Big Tech Lobbying Is On the Verge of Killing Right To Repair Legislation In Minnesota (vice.com)

Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Statehouse employees in Minnesota say that lobbying efforts by big tech companies and John Deere are on the verge of killing right to repair legislation in the state that would have made it easier for consumers and small businesses to fix their electronics. According to two of the bill's sponsors, the bill, which would have introduced "fair repair" requirements for manufacturers in the state, will not get a hearing that's necessary to move the legislation forward. Minnesota Senate rules automatically kills any bills that do not have a hearing scheduled by a certain date (this year, it's March 10). Last year, tech industry lobbying killed a similar bill in New York. "Unfortunately, it's not going to make deadline this session," Republican Sen. David Osmek, one of the sponsors, told me in an email. Osmek would not give additional specifics about his colleagues' concerns with the bill, but a legislative assistant for the bill's other sponsor told me that electronic manufacturer lobbying is likely to blame, while another source close to the legislature told me that tractor manufacturer John Deere -- a long time enemy of fair repair -- helped kill the bill as well.

Comments

Start our own farm equipment company

[Sebby]

Start our own equipment company, with full parts availability and no lock-in. They'll be selling like hotcakes!

Re:Start our own farm equipment company

[Grishnakh]

There's other equipment companies you can buy from. One big one is Kubota, a Japanese company. I'm not sure how their repairability compares to John Deere, but given how many times I've seen John Deere in the tech news about how the intentionally make it impossible for end-users to repair their equipment, I advocate buying Kubota or other foreign brands as a rule. They certainly can't be any worse than JD. Plus that bright orangish-red color is a lot easier to spot from a distance.

And given they're engineered in Japan, they've got to be better designed. All the Japanese cars I've ever worked on have been so much better engineered than any American car I've touched, there's just no comparison. With American cars, the engines will frequently have some clever and innovative design, but the component reliability will be crap, and the rest of the car will be crap too, with interiors falling apart in a very short amount of time, and generally poor design and layout of everything (like making it unnecessarily difficult to change the oil or do other simple maintenance). With Japanese cars, they aren't always at the cutting-edge of technology, but the component reliability is great, the overall design is great, and they seem to be designed specifically for easy servicing.

Re:Start our own farm equipment company

[Grishnakh]

If there's that much "brand loyalty" that farmers are screwing themselves by continuing to buy from a manufacturer that screws them over with repairability, when there are better alternatives out there, then fuck the farmers. I have zero sympathy for people who make stupid buying decisions (in the face of much better alternatives) and then whine and complain about how the vendor is mistreating them.

Tractors cater to a market that expects high reliability, ease of use, and ease of maintenance, or at least the farmers I know do.

If they're buying John Deere, then obviously ease of maintenance is not a concern of theirs.

No, don't blame Deere or the electronics industry

[fustakrakich]

Blame the politicians who took their money to kill the bill, and ultimately blame the people who reelect them. There is no hope unless they are voted out.

Perhaps not all is lost

[Scarred Intellect]

Though I HATE Wired, they have this to say:

Last Friday [Oct 28, 2016], a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles.

TFA

Re:It's not

[Joe_Dragon]

John Deere wants dealer only service and no 3rd party parts.

Re:No, don't blame Deere or the electronics indust

[hey!]

A couple of years ago I undertook to read the complete output of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper, who died in 1964. For most of his career he was a bottom-of-the-pack pro-writer, managing to get published regularly but never quite making enough to quit his job as a laborer in the Altoona PA railroad yards.

That's because for the most of his career he was a technically mediocre writer. His stories, taken on their own, were adequate for the most part. But if you look at his stories as a body, they're quite spectacular, envisioning a consistent history stretching thirty thousand years into the future (and some direction laterally if you count his "paratime" stories).

We take this kind of "world building" for granted in the post-LotR era; many aspiring writers start by creating elaborate historical backstories. What set Piper apart from these naval-gazing wannabes is that his future history is built around a single, central idea: nothing ever works for long. Sooner or later some people stop doing the things that system needs to be done because they've forgot why it should be done; or other people figure out ways to game the system; or both.

His stories always end on a happy, hopeful note, but if you fit it into the timeline with the next story it turns out that everything must have gone to hell in the end.

In many ways what we are seeing looks like the Piperian historical senescence of American small-r republicanism. Some people have stopped doing some of the things the system needs (informing themselves and dealing with opposing viewpoints). Others have figured out how to game the system (buying politicians without legally appearing to do so; flooding the mediasphere with bullshit).