So this week the White House actually did something I've been complaining about on this blog for years without ever expecting anyone in DC to care: on Thursday, Biden signed a big executive order on competition that includes a chunk specifically about your right to fix your own stuff. Not just "your stuff" in the vague sense either: phones, laptops, farm equipment, all of it. The order directs the FTC to draft rules cracking down on manufacturers who make it deliberately hard (or impossible) to get your own devices repaired by anyone other than them.
I want to be clear this isn't a law yet. Its an executive order telling an agency to go write rules, which is a slower and mushier process than it sounds like when you read the headline. But its still the first time I've seen the federal government put "right to repair" in writing at this level, and given how long iFixit and a bunch of small repair shops have been shouting about this into the void, it felt like a real moment.
Why I actually care about this one
I cracked the screen on my iPhone 8 back in March. Not shattered, just a spiderweb crack in the corner from dropping it on my kitchen tile, which is apparently the hardest surface known to man. I took it to a local shop two blocks from my apartment, guy fixed it in forty minutes for $89, and it works fine. Genius Bar wanted $149 and a three-day wait because they had to order the part. Nothing wrong with either option on paper, except Apple has spent years trying to make the independent option harder to exist at all: restricting parts, flagging "unauthorized repairs" with software warnings, that whole thing with True Tone getting disabled if you swap a screen without their blessing.
The farm equipment angle is the part that actually surprised me though. John Deere tractors have had locked-down diagnostic software for a while now, to the point where farmers in the Midwest have been driving to Ukraine, literally downloading cracked Ukrainian firmware off some forum, just to fix their own $300,000 combines without paying a dealership technician to drive out and plug in a laptop. I did not expect farm equipment repair to be the thing that got a competition policy person in the White House to write "unfair anticompetitive restrictions" in an official document, but here we are. Sometimes the weirdest example is the one that makes a policy land.
I'm trying not to get too excited, because the last few years have taught me that "agency directed to consider rulemaking" and "thing that actually changes by next spring" are very different timelines. The FTC still has to write the actual rules, there will be a comment period, manufacturers will lobby hard against it (Apple in particular has lobbied against right-to-repair bills at the state level for years, Nebraska and a bunch of other states have tried and failed to pass their own versions already). So don't expect independent repair shops to suddenly get official parts access by Labor Day or anything.
What I do think this does is change the argument. Up until now the manufacturer line has basically been "we restrict repair for safety and security reasons, trust us," and that's been enough to kill most state bills. Once the federal government's own competition people are on record saying that's mostly cover for keeping repair revenue in-house, that talking point gets a lot weaker in every statehouse fight going forward, even if the FTC rulemaking itself takes two years to actually produce anything.
Anyway. My corner-cracked screen is holding up fine, the shop used a real quality panel and not one of the washed-out aftermarket ones I got burned by on an old Samsung once. If you've got a repair horror story of your own, or a local shop you trust more than the manufacturer counter, I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments — this is one of those topics where the good shops are usually a word-of-mouth secret and not something you find by googling.