The Gloves Are Off in the Fight for Your Right to Repair

Comment
LoaderSave StorySave this story
Comment
LoaderSave StorySave this story

It has been a big year for the right to repair, the movement of advocates pushing for people to be able to fix their own electronics and equipment without manufacturer approval. The issue has gathered broad support from technologists, farmers, military leaders, and politicians on both sides of the aisle. It is popular with just about everyone—except the companies who stand to gain if the parts, instructions, and tools necessary to fix their products remain under lock and key.

Three US states passed right-to-repair laws this year, including in heavily Republican states like Texas where the measure received a unanimous vote in both the House and Senate. Repair advocates are planning to continue that push into 2026 and beyond, applying pressure to legislators in an attempt to give gearheads more options when it comes to the gadgets they use every day. It marked a big shift for the right-to-repair movement, which has been lobbying for decades to allow users to repair their gadets—from iPhones to laptops—without going back to the manufacturer or voiding the warranty by taking it to an unauthorized repair shop.

“The fundamental problem with restricting the right to repair is that when you buy equipment, you have a competitive market,” says Nathan Proctor, senior director of the campaign for the right to repair at the United States Public Interest Research Group. “Once you have the equipment, if the manufacturer can make the repair a proprietary process, there's no competition at all.”

While the right to repair has broad support around the world—Canada and the EU, among others, have passed laws and issued rulings in consumers’ favor—the US often finds itself the focal point of the movement. For years advocates have been pushing for federal laws to let people change their phone’s battery or fiddle with their tractor without running afoul of what manufacturers will allow. Despite bipartisan support, nothing has come to pass, which is why this year’s state-level laws were so important.

For many advocates, the right to repair is an environmental issue. People are less inclined to throw gear into landfills if they can fix it. While some companies have gotten better about owning up to their environmental impacts by, say, switching to cardboard or recyclable materials for packaging, efforts to make the products themselves recyclable have been slower coming. That’s begun to change. Even a company like Apple, long resistant to letting people tweak their own iPhones, has begrudgingly started offering self-repair options to its customers. So, too, has Google, which redesigned its Pixel Watch to make it more repairable after pressure from repair advocates.

Despite these victories, companies continue to find ways to dance around regulations, obfuscate repair manuals, and make some repair tools available to customers only in certain states. Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, which offers how-to guides and sells gadget repair kits, says the next big step after 2025’s legislative wins will be making sure companies are following the new laws. “We’re seeing different levels of malicious compliance from different companies,” Wiens says.

Subscription repair services like Apple Care can be helpful, but essentially what they do is generate recurring revenue for companies and keep users locked into their ecosystems even when a product breaks. And repair-as-a-service plans, which have long been used as an upsell in the consumer world, are now offered for much more serious tools.

For right-to-repair advocates, the issue goes far beyond consumers wanting to replace cracked phone screens. Farmers have been in a yearslong battle with John Deere for the right to work on their tractors and other equipment, something the Federal Trade Commission sued Deere over earlier this year. (The case is still pending.) US servicemembers, meanwhile, often can’t fix their own gear in the field. In December, lawmakers stripped provisions that would let servicemembers repair their own equipment from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the bill that funds the military for 2026, further proof that there’s still work to be done to convince people, and specifically politicians, they should be able to fix their own stuff.

“Right to repair is one of those issues that’s nice to have, but it doesn’t stab you in the abdomen the way all the other issues do,” says Louis Rossmann, who has run a YouTube channel supporting the right to repair for more than a decade. “My goal is to change things culturally, because the legislative route has failed.”

The battle, both legislative and cultural, is leveling up. Repair advocates want to repeal Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prevents bypassing passwords and encryption or selling equipment that could do so. Supporters of the current language say Section 1201 helps protect intellectual property, but right-to-repair advocates call it “parts pairing” and say companies have taken advantage of the protection to bake software restrictions into hardware devices that lock out anyone but the manufacturer from fixing them or using third-party parts. (See: the encryption-locked disk drive in the Xbox Series X or the proprietary air and water filters in Molekule air filters and GE fridges, which can receive firmware updates and new parts only from authorized dealers.)

“When you buy a device, a manufacturer can just push a firmware update or update the software and then remove a feature, change the way you interact with your device, put ads on a screen in your home, and turn your refrigerator into a billboard,” says Kevin O'Reilly of Fulu, who runs a bounty program with Rossmann that offers rewards to anyone who finds fixes for products made unusable by software updates. “All of those things are not what we agreed to when we brought technology into our homes.”

Despite what can feel like a constant uphill push, repair advocates are optimistic. Whether it is companies’ malicious compliance or fiddling with the funding of the NDAA next year, repairheads seem up to the task, even as hardware gets locked down through egregious software updates.

“We live in a world where the most important kind of territory to own is digital,” Proctor says. “We've got digital land barons now, and they have a different way of looking at how we interact with the world and what we should be allowed to do.”