Member-only story
Biden’s Right to Repair will include electronics, too
Part of a broad antimonopoly agenda.
The Biden administration teased a sweeping antimonopoly executive order last week, including a Right to Repair provision that was to be aimed at agricultural equipment — a direct assault on the corporate power of repair archnemesis John Deere.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/07/instrumentalism/#r2r
But it turns out that the executive order goes far beyond tractors and other agricultural equipment — it also applies to consumer electronics, including mobile phones, and this is a huge fucking deal.
The Right to Repair fight reached US state legislatures in 2018, when dozens of R2R bills were introduced, and then killed, by an unholy alliance of Apple and other tech companies fighting alongside Big Ag and home electronics monopolists like Wahl.
But the R2R side had its own coalition — farmers, tinkerers, small repair shop owners, auto mechanics and more. If the Biden order had stopped with an agricultural right to repair, that would have weakened the R2R coalition.
