John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

Shout out to Louis Rossmann for doing a ton of work on Right to repair.

He started a website called Consumer Rights Wiki to document anti-consumer practices.

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page

He's also involved with FULU Foundation which has a bounty of 25k to get Ring cameras working without Amazon's servers.

https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/ring-video-doorbells

"Right to repair" isn't some kind of little negotiated contract fiddling. A company can't agree to a 5-year right to repair. Right to repair is a normal freedom, like speech, like using everyday objects you buy or make, generally walking around, meeting people, etc. Don't let's get all twisted up here and start thinking some dumb-ass business plan is the starting point in our basic conceptualization of humanity.

Great news, the fine is so small doesn’t matter, but curing the wrong does. My hope is this standard will apply to modern cars as well, repair manuals and the software tools to interact with the cars are also heavily restricted by the manufacturers.

Bananas that stuff like this needs to get litigated in our society - if you asked 100 random people "should farmers be able to repair their equipment", you would get 100 yes's.

It was always crazy to me that farm equipment was locked down. I almost understand yuppie buying an E-Class not working on their own car, but a farmer not able to work on his own tractor just felt so wrong. It made me wonder how John Deere was still so popular and seemingly beloved.

There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.

> Deere must pay $1 million collectively to the five states for antitrust enforcement costs and will be subject to strict compliance oversight for the next 10 years.

$1 million fine for probably $10 billion in profit. I know what lesson I'd learn if my only personal value was maximizing shareholder value. The compliance part can be dealt with later.

Great Stary. I wish he could go after the large format printer industry. (The really big printing machines). Those machines are locked for service and require service contracts, and you still can't get under the hood. And when the company decides to obsolete the product, customers are thrown out on their backsides.

As much as I hope this is a turning point, I’m not holding my breath.

John Deere was one of the most egregious offenders in the right-to-repair movement, especially with how expensive their tractors are. There’s definitely a difference paying for the repair of a ten of thousands of dollars machine versus having to buy new AirPods.

I’m no expert in US law, but my understanding is an FTC settlement doesn’t create any precedent like a court case would, so I don’t anticipate this leading to other offenders, like in tech, being held accountable. Their support is too important right now.

Ultimately, I think the underlying motive for the administration is scoring a win for a core constituency, farmers. Tariffs and immigration enforcement have really harmed the viability of their farms, but at least the admin can say the did something for them.

Nevertheless, I’m glad that John Deere is being forced to provide parts and information to individuals and repair shops.

We need same for Lenovo Deere, John Dell ... Soldered RAM's, soldered SSD's lately, batteries which have by purpose just slightly different size not to be interchangeable.

And for mighty HP and their printers, management needs to be put to wall and shot. There's no other solution.

Thank you all involved! Bring it to our cars next! I'm looking at you, electric vehicles!

The settlement changes nothing [0]

[0]: https://fighttorepair.substack.com/p/this-doesnt-break-the-m...

Good. It's a tractor, not some tiny glued-together tech gadget.

Does that enforcibly include tractors the Russian Federation captured in eastern Ukraine?

1 million dollars? Like, less than 1 tractor after financing? How will they recover from this?!

so happy to hear this, I know many farmers that went with other brands or used equipment without chips. most farmers I know just want pure mechanics anyway

Fifty years ago the average guy buying a tractor had a family farm with a few hundred acres. Equipment was smaller and had less frills because the John Deeres of the world were catering to those small time customers. There were a lot of them.

Those small time farms mostly don’t exist anymore. Today farming is done on an industrial scale, and equipment manufacturers are catering to the big players. They need big, efficient equipment that is profitable to operate at scale and they’re willing to pay for it. Only the big farms can.

I wonder how much of this is just the manufacturers making more high end, complex equipment that is just difficult to repair in general as opposed to them maliciously designing things to be difficult to fix.

Keep in mind, increasing the cost to repair something lowers its market value. There’s a reason Toyotas are more expensive than Dodges. The market prices these inconveniences. It’s not in the manufacturer’s interest to do this.

I think the real risk here is that the equipment manufacturers will use these settlements and regulations to build crazy reporting and compliance requirements that give them a moat that prevents upstart companies from competing with incumbents in the industry. What they really fear is competition, not the loss of a few percentage points on their part sales and service profits.

I think it’s important to understand that while this is a win, it’s only a small step.

> Deere will now be required to make diagnostic and repair tools available to equipment owners and independent repair shops, not only its own network of authorized dealers.

In practice, this means Deere will now operate similar to auto manufacturers. They will make their proprietary scanning equipment, software, and manuals available… for a few-thousand-dollar/ month subscription.

You have options as to where you can replace the physical components… but still need to pay a subscription fee in order to use your vehicle’s full feature set or get access to the data you collected but don’t actually own. Your vehicle’s firmware is still locked.

They will make their parts available… but not necessarily to a common standard (we could have used a common bolt size or hose line, or specced a commonly available alternator, but we decided not to), making it prohibitively costly for third party manufacturers to compete on aftermarket parts, and keeping genuine part costs high.

You can (legally) work on the machine yourself… but work done without a licensed mechanic will likely void your warranty, or prevent you from using necessary software features.

Your local mechanic can now repair your equipment… but in order to do that work they may have to invest in not only scanners and software, but an odd handful of unique task-specific or custom tools in order to complete the repair.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a win. It’s high time that the FTC addressed Deere’s blatantly anti-competitive behavior. However, this isn’t a silver bullet that will save farmers from the rising tide of extractive capitalism, or isolate their tractors from nation state cyber threats.

In the last decade, on a fleet of almost 30 Deere machines from lawnmowers to high-clearance sprayers and combines, I could count on one hand the number of times I've needed the Deere laptop to diagnose a problem to fix it.

Oh I wish I was home, mama

where the bluegrass grows

where the right to repair

is made plain!

That is good news for once

Good. However had, one question still remains: why did the US government not have this automatically put in place in general? The title refers to one company for the most part. The question is why the US government, which assumingly should work for the people, prioritizes private commercial interests over individual ownership models.

Now can we get the same for our TVs and other electronics? We seem to just buy new cheap crap rather than fix what we have. Filling the landfills with toxic metals that seep into our drinking water.

damn

This should be extended to software We have the Digital Human Right to adversarial interoperability no matter the dimension/interface.

Good, do Apple next.

1 Million isn't enough. The CEO should personally pay 1 million, the Deere corp should have to pay 100 M.

Now do printers and MacBooks.

It's nice to see enshittification being stopped and reversed.

I’ll believe it when I hear farmers telling me it’s true

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"...Deere will now be required to make diagnostic and repair tools available to equipment owners and independent repair shops..."

This is only the tip of the iceberg. They make the parts deliberately proprietary to prevent competition. The classic example is curved cabin windows instead of flat commodity glass.

Laissez-faire capitalism is efficient at extraction not productivity.

The very concept of IP was a mistake. I understand it helped make a lot of work possible. But virtually nothing useful came from nothing, and the reservoir of human knowledge belongs to all of us. Unless you are Isaac Newton, you took a good idea and made it better or more applicable. Pretending like you own it is just dishonest.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

--Isaac Newton