@Moon@guizzy@pluralistic you sure about that? most farmers are republicans and they are pretty much universally in favor of being able to repair their own farm equipment. same goes for people who work on carsrepublicans *in government* are generally bought off whore politicians who don't represent their constituency
@guizzy@pluralistic republicans generally are against right to repair on principle, it will be filled with poison pills by the biden administration so that democrats will oppose it
@Moon@pluralistic Maybe I'm too cynical but my guess is that it's going to be put in a bill filled with poison pills ("right to repair needs racial justice!") so that the Republicans have to kill it, then the Democrats can campaign on that to farmers ("See? Republicans don't want you to have the right to repair your tractors! They actually hate small business owners!")
Despite Deere's lobbying, patronizing and FUD, the right to repair has - finally - triumphed.
Today, the Biden administration announced an executive order directing the Department of Ag and the FTC to develop R2R rules for agricultural equipment!
Every farm has a workshop, because when you're at the end of a country road and there's a hailstorm coming, you need to bring in the crops, not wait for a repair tech.
Deere's arguments that independent repair will expose America's food supply to cyber-risk are equally hollow, because Deere has some of the *worst* cybersecurity of *any* industry - winning the infosec race to the bottom.
At the same time, Deere started pushing the insulting story that farmers are yokels, too stupid to fix their tractors. This despite Deere's long history of turning farmers' modifications of their equipment into money-making features in new tractors.
Big Ag is a particularly odious repair troll, and John Deere is its standard-bearer. The company has been trying to felonize farmers' repairing their own tractors since at least 2015:
They told the US Copyright Office that farmers don't own their tractors - because tractor firmware is copyrighted, it is licensed, not sold, and farmers must abide by the company's license terms.
"Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
Right to Repair advocates never lost hope. May's "Nixing the Fix" report from the FTC establishes a factual record in support of the right to repair across many sectors, but especially agricultural equipment.
It's part of the long trend in which all levels of government make policy based on what serves the interests of the rich and powerful, not the people they serve.
2014's "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (Cambirdge University Pree) quantifies this phenomenon:
Right to Repair is a no-brainer. You - not corps - should have the right to decide whom you trust to fix your stuff, even (especially) when it's "smart" and an unscrupulous repair could create unquantifiable "cyber-risk."
And yet...*dozens* of state R2R bills were defeated in 2018, thanks to an unholy coalition of Big Ag, Big Tech, and consumer electronics monopolists like Wahl. That supervillain gang reassembled to fight and kill still more bills in 2020/1.