Faced with new laws in California and other states, big tech lobbyists want to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” to prevent “a compliance market where lawyers drive the decisions.”
So what they’re saying here is that it’s cheaper for them to drag rtr laws to court everywhere for years than it is for them to make devices repairable. Or, in other terms, planned obsolescence makes them so much money that they can spend billions in lawyer fees and still make a profit.
Not really, a big driving factor behind making devices irreparable is to uphold the illusion of infinite growth.
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Yup, or the Apple play which is just walk right around these regulations with some additional tricky bullshit while outwardly ‘supporting’ RtR. If I was a lawmaker I would be so fucking livid about this circumvention I would come back even harder but I guess I don’t know a lot about that process.
Forgot something if you were a lawmaker you probably had so much money from those company that you would not care.
The goal here always been to make it look like they do something usefull not actually do it.
It’s supremely disappointing, looking up campaign contributions, how little money is required to influence our politicians.
Yeah at least make the corruption worth it but it’s hard to up the price when the guy next to you would take a trip to Delaware to vote the way they want
I’m surprised they haven’t just added some text to line 9,473,222 of their ToS that says they can auto bill you for the full price of a new device if repairs have been detected.
Stupid shit like that in ToSes usually get thrown out in court
Don’t give them ideas.
I want to see the right to repair extended to software also. You know what that means, right lol
I’d bet money this is the real fear of Apple and the others.
FOSS FTW
This is a farce. Big corporations and their lackey interest organizations employ armies of lawyers all the time to get their way. To then say it shouldn’t be a matter of law to prevent monopoly is at the least hypocritical, at the most an over reach of power and influence.
Your device, your choice.
The fundamental problem here is those monopolies having unfettered access to regulatory law making processes. Right now it’s as if these companies are free to regulate themselves and everyone is unhappy because they misuse those powers to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else. The minimum requirement is to break them up for such overreach.
This article is such a mess. It just clobbers together talking points, speculation, and suspicion into a word salad
The MOUs in the past were a marketing steps to prevent each state from inventing a new set of rules. It worked.
Yeah - of course such “self regulation” is never as good as an advocate’s wet dream. Any law passed will also be bypassed. They will never try to build a taller wall. It’s in their business interest.
But there is a legitimately win-win situation in a national MOU taking say the CA law and applying it nationally. If you at all feel the CA law is good, it will spread it to shit states that would never care about their citizens’ right to repair on their own.
For the corps it is indeed a nightmare to let 50 states pass 50 different set of rules. The whole point of the IS market is that that does not happen. That there is one set of rules.
But yeah. They will fight any law that is passed. Any MOU they sign will not be perfect. And of course before the ink is even dry on the MOU the corps will be working on ways to subvert and bypass it.
PS: No MOU actually prevents states from passing new laws. It just tries to make a marketing claim “you do not have to spend effort on it- we are doing a good job already”. But that only lasts for as long as the MOU is not bypassed.
