At the end of the day, “right to repair” is at best an ideological position similar to open source software, only they’re trying to use government authority to forcibly compel acceptance of their ideas rather than actually compete in the marketplace of ideas. Given that attempts at highly modular phones have flopped versus the consumer preference for thin and waterproof devices, it’s pretty clear that they’re going this route because the public simply isn’t buying what they’re selling. As such, presenting their ideological preferences as “rights” is a generally bad faith attempt to sidestep that entire discussion.
Holy shit, I haven't heard a hot-take this bad in a long time.
The right-to-repair movement has
nothing to do with modularity or open source software. Its a completely different idea.
Market competition doesn’t “work” for repair-ists because the vast, overwhelming majority of consumers care about features which are best achieved by cutting out easy repairability. So what we really have here is a tiny, screaming minority of ideological die-yards trying to get the government to step in and take away features that people actually want for a forced feature that very few people benefit from and even fewer actually want.
Again, a shockingly foolish hot-take from someone who usually sounds very well educated. And I'm not insulting you lightly, I'm genuinely surprised that someone with your level of education could say something this uninformed.
For one, the right-to-repair isn't about taking any features away from anyone.
Its usually primarily about getting rid of two things:
1) Built-in "Bricking": IE, when a company intentionally booby traps a product to make it break if a repair is attempted. Some HP Printers, for example, were programmed to automatically brick themselves if non HP ink was used; there was no consumer function there, HP just wanted to force consumers to buy their overpriced ink.
2) Forced into overpriced repair contracts.
A great example is McDonalds, where I worked part time in college. A lot of people don't realize this, but McDonalds is very predatory towards their franchisers - despite McDonalds franchises over all being profitable and easily beating the profitability of a Wendy's or Burger King (19% profit margin on average vs 6% and 1%, respectively), McDonalds owners generally have the lowest opinion of corporate out of any franchise.
A lot of this is... well, let me use the infamous McDonalds Ice Cream machine as an example. I'm about to tell you the secret of why they are always broken. Its because McDonalds has a deal with the manufacturer that causes the repair cost to be insanely high, essentially highway robbery high.
Which means McDonalds owners tend to try to put off the repair cost as long as possible, unless ice cream happens to be extremely popular at their location.
The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. “It’s a huge money maker to have a customer that’s purposefully, intentionally blind and unable to make very fundamental changes to their own equipment,” O’Sullivan says. And McDonald’s presides over all of it, he says, insisting on loyalty to its longtime supplier. (Resist the McDonald’s monarchy on decisions like equipment, and the corporation
can end a restaurant’s lease on the literal ground beneath it, which McDonald's owns under its franchise agreement.)
Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.
www.wired.com
And if you argue that this isn't a problem,
you are flat out denying an ancient principle of economics by committing the broken windows fallacy. Fundamentally, the right-to-repair is an issue of preventing an artificial replacing of repair cost. Economically speaking, there is little effective difference between a company causing a phone to be automatically bricked upon a necessary repair being attempted and a company intentionally breaking the phone themselves so the customer has to buy a new one. Economists have known that increasing the amount of repairs doesn't generate true economic growth for over 150 years at this point.
