New York Becomes The First State To Pass A ‘Right To Repair’ Law
New York State has become the first state in the country to pass right to repair" legislation taking direct aim at repair monopolies. The bill itself mandates that hardware manufacturers make diagnostic and repair information available to consumers and independent repair shops at fair and reasonable terms."
The bill notably doesn't include vehicles, home appliances, farm equipment or medical devices - all sectors rife with obnoxious attempts to monopolize repair via DRM or by making diagnostics either expensive or impossible. But right to repair advocates like iFixit's Kyle Wiens say they are hopeful they can include such technologies in additional NY state bills down the road:
There will still be a long way to go before we've legally secured a Right to Repair for every thing, across the whole world. Many other states are considering bills of their own, and we've still got appliances, tractors, and medical devices on our dream docket.
Nevertheless, this victory is the biggest the Right to Repair movement has seen so far.
For the last year or two we were in a race to see which state would pass right to repair legislation first. California seemed poised to take this mantle last week, but lobbyists scuttled the effort at the last minute, falsely claiming that the bill would harm consumer privacy and security. A federal bill has been considered, but, there too, cross-sector lobbying has stalled progress.
There's a long list of large corporations that are working overtime to cement repair monopolies either through DRM or draconian restrictions on access to tools, diagnostic systems, parts, or device manuals. This ham-fisted behavior, most notably by companies like Apple or John Deere, has resulted in a massive, bipartisan, grassroots movement that has slowly jumped from the nerdy fringe to the mainstream.
While a scattered number of companies have made improvements to try and pre-empt such legislation, many others have only doubled down on the behavior. Worse, they've taken to bandying about all manner of false claims about how dismantling their repair monopolies would harm consumer privacy and safety, help sexual predators, or turn states into diabolical meccas for hackers.
But those efforts have proven to be a hard sell, and New York is likely the first of several states responding with common sense and extremely popular legislation. It's been a grim stretch for consumer rights in the U.S. (especially in telecom), though watching the right repair movement galvanize and slowly enact meaningful change has proven to be a refreshing exception.