This bill needs to provide at least one of these things in order to not be a damp squib:
- Electronic components.
Most attempts to water down R2R specifically involve limiting the access provided to "assemblies" rather than individual chips. OEMs don't actually do component level repair[0], the labor costs are too high, so they make the consumer eat the cost of a logic board swap. Furthermore they don't want to have to sell components because that makes product cloning easier.
- Parts pairing tools.
Parts used to authenticate the user are typically paired to the device specifically to prohibit third-party replacement. This is for a legitimate reason[1], but that reason has been weaponized into a generic prohibition on third-party repair. Repair shops should have access to the tools needed to swap serialized parts between phones.
- Calibration tools.
Parts that aren't explicitly locked out for security reasons still sometimes require calibration. This is mainly because Apple likes to get the most out of their parts, and is a legitimate engineering reason, but Apple won't provide the calibration tools because it's PrOPrIETaRY. This often generates confusion when people swap logic boards and think that something is paired when it's not, and we can't tell the difference until someone actually goes and builds their own calibration tool for it[2].
- "Intellectual property"[3] exemptions.
People who make third-party pairing or calibration tools run the risk of spurious DMCA 1201 claims. While DMCA 1201 is ostensibly there to prevent people from selling copying tools for copyrighted works, that protection also applies to software, and software has a nasty habit of working its way into absolutely everything. While it might ultimately be legal to produce a tool to allow parts to be swapped, that still subjects the producer of that tool to years and years of litigation to prove their legality. Even the existing DMCA 1201 exemption process, which is specifically intended to prevent this, only applies to individual acts of circumvention and not tools. We need either a separate exemption process for tools, or at the very least, an extension of copyright misuse to include "adding DRM to things that are not copyrightable" and statutory damages for such misuse.
[0] Unless forced to do so to fix a product defect, and usually it's done like shit by the lowest bidder
[1] Fake touch sensors can just lie and provide the same fingerprint data each time
[2] Such as the calibration tool for the MacBook angle sensors, which everyone thought was paired to the device - even Apple's PR team - but wasn't. People were hallucinating all sorts of explanations as for why you would need to lock down an angle sensor when it turns out Apple just doesn't communicate any of this.
[3] I'm using the phrase "Intellectual property" in the sense of "anything we can use to stop competitors from competing", not in reference to any actual, specific law.