Colorado's Anti-Repair Bill is Dead

TheDeadDontDie writes:

Colorado has led the US on legislation that ensures people can fix their stuff. Manufacturers tried to claw back that control but ultimately failed-for now:

A controversial bill in Colorado that would have undone some repair protections in the state has failed. The bill had been the target of right-to-repair advocates, who saw it as a bellwether for how tech companies might try to undo repair legislation more broadly in the US.

Colorado's landmark 2024 repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment , went into effect in January 2026 and ensured access to tools and documentation people needed to modify and fix digital electronics such as phones, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. The new bill, SB26-090 , would have carved out an exception to those repair protections for "critical infrastructure," a loosely defined term that repair advocates worried could be applied to just about any technology.

SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House's State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.

Danny Katz, executive director of the local nonprofit consumer advocacy group CoPIRG, says the battle was a group effort. Speaking against the bill were a cohort of repair advocates from organizations such as PIRG , Repair.org , iFixit , Consumer Reports , and local businesses and environmental groups like Blue Star Recyclers , Recycle Colorado , Environment Colorado , and GreenLatinos .

[...] Supporters of the bill, backed by companies like Cisco, had pointed to the potential for cybersecurity risks as their motivation for altering the law's language. If companies were required to make repair tools available to anyone, the theory goes, what's to stop bad actors from using those tools to reverse engineer critical technology like Internet routers? Withholding those tools, they posited, would make them less available to hackers who could misuse them. Advocates of the bill said that companies should be allowed to keep their secrets if it ensured security, though that argument starts to fall apart with a little scrutiny.

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