Tech Lobbyists Hard At Work Undermining Proposed Alaska ‘Right To Repair’ Law

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

There’s still a meaningful effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

Alaska could be up next. Two versions of a new right to repair law are winding their way through the Alaska state House and Senate. The bills would amend the Alaska Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, requiring tech hardware manufacturers to make parts, tools or software needed for repairs available to independent service providers and consumers.

As is always the case, the proposal has broad, bipartisan support among the actual public:

“In a lot of ways, this is a deeply conservative bill in the sense that for most of the 20th century, you could fix the stuff you bought, and the parts would be available, because it was another revenue stream for the businesses,” said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Forrest Dunbar, the sponsor of the Senate bill.”

As is also always the case, hardware vendors from a variety of sectors (agricultural, medical, tech, consumer hardware) are lobbying against Alaska’s proposal, falsely claiming that easier, more affordable repairs constitute a privacy and security threat to the public.

TechNet (a lobbying coalition that includes Dell, Apple, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Verizon), for example, is trying to convince the Alaska state legislature that everything is working fine currently, and that fixing anything would make consumers less safe. Apparently because truly independent repair professionals are too incompetent if they don’t have big corporate oversight:

“TechNet wrote that the bill would erode the current system where manufacturers work with authorized repair service providers, and that these agreements “ensure that technicians have the appropriate training, access to safe repair procedures, and the qualifications necessary to protect both the device and the consumer.”

TechNet is also trying to claim that the Alaska bill is “misaligned with language of right-to-repair bills from other states” such as New York. Granted they would say that, given that after New York passed its bill, tech lobbyists convinced NY Governor Kathy Hochul to water that states’s bill down to the point of uselessness.

The concern now is that lobbyists successfully manage to water the Alaska bill down so badly that it ultimately becomes similarly useless.

Something that’s broadly not mentioned in coverage of right to repair: while eight states have passed right to repair laws in recent years, not one of those states has actually managed to actively enforce it, despite no shortage of bad behavior by companies looking to secure repair monopolies. That’s something that needs to change if the movement is to have any serious impact.

Filed Under: alaska, bipartisan, hardware, independent, monopoly, right to repair, software