The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair

Yeah! If the children want to lay my rail road lines for pennies, who the hell are the regulators to tell me and them we can't do that?!?!?

It isn't a free market. It is a regulated market and that regulation benefits both innovation and the producers and consumers in the market.

What public interest is served by allowing companies to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices like locking people into proprietary systems?

The world is a better place because regulators mandate things like interoperability in phones or requirements that auto manufacturers supply parts for 3rd party mechanics to fix vehicles.

1) agricultural equipment relies on a network of local dealers to sell and maintain the equipment.

For this reason, it's very hard for competition to break in. No one wants to wait 2 weeks for a part for their tractor during crop season.

2) No other manufacturers offer real choice (and the required logistics I mentioned above), so it's not something the free market will fix.

Except you can't because they abuse the shit out of the paten system. The paten system was a great idea when it protected up starts from being destroyed by the competition, but now it's used by incumbents to stifle markets.

Are you saying companies should be able to sell bottles of bleach as "baby formula"?

"Free Market". Yeah sure Jan.

I would agree only if John Deere is not allowed to use provisions like DMCA[1] to prevent repair of their hardware.

[1] https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyri...

> This is certainly abuse from the executive branch and I hope the courts stop it.

“Actually I think it’s good that companies don’t allow you to repair their products. And it’s an abuse of power for the government to stop them”

You realize that forcing companies to respect the right to repair actually makes the economy stronger?

Independent repair shops can exist in that environment. The market becomes more free in that sense…

Grow up

Incredibly short sighted. Extrapolate this to the point where all of the manufacturers use DRM / abuse the legal process to prevent an owners right to repair their own devices. Where's your "free market" now?

Government regulation is critical to a healthy market economy. No economy should be totally unregulated as it will end in a monopoly. Instead you need a moderate level of regulation to prevent people from abusing positions of power. That's what this is. They're purposefully making their products impossible to repair without them, and using their market dominance to enforce it. You're welcome to disagree, but every stable economic theory relies on some regulation.

It's a captured market. Free markets are where no one has extreme market power like with a mono/duopoly or monopsony or whatever. A free market would be one where Deere is broken up by antitrust action. Making right to repair rules is the soft-touch approach to curbing their abuse.

This is a frustratingly bad take. Bad repair practices are gradually taking over the entire market and they clearly represent a failure of said market to provide good products, ie the strategy consists of making the product irrefutably worse in order to make a bit more money. Every major phone manufacturer, for example, has followed in apple’s footsteps to make independent repair more difficult purely to extract more profits. In other words, how does the corporate shoeshine taste?

In the past, the free market deliberately produced formula that didn’t nourish babies and then lied to their mothers. It’s hyperbolic, but not really a bad question to test op’s logic.

Almost exactly a half-century ago, Nestle sent sales girls dressed like nurses into Africa to convince women to stop breastfeeding. They gave them free trial samples that lasted long enough to stop natural lactation, and the women were forced to rely on formula.

Problem was, the water wasn't suitable for giving babies that young, resulting in some babies dying.

They're not using their market dominance to enforce it. They're using regulations (copyright and trade secrets) to enforce it.

“Buy a different brand of tractor” isn’t the same as “let them feed bleach to babies”.

It kinda is. The FDA regulates food and drugs - the FTC does the same thing for unhealthy market configurations. You can claim up and down that other options exist in both cases ("don't want to eat rat feces? buy something else!") but the regulation of unhealthy practices overall improves the quality of market options while also making businesses (rightfully) fear exploiting their customers.

In this instance, it's not like John Deere is using their position to improve the status quo of their product for everyone involved. They are explicitly demanding money for nothing - not only is it anticompetitive, but it's not promoting healthy market development. Deliberately designing malnutritional formula is really not that different from deliberately designing a tractor it's owners can't own. The mechanism for regulating both issues is pretty similar as well.

Are you saying John Deere makes farm equipment that by design makes people physically sick? And if that is not your opinion, what was the point of your question?

Yup. Pretty crazy stuff.

They're using the money they got from market dominance to finance their lobbying for regulations to enforce their market dominance.

It's the political economy. Every market system ever has had one.

They get away with it because of their dominance in the market, that's why the gov't needs to take action. They're so huge there are no real competitors for customers to turn to.