simply don't want people to know too much.
You can find leaked laptop schematics. They are almost identical between manufacturers and models because they're based on Intel's reference schematics, and I suspect the latter wants to keep them under NDA (they were freely available on the site up until the ~Pentium 4 era.)
