More Details On How Tech Lobbyists Lobotomized NY’s Right To Repair Law With Governor Kathy Hochul’s Help
The good news: last December New York State finally passed a landmark right to repair" bill providing American consumers some additional protection from repair monopolies. The bad news: before the bill was passed, corporate lobbyists worked with New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to covertly water the bill down almost to the point of meaninglessness.
Grist received documentation showing how Hochul specifically watered the bill down before passage to please technology giants after a wave of last-minute lobbying:
Draft versions of the bill, letters, and email correspondences shared with Grist by the repair advocacy organization Repair.org reveal that many of the changes Hochul made to the Digital Fair Repair Act are identical to those proposed by TechNet, a trade association that includes Apple, Google, Samsung, and HP among its members. Jake Egloff, the legislative director for Democratic New York state assembly member and bill sponsor Patricia Fahy, confirmed the authenticity of the emails and bill drafts shared with Grist.
The changes all directly reflect requests made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and other companies desperate to thwart the right to repair movement from culminating in genuinely beneficial legislation. All of these industry giants are keen on monopolizing repair to drive up revenues, but like to hide those motivations (and the resulting environmental harms) behind flimsy claims of consumer privacy and security.
Among their asks: numerous cumbersome intellectual property protections, as well as the elimination of a requirement that manufacturers provide device owners and independent repair providers with documentation, tools, and parts" needed to access and reset digital locks that impede the diagnosis, maintenance or repair of covered electronic devices.
Additional restriction added by industry and Hochul at the last second force consumers to buy entire repair assemblages" instead of being able to buy just the independent parts they need, which advocates say further undermines the law (imagine being forced to buy an entire computer motherboard when just a single component is broken).
The bill already failed to 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. Between that and these last minute changes the bill is more ceremonial than productive, and yet another clear example of how normalized U.S. corruption cripples meaningful reform.