Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Either that, or maybe I'll rant about a topic for a while. Anyway, let's go ahead and start the show. Today we're gonna be talking about Right to Repair. You might be wondering, well, what is that? It's a set of it's a principle that asserts that one should have a guaranteed ability to repair their own stuff. For example, if the battery in your car were to go bad, it would be reasonable to expect that you could go, get a replacement battery, replace it in your car, and be good to go. You wouldn't wanna seek to buy a new car just because the battery was bad. This concept can apply to a lot of different things though. You could think about it in regards to cell phones, appliances like your washer and dryer, or even to heavy equipment like the tractors that farmers use to harvest the food that we eat every day. So why is this important as a, technology issue and as a public policy issue? It's in part because we've seen trends of companies attempting to prevent folks from being able to conduct these repairs. For example, Wired had reported instances of iOS showing a service notification when folks have tried to put replacement batteries into some models of iPhones. And this kind of feeds into that idea of planned obsolescence. The concept that when you buy a piece of hardware, the manufacturer kind of intends you for you to use it for some fixed period of time before you then are forced to get rid of it and buy a replacement. Now that isn't always nefarious. Sometimes companies simply can't afford to support a piece of hardware indefinitely. So as they make new models, support new features, new types of hardware, they eventually have to stop having their software support the old. So somewhere in that gradient of support things forever and stop supporting it the day after it's released, there's probably some reasonable point where it makes sense to allow that sort of thing, but also it's not harmful to the consumer. But this is also not only phones, not not only consumer devices that this sort of thing applies to. A keen example recently is in the fraught relationship that John Deere has been having with some farmers. As some of you may know, that company is known for the manufacture, manufacturing of equipment that they use to do their jobs. And often that farm equipment is now making more and more use of computer technology and software. So as a result, you see farmers having to agree to an end user license agreement much like you or I might do, installing that email app on on smartphones or that desktop application to do something like help make a podcast. And just like that, you can start to feel at times like the thing in your pocket or in this case, the thing I'm driving to harvest a crop isn't really something I own, but something that I'm paying money to have access to. And you can kinda feel that the response to that energy in a report written by Kevin O'Reilly, who is a right to repair advocate. And something that Kevin O'Reilly did is they called 12 John Deere dealerships posing as a customer. And what they did is they called and tried to get access to diagnostic software, which we'll talk a little bit more about the impact that that software has on this equipment in a moment. But the result of these calls is that 11 of them told this person that they don't sell diagnostic software or give access to it. And the twelfth one provided an email that that one could, in theory, send an email to and say, hey. How do I access these tools? From what I could tell reading through the report, they didn't get a response to that email that was given by the twelfth. This is concerning to someone who maybe owns a tractor because, for example, the John Deere s seven sixty. Of course, when I say I model it, let you know, very confident like that, it makes it sound like I know stuff about tractors. I am in no way an expert at that at all. But one thing I do know is from a Google search that they use a 125 different software connected sensors. And something I learned from that is that if you attempt to fix a problem that somehow impacts those sensors, it can require access to that diagnostic software we're just talking about that often farmers don't have access to, as we learned from the 12 phone calls. This led me to an anecdote about a person named Jared Wilson, who's a farmer based out in Missouri, and they had an issue come up with a mechanical valve on a fertilizer spreader. What that led to is, the activation of something called an immobilizer. Now Now what an immobilizer is for, I gather, is that it makes the equipment inoperable until error codes are cleared. I believe the original intent of something like this, I imagine, is to make sure that the equipment can operate safely. Activating this immobilizer means that you can't use the equipment. Well, this is a problem if you have fixed that thing yourself, but you don't have access to the software tool to clear the error code that makes the immobilizer work. So as a result, Jared had to take his equipment to the dealer where it sat for thirty two days, causing him an opportunity cost that they estimated at somewhere between 30,000 and $60,000. It may have actually been possible at the beginning of this to have saved that whole thirty two days if they could have just accessed the tools to clear the code after addressing the mechanical issue themselves. There's also an impact to the environment that shouldn't get lost in this conversation. According to iFixit, the average time that an American keeps a cell phone is around thirty four months. They also point out that 1,500,000,000 cell phones were manufactured in 2018. That is a lot of cell phones that over the time between then and now have likely been thrown out and replaced. And that's only part of the 50,000,000 tons of e waste that's generated per year, of which only 20% is recycled. So this leads to an open question, and that question is whether we can reduce the amount of waste by making things easier and cheaper to repair. This leads to the open question about whether the amount of waste can be reduced by simply making things easier and cheaper to repair. The this feels like an intuitive yes to me, but I imagine it'll be a policy area for some interesting research as more areas embrace right to repair legislation. Speaking of the policy space, then what's going on right now? That's a valid question. The most recent stuff is on July 9, an executive order was signed by president Biden in The United States. And what that does is it gives instruction to certain government agencies to better use antitrust laws as a tool in this right to repair space. So for example, the attorney general, the chair of the FTC, and other agencies with the authority to enforce the Clayton Act are directed to put some amount of focus on enforcing antitrust provisions. The Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, is encouraged to review guidelines it uses for for horizontal and vertical merger guidelines. That point is also kind of interesting because, as you may or may not be aware, when different companies seek to merge together, particularly in tech, this comes up. The FTC is one of the agencies that looks at whether that merger should be allowed to go forward or not. So adjustments to those guidelines could have impacts, beyond even just this right to repair situation. Also, the secretary of agriculture was directed to look at unfair treatment. This includes companies that and this is a kind of a direct quote, exercise extraordinary control over numerous inputs that determine the amount farmers are paid and require farmers to assume the risk of factors outside their control, leaving them more economically vulnerable. So this would seem to be aimed at organizations like John Deere that have some piece of software that's required to do repairs, and because that is a bottleneck to the process, it might be causing a farmer to assume an undue amount of risk, which makes them economically vulnerable, in the words of the order. There are other policy actions happening in this space, including at the federal level. For example, a bill was introduced by representative Morrell of New York's 20 Fifth on June 17 called the Fair Repair Act, HR four zero zero six. And this seeks to require manufacturers to make repair information, parts, and tooling available for third parties. Allows the Federal Trade Commission, when those things don't happen, to penalize through an assortment of different civil penalties. You can probably think of it being things like fines, refunds, forcing changes to contracts, that sort of thing. I'm unsure how far this bill will go. It seems fair it's still fairly new. It does have one other cosponsor, representative, CANNA. I don't know if I pronounced that right, but they represent California Seventeenth. And it has been referred to the house and enter the house energy and commerce committee. There hasn't been a ton of activity though at the state level. Massachusetts might be the only state to have done right to repair legislation since the nineteen eighties, though other states are trying. New York, for example, has senate bill s four one zero four, which did pass their state senate. The purpose of it is very similar to the Fair Repair Act at the federal level in that it seeks to ensure access to diagnostic tooling, information, and equipment for independent repair providers as well as consumers. The last action was taken on that one on June 10 when it passed the state senate and was referred to ways and means. I'm unsure how fast the transition from one chamber to another happens in New York State. I'm not an expert on their state general assembly. But after two months, I would be wondering if it's stuck for some reason or if it's just normal for something to take that long. If you know that or you know someone who does, feel free to reach out to the podcast, and I would love to dig into it more and and learn from your experience. I've brought this issue to your attention today, and I've pointed out that it's salient because it impacts a lot of the items we rely on day to day, whether you're talking about your cell phone, your computer, the appliances in your home, or the machinery we might need to do our jobs. This is getting attention because it's causing real damage to folks livelihoods and to their wallets. Both in the damage that's done directly, whether we're talking about those anecdotes earlier today, or the damage that happens indirectly, such as in the reduction of competition in The US economy, which can have ripple effects. You know, we might be thinking about the ability for small organizations to come up and displace larger ones, the ability for organizations to innovate, all that sort of thing. At the end of this, it was great to have this chat with you today, and don't forget to subscribe for more content like this, as well as longer form interviews as they come out.