Right to Repair laws have now been proposed in all U.S. states
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Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
For cars there is an entirely different problem: New cars come with warranties. The sort of people who buy new cars, typically sell them by the time the warranty expires, so they only care about repairability to the extent it affects resale value, which is an attenuated effect. Then someone else is going to be driving that thing until it's 20+ years old, but the manufacturer isn't responsive to their concerns when designing the car because they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars.
Wow somehow this simple observation seems to be the greatest critic of capitalism I have heard in long time. It succintly shows why this system if left alone and scaled will destroy everything with its externalities.
And the latter is more susceptible to it. Things work when you're the customer and you have competing suppliers. They don't work when you're not the customer. But you could still be the customer in another market as long as there is one, e.g. because third parties can reverse engineer the OEM parts and go into competition with them. So a major risk here is that the incumbent captures the government to prevent that from happening.
The closest you generally get to competing alternatives with government is "laboratories of democracy" from having different states each with their own laws and the ability for people to vote with their feet, and even that suffers from the same failure mode. The system is intended to sustain that by having a strictly limited central government, but the central government gets captured by those who want to impose uniformity on what was meant to be diversity.
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
Credentials. Not spin. The farmers are actually calling for this.
The new module costs 500$
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
we didn't use a lot of the data but I had it for weird systems.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
Our '08 Caravan had the ABS module die, and try as I might with 3 or 4 independent mechanics, had to go back to Dodge/FCA to get it reprogrammed for the car to accept the new module.
Why can other cars get away without this specific charging knowledge? Is it because , in true VW fashion, they specced the minimally-acceptable battery size and need to have optimized charging to mitigate the under-sized battery? Just like VW has under-specced wiring for decades.. Seems pretty suspect..
This is the same dealership that, when I asked about "30K mile maintenance" for our '08 Van (with the venerable, proven 3.8 engine) recommended (in addition to oil change, obviously), spark plugs, coolant flush, transmission flush, brake fluid flush, etc. I.e. a $700+ service for a van 2.x years old. And most of those were NOT on the Dodge service requirements.
I'm working on fixing the letter now.
We built this tech when having five or six states with bills was exciting. Now, 50 states times two chambers times sometimes two or three bills has become a whole thing to keep track of it all.
Keeping all of these bills up to date across 50 states that change every year is quite the project. It's a pretty manual process right now, alas. I'd love to automate it.
Everyone else: please thread any bill year mismatch / other issues you find here, and I'll fix them!
I don't know how your site's infrastructure works, but would it be possible to have some way we could submit something like a pull request to contribute easier? It would be no trouble for me if it made it easier for you.
I don't know if they have other bills and what not in play to address other industries.
The bills have been introduced in 50 states, only 5 have legislated these bills into laws.
FWIW, all of the searching I could find about Right to Repair laws in Massachusetts focused solely on vehicle right to repair (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_1), not on electronic devices generally, so maybe that's why Massachusetts was not included in the description (which specifically said "passed electronics right to repair legislation") but was categorized on the map.
I have updated the map to remove MA from the "Passed" or "Active and Passed" category given the law that has passed is related to automotive and our focus is more on digital electronics equipment.
I also updated the legend to address some of the valid concerns mentioned here:
Dark Red = Active in 2025 (or current year); Light Red = Active before 2025; Red and Black = Law Passed & Currently Active; Black = Law Passed
I still don't understand these categories. What is the difference between "Active" and "Law Passed & Currently Active?"
Thanks iFixit for championing this cause for so long. The rest of the world will follow these states’ lead.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IP...
It's not perfect (see the last link for details), but it's a great start. Also, if you have the time, read the actual directive. It's fairly readable as far as laws go.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... - see Article 5.
Also the FAQ:
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/2d443b31-dc2a...
Also there's an entire directive for batteries:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj
Article 11 is the one that's probably most interesting to people here, the reason why we are now starting to see easily removable batteries in mobile devices, again. Actually "easier to remove", they're definitely not as easy to remove as the Nokia 5110 batteries :-p
Law is a maximally complex representation of reality manifested by anxiety.
Massachusetts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43021108
Maine https://pirg.org/articles/automakers-sue-maine-to-block-repa...
>The association of automakers also alleges that because the “independent entity” has not created a “standardized platform,” they have no way to securely share vehicle data. They are asking the court to declare the law unenforceable until the independent entity has undertaken its obligations.
That sounds understandable. Just until the independent entity gets their act together.
If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational. Unfortunately the $600B sponsor and $6B president are faaaar on the other side of the invisible net worth boundary where that starts to be the case, so I wouldn't expect RtR to get much traction, but who knows. There is enough chaos to make it worth a try even if it "ought" to fail on grounds of "government by the rich, for the rich."
Sounds like narcissistic personality disorder to me. Why are some of us worshipping these people again?
Not quite yet. An admirer of dictators. He's a wannabe dictator. Stacking the decks with loyalists and purging those that don't roll over. Never failing to take an opportunity to divide, to tear down, to fabricate, to create chaos for the 99%. Constantly crossing lines that would've been unthinkable for any other president - including previous Republican candidates.
Offtopic: I often think of the alternate universe in which John McCain won the Republican nomination over Donald Trump. What a different world we'd be in! Good chance Biden wouldn't have won in 2020. Good chance Russia wouldn't have had an opportunity to invade Ukraine a second time.
safety (i.e. "if an amature does the repair wrong, they could hurt themselves or the owner"),
security (i.e. "if we let people know how it works, it'll be easier to hack"),
technilogical advancement (i.e. "smartphones would have to be chunky bricks with no water resistance if we designed them to be easily opened for repair"),
consumer protection (i.e. "unauthorized repair technicians are unaccountable and might do something unscrupulous to your device"),
value (i.e. "if companies have to design for repair and provide support for repair, then those costs get passed onto consumers"),
among other things. I don't find these arguments compelling and I think there is plenty of precedent for repairability being best for consumers. But they come up a lot - especially from anti-R2R lobbiests.
Our society has also been trained to be consumers, always throwing away old stuff in favor of the latest and greatest. When something breaks, the first thought is usally "how much will it cost to replace this?" instead of "how do I fix it?" Everything is treated as disposible, so there isn't much motivation for the average person to care about repair.
I would really like total control of my car's ECU, but I know the most popular use of such a power would be to circumvent emissions controls and maximize MPG or HP.
sort of like the bathroom hand dryers that have many biased points saying they are better than paper towels.
I think the benefits outweigh those costs, but the argument isn't unreasonable.
And they're arguably NOT arguments at all, as doing something to make your product less repairable is generally MORE expensive that NOT doing that thing. Most of the time in product manufacture, costs come from performing actions, so by not performing actions, those costs go away. That's what these laws are usually about, skipping repair-unfriendly design choices, making repair documents available (that's free, they already exist, companies need not keep them secret/internal), and not creating software locks that are only for keeping out "unauthorized" repairs.
Apple could save money by using all hex/phillips screws and doing away with pentalobe screws as they'd have few different items to buy and use. Apple could save a really good deal of money using NVMe drives, or an open standard for flash-chip boards like in the M4 Mini, because currently they waste a lot of engineering resources on their proprietary solutions. Devices with ultrasonically welded plastic cases could skip the ultrasonic welding step and just use clips on the plastic frame. Etc.
Dell is currently better off buying the same RAM etc used by other computer manufacturers.
second: even if it may make up for it, the manufacturers profits still will be reduced
replacing some components means fewer components sold overall, because whole products 'replace' just all components
Economies of scale don’t mean things are free. The marginal cost of each transistor is still greater than zero even though where producing what 10^20 ish of them per year.
Idk where I implied zero cost of things anywhere?
I wouldn’t call what you mentioned as reasonable, but nobody with the financial muscle or brain power wants to do that deep dive analysis.
But for the non-farmers, perhaps it'd really sway tribal mindsets to understand people "similar to them" (more so than elite techies...) benefit too.
As if I'm blind or stupid and wouldn't try the obvious??
You can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason into
They have no rebuttal because you're now making their own arguments. Regulations that allow those parts to be seized or those people to be jailed should be repealed.
In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right. DMCA 1201 impairs adversarial interoperability and therefore competition. Trademark law is meant to be about consumer protection and accurately representing the source of goods to the consumer, not enabling price discrimination by putting up trade barriers to cross-border arbitrage.
But a lot of those bad laws, they're federal. So if all you have control over is a state legislature, and those laws exist and have impaired competition and the state legislature can't remove federal laws, you then have to ask what they can do about the problems caused by those laws, until such time as we can get them repealed at the federal level.
If you want a fun compromise, pass a right to repair bill that only applies to companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue (but using the largest entity in the supply chain, so you can't just use a small business as a middle man to get out of it). That's going to make it apply to any of the relevant companies, but then if you ever managed to actually make those markets competitive enough for smaller businesses to be viable, you don't have yet another rule stacking on more barriers to entry for small businesses.
I disagree. There are many situations in which it will always be more profitable to screw over consumers than it would be to not screw them over, even taking into account that you might steal some business from competitors.
Any company that does spring up out of nowhere and do the right thing for the consumer will eventually be forced to screw over their customers or be bought up by someone who will because shareholders will never leave giant piles of money sitting on the table. Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
But this is exactly the point.
A competitive market is going to have at least a dozen suppliers. There are some corporate apologists who like to pretend that a duopoly is competition and only a strict monopoly is a problem, but that's BS. With sufficiently few suppliers they can easily collude with each other or use conscious parallelism to make sure that everybody is screwing customers and therefore nobody has to stop.
A competitive market isn't a thing where one company is so great they put all of their competitors out of business. It's a thing where entering the market is easy so lots of people do it all the time.
Suppose there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer. If entering the market is easy then soon there are six companies, because investors like money. If the incumbents are getting 50% margins and you could go eat their lunch while still getting 20% margins, that's what you do. Then there are six companies getting 20% margins, but that's still a good profit margin and it's still easy to enter the market, so soon there are seven and their margins are 8%. Trying to buy out the new guys or collude with them doesn't work because the combination of "industry with high margins" and "easy to enter the market" means new companies will keep showing up forever until the margins come down.
Whereas if there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer and regulations make it hard for anyone new to enter the market, the customer is screwed. Which is what keeps happening.
I'm not going to bother to address most of your comment because of this.... but just.... Unbelievably rude and arrogant of you lol. Par for libertarians.
Anyway no they where not libertarians they where MAGA as I stated.
They weren't interested in any of the BS you espoused. Things seized at border? Must be dangerous or illegal ,good on our boys in blue.ppl in jail? Must be protecting society.. OBVIOUSLY innocent citizens don't go to jail. Etc etc.
Don't believe climate change is real at all
Don't believe COVID is real or was real. At all.
Highly evangelical Christian while being the most unchristlike beings imaginable.
MAGA BULLSHIT not libertarians...
People say "rude" when they mean insubordinate, as if subordination is something anyone is entitled to.
Anyway. My original point stands. Right to repair is heavily politicized in maga crowds and therefore the current Republican party. Most of the arguments they have against it are nonsense and is very much akin to drug war reasoning. The only people in their eyes who want right to repair are pirates ,thieves and smugglers.
I don't give a fuck what libertarians think because they hold no political power or sway.even if they hold the logical ethical high ground in what SHOULD happen.... Nothing ever changes regardless of their opinions. Again see the drug war.
a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend (overcome, expand) traditional boundaries.
I never heard of the term before as why Im asking.
Also, in my own view. I don't consider myself political, I watch what people do, versus what they say they're going to do. And for me, any political figure can say one thing when the really want to do another.
I agree that government needs to be reformed, but somhow, Im thinking the reform issue is just being used as a vehicle to push a Accelerationism agenda.
If such sentiment was across the political spectrum, he wouldn't have been voted in. The notion that what people think in your bubble is what everyone thinks is what leads to conspiracy theories like "Stop the steal", and it has a chilling effect on actually engaging with people who might be voting against their own interests (or maybe even challenging your own cherished viewpoint on something)
As far as actually engaging, that's the fundamental problem! Most of his support was basically founded on rejecting discussion and reason, voting the gut feeling of something latched on to from one of the many conflicting things he said, while being happy with other people's frustration because you've pigeonholed them into "the other". Like I'm a libertarian, I personally share many of the frustrations and criticisms that got Trump elected! Yet you've seemingly assumed some caricature of me where I've got a narrow understanding with "cherished viewpoints".
I'm a libertarian. I've tried for many years to engage with so-called conservatives on their own terms. I always get othered from not just repeating their thought-terminating party lines.
One of the most glaring instances was about surveillance. I completed agreed with where they were coming from. But trying to connect the abstract topic to the digital freedom tools I was working on/with somehow made it into an argument! The only thing they wanted to hear was validation of their helpless world view.
> I don't find that comic compelling.
Perhaps you don't, but I've certainly seen it play out in real life. People don't like beliefs shoved down their throats, no matter how much it might be in their favor.
First, it's worth looking at how we reached this this point and why Right-to-Repair has become such a big deal in recent years.
For younger generations it may come as a surprise to learn that 50 or so years ago the very concept or notion of one's right to repair one's equipment would have been very foreign to the average person. Consumers would have expected their appliances to be both durable and long-lasting and capable of being repaired. Back then, just about every appliance from a toaster to a television set was repairable and manufacturers had service departments where their products could be returned for repairs. Alternatively, owners and independent repairers could buy spare parts and service manuals from these service outlets.
In fact, so ingrained were notions about repairs and service that no one would have given even a second thought that in future they might be discontinued. In hindsight, I think blindness to the fact that things might change is why so few of us saw change coming until it was upon us.
Anyway, that was the normal situation until somewhere around the mid 1970s - early '80s when things changed drastically for the worse.
Why the change? In the decades since then there has been a huge shift in manufacturing and the economics of manufacturing. More than ever the overwhelming issue nowadays in manufacturing is profit, it has become the principal driving force and raison d'être for manufacturers' existence. No doubt, profit has always been a driving force but in the past it was tempered by other considerations, companies often built their reputations on the quality and reliability of their products and that those who ran them often had high manufacturing standards that they wanted to uphold.
In past decades people who ran manufacturing companies were more likely to be their founders—often inventors and or engineers—and they had a vested—intellectual—interest in their products and by virtue of the fact they required their companies to produce good products that consumers would appreciate.
From about 1980s the economic environment in which businesses found themselves changed dramatically, manufacturing thus changed to adapt. Free trade, reduced tariffs, offshore manufacturing, family companies being absorbed into multinationals, change in investment practices and so on meant that the utility and quality of products was often deprecated in favor of profits. With the changes founders and engineers ended up having much less say and influence over production than previously. Now shareholders and accountants ran these companies and their CEOs were no longer engineers but those with MBA degrees.
Of course, that's only part of the story, computers and IP became a big deal during this time and was very influential in rolling product info back into the proprietary realms of companies. Nowadays, information about products that companies once willingly placed in the public domain for the benefit of their customers such as circuit diagrams and maintenance and repair documentation, etc. has almost dried up completely.
Many well-known and highly respected companies succumbed to these economic changes. Had I time I could give many examples but HP and Sony are two egregious cases that immediately come to mind. Probably the quintessential example of where engineering management has given way to profit and the greed of investors is that of Boeing. The 747 was first designed and built 50+ years ago when Boeing was an engineering company run by engineers, nowadays investors and accountants run the company and is product is the 737-MAX.
Also, these changes have brought old nefarious manufacturing practices to the fore. Whilst the notion of planned obsolescence has been around for well over a century modern business practice has brought it to new heights. Products are now designed with less durability and have much shorter lives than in the past.
An example I like to give is that several years ago I bought three plastic buckets at the supermarket and the plastic handle fell off one before I got it home and not much later the handles fell off the other two when in use. Compare them with an old beaten-up and dented hot-dipped galvanized bucket we've inherited from my grandmother that was made sometime around the mid 1920s. It's somewhat the worse for wear but it's still functional. Furthermore, it still has its handle and it's not even rusty.
Here, durability has given way to profit, planned obsolescence ensures that manufacturers sell more. Then there's the serious problem of plastic pollution. And that's just for starters.
It seems to me there's a simple solution to all this but instigating it would be very difficult as manufacturers would fight it every inch of the way. That is to tax products that are deliberately designed without durability and longevity in mind. A durability tax would provide manufacturers with a financial incentive to make better products. Taxes also have the advantage that they can be fine-tuned until they become effective.
A durability/longevity tax would be not only just applicable to buckets but also smartphones and such. For example, phones without the facility for users to change batteries easily would fall into this category and be subject to the tax.
A similar 'utility' tax would apply where manufacturers deliberately depreciate a product's functional utility in favor of profit. Often that could be difficult to define but let me give you an example based on the definition and modus operandi of a device. Again, the classic example is the smartphone. First, we should not lose sight of the fact that a phone is primarily a telecommunications device licensed and tightly regulated under various telecommunications laws.
In recent years, phone manufacturers have deliberately killed the FM radio facility in many smartphones to encourage streaming which is more profitable. FM does not stop streaming, so why should it be removed when it serves an important purpose in times of emergency? During floods, fires, earthquakes etc. when WiFi and cellular services could easily be out of operation FM is very capable of supplying alternative sources of emergency information.
If governments acted responsibly then they ought to deem life and safety as being more important than profits, thus to encourage (rather than mandate) manufacturers to incorporate FM reception on their phones they could levy a utility tax on phones that do not have FM reception.
BTW, an almost identical argument is already being played out in the US over AM band reception in car radios. EV manufacturers want to phase out AM on grounds it's hard to reduce interference in EVs whereas the FCC has stated it's essential in times of national emergency. Incidentally, where I live the national broadcaster assumes the responsibility of broadcasting emergency information on the assumption that smartphone owners may no longer have access to WiFi or cellular networks.
At first thought much of that may seem outside the scope of the basic Right-to-Repair laws but on consideration it's not. Tied up with durability/longevity are related issues such as fitness for purpose, product functionality, minimizing e-waste and so on. When it comes to considering these matters this example just shows that we've barely scratched the surface.
That Right-to-Repair legislation is being widely enacted is no doubt excellent news. That said, the manufacturing lobby is extremely powerful so we need to fear that laws may be watered down to the point of being ineffective.
What's needed is a cultural shift by manufacturers back to those of earlier times. However, given the nature of their cultural shift of recent decades, we should not expect an easy ride going forth. Trouble is—as we've all too often seen—that in democracies where companies have undue power and influence it is very difficult to get effective law enacted.
The upside is that this shows how popular RtR is, and there's a good chance at least several states may implement their laws. At some point, even if it isn't universal, all it takes is enough states to force manufacturers to support independent repair by default.
Of course this IS a milestone to getting a law passed, and shows that the campaign is getting legislators' notice etc. So it is still good.
Spending cash on candidates to prevent bills like this is likely a rounding error on their yearly budget.
That is bullshit, of course -- just an excuse for companies to dodge basic business responsibilities, and a blatant failure on their part to acknowledge why consumers felt this legislation was needed in the first place. But it is certainly true that there are short-term drawbacks.
I tend to think B2C is who needs the most protection from the gov since C are relatively powerless, whereas B2B tends to be more balanced, but the more I think about it the more I think that perhaps we're overlooking an important area. Nevertheless I think for now we need to focus on B2C and worry about B2B later. Can't spread ourselves too thin.
I mean, there is the psychological phenomenon known as the Just World Hypothesis. When presented with something that's simply bad, or simply good, people are skeptical and tempted to search for the counterbalancing element, treating it like a trick question even if it's not.
And so it can be hard to accept it simply is good. But that doesn't have to be the end of the conversation because that impulse can be channeled productively just by changing the baseline. Right to repair, I would think, simply is good, but since we need a bad thing, we can talk about the long road ahead to full implementation, or the effort necessary to overcome cultural inertia, as well as status quo extremism in our institutions.
But I think the right to repair itself is a good thing.
I remember that phone[0] that google killed and that was back in 2013? Since then other projects have sprung up to tackle this. There are links at the bottom of the page.
To your point, I suspect the same, I'm trying to think of adverse consequences. The closest I can think of is something akin to the battery example, but in a different way. Maybe you're more comfortable putting high performing dangerous-to-handle components in a phone if you can seal it shut. Maybe component-by-component tech support accountability to a tech repair community is a new set of burdens they don't want to have. I suppose the latter feels plausible, but the possible impact on components seems less convincing.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative to that given how juicy targets even locked phones were for "chop shops" before Apple introduced parts pairing. People were mugged left and right for their phones.
(Obviously the solution would be to tackle poverty, drug abuse and mental health issues, but that is even more unrealistic)
The solution to theft shouldn't be taking away your right to own things in the first place.