FTC Strikes Settlement With John Deere On ‘Right To Repair’
from the fix-your-own-shit dept
To be clear, the FTC under Donald Trump and new boss Andrew Ferguson has been a dangerous embarrassment. Whether it’s the firing of both Democratic Commissioners, the politically motivated investigations, the extremist attacks on trans people, the agency’s useless attacks on porn, or its efforts to undermine free speech, the Trump FTC has largely been a hot and painful mess that looks nothing like the “extension of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy” promised by Republicans last election season.
That said: stopped clocks and all that.
The agency appears to have actually done something useful in striking a new settlement with agricultural giant John Deere to address the company’s longstanding “right to repair” abuses. According to an FTC announcement, the settlement to the joint lawsuit brought by the FTC and five states requires that the FTC spend at least ten years trying to make repairing its tractors easier:
“The FTC’s settlement requires Deere—for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states—to provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers.”
As is often the case, whether this actually sees any meaningful enforcement will remain an open question. But right to repair advocates like U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor say the settlement is a meaningful one, and a step up to the agreement John Deere made when recently settling a different right to repair class action lawsuit for $99 million.
“The agreement between Deere and the FTC is much better than the deal secured in a similar class action lawsuit,” Proctor said. “For example, it protects independent mechanics from anti-competitive practices in the repair marketplace.”
As we’ve covered for years, John Deere went out of its way to acquire smaller, independent repair centers to force users to use more expensive John Deere dealership repairs. Then it went out of its way to make tools, manuals, and parts as difficult as possible to get. In short they worked tirelessly, for years, to create a monopoly on repair — dramatically driving up costs for consumers.
John Deere’s behaviors had one positive net benefit: they directly sparked a nationwide and bipartisan right to repair reform movement that sparked Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington to pass state level right to repair laws. All 50 states have considered such laws, and several (like Maine and Ohio) have gotten close in recent years.
More recently, John Deere had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agreed to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s original complaint noted.
It’s worth reiterating that since passage not a single state has actually enforced the laws despise no shortage of offenders, so a lot of work needs to be done on the enforcement front. And again, a settlement with the FTC is also only as good as enforcement; not exactly the Trump administration or U.S. government’s strong suit when it comes to standing up to consolidated corporate power.
Filed Under: antitrust, ftc, hardware, independent repair, monopoly, right to repair, tractors
Companies: john deere
Comments on “FTC Strikes Settlement With John Deere On ‘Right To Repair’”
Easy to make a deal
Watch for the bump and subsequent drop in the value of Trumpcoin.
” that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers.”
Oh look, we stopped that. Guess we got to do nothing.
This will either go that way, or be used by them to block states from passing laws that would go farther or make it permanent.
John Deere in 3, 2, 1...
Enable malicious compliance.
FTC makes tracrors?
Typo
“… requires that the FTC spend at least ten years trying to make repairing its tractors easier”
Seize the means of production
This is what we get under capitalism. Corporations don’t face the same material conditions that the rest of us are subject to. They get to make decisions that greatly impact all of our lives without the slightest bit of consent from us. That shouldn’t be allowed. It’s a dictatorship we have to submit to every day we walk into a store or our place of work. If we dissent, they lay us off or send the Pinkertons to put us down. The people who are most affected (basically everyone) should be the people make collective decisions on how everything we rely on is made. John Deere should be taken from the shareholders and become a national cooperative owned by the workers and the farmers.
People think that “good laws” will keep corporations in check, but that’s a fairy tale. Anybody who remembers FDR’s New Deal policies knows that no “good laws” last long when corporations have exclusive control over the land, machines, and resources necessary to sustain a society. It’s a system of slavery so insidious and well hidden, nobody even realizes it is slavery.
Re:
This doesn’t require the politically-unpalatable and legally-problematic idea of “seizures”, though. Someone could, and should, do what the Linux developers did: create a product that will, at some point, make people think “why are we still dealing with those other assholes?” (Probably someone will show up to say those open tractors are just too damn different from what they’re used to; oh, well.)
That said, I do think there’s a good case to be made for adding a type of limited outlawry to laws. Like, if some company has been found to have abuse copyright in relation to their product, the legal system should no longer recognize their copyright on it.
Re:
Actually you just need to stop Wall Street and friends from dictating how things work, and change culture a bit. Older forms of bad capitalism can be dealt with well and quickly in an otherwise free society.