Patreon Preview – 466. I’m Evil as Shit

So, uh, headline, "Farmers finally get a John Deere right to repair agreement that doesn't screw them over." So this is a, uh, a very welcome and honestly a little surprising FTC settlement, um, that, that was just, uh, through an antitrust agreement, um, with the Federal Trade Commission that was just reached.

One of the, you know, th-this-- one of the biggest wins, as Jason calls it, in this long right to repair battle.

You know, right to repair for people, right, who might not be aware.

Um, you know, John Deere has had a lockdown on, uh, repairing their, their machinery, their heavy equipment, their, um, for farms, right? I mean, if you're a farmer, right, like, you know, your John Deere equipment, John Deere has a monopoly over this stuff.

Your John Deere equipment is absolutely crucial and necessary, you know, for anything that you're doing, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like, uh, it, it's...

A-and, and so John Deere exercises a ton of power over farmers, uh, and repair shops and so on by using these software licensing agreements that are all wrapped up in the computers that actually make the, the factory equipment or the farm equipment work, right? Those, you know, software licensing agreements act as little digital enclosures.

You have, uh, I've written about this more broadly in my work on platform landlords, right? The internet of, of landlords.

Um, and, and, you know, what they do is they prevent people from modifying or repairing John Deere equipment, um, unless you are done, unless it is done so through an authorized repair shop or an authorized dealer.

And so this gives John Deere the ability to extract exorbitant rents out of people through these authorization fees, right? As well as through just collecting a ton of data constantly from the equipment, um, i-in use.

And, uh, and they will use those licensing agreements in really punitive ways too.

So if, uh, if a farmer were to modify a tractor or repair a piece of equipment outside of this kind of authorized ecosystem, then there's been cases where John Deere just bricks your tractor, right? They...

You've broken the software license agreement, they revoked it, and they've bricked it, right? Um, a-and so this has been a huge battle where, you know, th-this cost farmers tons of money, so much more money and time, right, downtime as well, where, you know, a piece of equipment breaks.

Hey, if you had access to the diagnostics, uh, equipment, you know, if you were able to poke around under the, under the hood, you might be able to get the, the tractor up and running.

Couple hundred bucks to replace a, a broken part, um, maybe a day of downtime, you get it up and running, right? There's been a number of cases, and this was kinda core to the, a class action lawsuit from last year, and then now this new FTC settlement where, you know, a case where it might be a couple hundred dollars and a down, and a day of downtime turns into many thousands of dollars and weeks of downtime because you're having to wait until an authorized repair shop has availability to come out and run diagnostics on your machine.

You're having to source the, the equipment or the parts from an authorized dealer, right? Like, you know, it, it cr- it just stacks time and cost.

Um, and so the, this, this, you know, has been a long battle.

This has been a long policy debate for a long time, right? Like Bi- you know, in Biden's administration, he, you know, he, he commanded the FTC, you know, look into right to repair, right? You know, this has been something that the Democrats especially have been really kind of, you know, we need policies around this.

They've been dragging their feet around it, though.

You know, be- you know, dragging out in these long, uh, battles, policy, lawsuits, regulation, and so on.

Um, this culminated in, after years of liter- litigation, a class action lawsuit against John Deere, which was settled, uh, in April, um, only earning a $99 million payout for farmers, uh, who paid for repairs over the last decade.