Tech Companies Fail To Kill Colorado’s ‘Right To Repair’ Law

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

Last month we noted how tech companies, automakers, and others were trying to kill Colorado’s existing “right to repair” law, which is supposed to make it cheaper and easier to repair the things you own.

More specifically, tech companies like Cisco and IBM were pushing Colorado lawmakers to sign off on  SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the state’s existing protections under the pretense of making the public safer.

After previous journalism from the likes of Ars Technica and Wired drew some unwanted attention, the effort appears to have failed, according to Wired:

“SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.”

Like many similar efforts, tech companies falsely tried to convince lawmakers that making things cheaper and easier to repair would pose entirely new privacy and security risks, and that independent repair shops would be prone to make constant and dangerous mistakes. Pre-Trump Lina Khan era FTC studies had repeatedly indicated those claims are false.

In this case, IBM and Cisco had tried to use an updated definition of “critical infrastructure” that was so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless. While they failed this time, they’ll be back. Countless companies, across countless industries, are desperate to boost revenues by monopolizing repair and driving up the cost of ownership for consumers and other companies alike.

Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, not one has actually managed to enforce their new laws despite no shortage of targets, something that gets curiously omitted by most reporting, and indicates the movement has a lot of work left to do.

Filed Under: colorado, hardware, lobbying, repair, right to repair, software, tech