John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement • Hacker News Board

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#71

Post by WarmWash » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

spaqin wrote: post #31

mothballed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tractors are legal above 25hp but it requires DPF, and at I want to say about 75, possibly more than that. Farmers generally hate DPF systems and will disable them the microsecond they get the right to repair. >Then why even manufacture them and cripple them? They cripple them because they know people want bigger tractor without emission control so they sell it as a less powerful tractor and then just expect people t…

Thankfully, it's not illegal to own a screwdriver and nothing changes there. There's absolutely no relevance between right to repair (not right to break emission laws!) and the situation you describe.

Well, then there also must not be much relevance between lax guns laws and school shooters?

I get what you are (trying) to say, but lets be real here. Right to repair people (myself included) just need to own that it will have some downsides.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#72

Post by timschmidt » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:18 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #65

Grombobulous wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This concept of percent of profits shouldn't be considered in the context of fines. For regulations to have teeth, punishments shouldn't just slap you on the wrist just because harmful practices weren't responsible for a lot of profit. In that scenario, a lot of growth companies or just poorly performing companies could just say "sorry, we don't make any profit, so our maximum fine is $10," and obviously that wouldn'…

> Fines should really be about "what size fine will be a deterrent for this company?" To a degree. But it also has to be commensurate to the actual market size and impact. If an Amazon releases a defective dog toy that is bought by 10 people, it’d be unreasonable to fine them $100 billion dollars just because they’re a huge company.

Depends entirely on whether or not you think Amazon actually caring about the fine and bothering to do anything to prevent it recurring is part of the goal.

If it is, the fine must be large enough to matter against the backdrop of corporate P&L. Courts have an entire category for this type of fine: punitive damages.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#73

Post by jamienk » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

"Right to repair" isn't some kind of little negotiated contract fiddling. A company can't agree to a 5-year right to repair. Right to repair is a normal freedom, like speech, like using everyday objects you buy or make, generally walking around, meeting people, etc. Don't let's get all twisted up here and start thinking some dumb-ass business plan is the starting point in our basic conceptualization of humanity.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#74

Post by FloatArtifact » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:32 AM UTC

Thank you all involved! Bring it to our cars next! I'm looking at you, electric vehicles!

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#75

Post by syntaxing » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

SideQuark wrote: post #59

syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell. Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

Admittedly I have never worked in the agriculture industry, but I have been a mechanical engineer for multiple industries before I became a software engineer (a good 5 years I was in a position where I quoted customers). You really cannot imagine that out of the 44B gross revenue and 5B net, that a "non tiny fraction" was not related to right the repair? Collections of receivables + Proceeds from sales of equipment on operating leases is north of half of the 44B gross. How much of that gross would have not existed should there been a third party market to repair and service exist products? I honestly can't give a number but I doubt its "tiny". Look at the car industry, about 20% of the global revenue is aftermarket. You simply cannot naively think that "right to repair" only effects the service contracts. Theres aftermarket parts and 3rd party repair shops that COULD have been a bigger market without John Deere's anticompetive practices.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#76

Post by edoceo » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

srejk wrote: post #67

Cider9986 wrote: post #16

Shout out to Louis Rossmann for doing a ton of work on Right to repair. He started a website called Consumer Rights Wiki to document anti-consumer practices. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page He's also involved with FULU Foundation which has a bounty of 25k to get Ring cameras working without Amazon's servers. https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/ring-video-doorbells

I appreciate everything he stands for - he's on the right side of just about every issue. I just wish he could make more succinct and effective videos.

Sometimes the problems are so complex and entangled it's hard to fit solutions into sound bites (vis: taxes, healthcare(USA) and apparently product "ownership".

Deere is a long way from the user accessibility of the Model A or B.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#77

Post by syntaxing » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:39 AM UTC

tjohns wrote: post #50

syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

While I suspect this is actually profitable for them, you can't attribute 100% of their profit to anti-repair activities. At a minimum, you'd have to break out profit from equipment sales vs service contracts.

Posted in another comment but you cannot just think about John Deere's balance sheet. A whole other industry would have existed without John Deere's intervention but they were able to capture a lot of the GROSS revenue due to it. You can look at other non high litigation capture industries like automotive.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#78

Post by cgyvbunji » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:48 AM UTC

srejk wrote: post #67

Cider9986 wrote: post #16

Shout out to Louis Rossmann for doing a ton of work on Right to repair. He started a website called Consumer Rights Wiki to document anti-consumer practices. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page He's also involved with FULU Foundation which has a bounty of 25k to get Ring cameras working without Amazon's servers. https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/ring-video-doorbells

I appreciate everything he stands for - he's on the right side of just about every issue. I just wish he could make more succinct and effective videos.

Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#79

Post by stevemk14ebr » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

dreambuffer wrote: post #15

There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.

I wouldn't do it, your point is now disproven

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#80

Post by sothatsit » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

ggoo wrote: post #60

GuB-42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it is not the right question in a market economy like ours. The right question is "what is the value (in dollars) of the right for farmers to repair their equipment". If John Deere values it more than farmers, then they will sell tractors that farmers can't repair on their own, hoping to earn more on repairs rather than easier to repair tractors that are more expensive up front. Basic market economy. It only n…

If you asked 100 people which question is more important, yours or mine, I don't think I'd get 100, but I'd probably get 90+. IMO, asking the dollar value of our rights isn't the "right" questions to be asking ourselves.

It is not so simple a problem. Should people have the right to do whatever they want with hardware they buy? Yes.

But the regulations that would require John Deere to change their practices and designs for repairability are not about your rights, they are about what we require John Deere to provide. And the more you require John Deere to provide, the more costs add up. When designing regulations that we require companies to follow, the costs of those regulations should be considered.

For routine repairs it seems very beneficial for farmers to be able to repair things themselves. But there’s a very long tail of problems where at some point the cost will become meaningful, and the benefits might not be that great.