Who Owns the Ability to Fix the Thing You Bought

The Aftermarket Is Not an Afterthought

In the case of durable goods the money made after the sale often exceeds the money made from it. Parts service and consumables have higher margins than original equipment arrive after many years and face much lower purchase prices because the customer is already committed to the installed product

Any manufacturer that recognizes this has an obvious incentive to control who serves that aftermarket. If independent repair shops and owners can do the work the margin is lost to competition. If only authorized channels can do it it is captured

A Worked Example: Why the Aftermarket Is Worth More Than the Sale

That statement is made constantly in this debate and almost never quantified. Doing it once explains the entire business reason

Take a piece of capital good. A machine sells for $400,000 with a gross margin of 15 percent so the manufacturer makes $60,000 on the sale

Now follow it throughout your working life. Say twelve years consuming $20,000 a year in parts and service. Aftermarket work carries much higher margins than original equipment because there are no competitive bids for a broken machine in a field. Take 45 percent

$20,000 a year with a 45 percent margin is $9,000 in annual gross profit. In twelve years it is $108,000

The aftermarket produces almost twice the gross profit of the machine itself or 60 percent of revenue. That unique proportion is why this is a fight rather than a policy discussion

Now estimate what the open repair would cost the manufacturer. If independents took over half the service work the manufacturer would lose $54,000 in lifetime gross profit per machine which is close to the total margin made by selling it in the first place

Read it again and the behavior described in the next section will no longer seem like corporate obstinacy. Losing the aftermarket is economically equivalent to giving away the product. No management team faced with that arithmetic will willingly admit it and none have

The other side of the ledger belongs to the client and is even larger. Consider a combine harvesting one thousand acres of a crop valued at $800 per acre or $800,000 in revenue within a harvest window of about ten days that is determined by weather rather than preference

The machine throws a fault that immobilizes it. To clear the code a dealer technician with proprietary software is required. The closest one is three days away

Three out of every ten days lost in a weather-dependent window puts a significant portion of the crop at risk. Losing 10 percent costs $80,000

Versus a repair that with access to the diagnostic tool would have taken an hour and cost a few hundred dollars

Put the two calculations together and you have the entire dispute in numbers. The manufacturer is defending something worth approximately $54,000 per machine over twelve years. The customer is exposed to something worth $80,000 in a single bad week. These are illustrative figures and both vary wildly by industry but the asymmetry is why this became the law in agriculture and not in consumer electronics

The Mechanisms of Control

Restriction of repair rarely results in rejection. It is built into ordinary business decisions that seem reasonable in isolation

Parts Availability is the simplest.If replacement components are sold only to authorized dealers independent workshops cannot perform the work regardless of their skill. Diagnostic software and tools They matter more as products become computerized since modern equipment often cannot be repaired without proprietary software to read fault codes and crucially authorize a new part to work with the machine. Design options such as adhesives instead of fasteners non-standard screws and welded instead of slotted components pose the difficulty of independent repair. Documentation hidden from the public makes correct repair a matter of reverse engineering

The most transcendental is pairing of parts in which an original replacement component will not work until the manufacturer's software cryptographically associates it with the device. In the case of part matching even a legitimate part purchased from the manufacturer will not work in an unauthorized store turning a hardware marketplace into a permissions system

Where It Became a Public Fight

The issue moved from consumer irritation to politics through agriculture. Modern farm equipment is heavily computerized and farmers discovered that a machine could be immobilized by a fault that required a dealer technician to fix during a harvest window measured in days. The cost wasn't the repair it was the harvest

The response included a memorandum of understanding between a major equipment manufacturer and a farm bureau committing to improving access to tools and documentation and sustained legislative pressure in several states. Agriculture made the argument vivid in a way that consumer electronics had not because the loss was quantifiable and the customers were politically organized

Case Study: John Deere Signed an Agreement and Got Sued Anyway

The manufacturer of the equipment in the previous section is John Deere and the sequence of what followed the agreement is the most instructive in this entire area

In January 2023 Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation. The company committed to providing farmers and independent repair technicians with access to tools software manuals and diagnostic information on fair and reasonable terms. In exchange the Farm Bureau agreed to encourage state affiliates to refrain from implementing right-to-repair legislation

It seemed like a resolution. A voluntary industry agreement negotiated with affected customers avoiding the need for a patchwork of state laws

In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission joined by the states of Illinois and Minnesota sued Deere. The complaint alleged that the company had illegally restricted repair by controlling access to its Service ADVISOR diagnostic software that this forced farmers to resort to dealer service and that the practice had persisted despite the memorandum of understanding

Whatever the final outcome the shape of the dispute says something important about voluntary commitments in this area. The 2023 agreement promised access on fair and reasonable terms and those words contain no definition. A manufacturer can fulfill that commitment to the letter by setting the price of the diagnostic tool restricting the functions it exposes or limiting who can buy a subscription so that the practical situation does not change

That is the central weakness of the entire legislative approach described later in this article. Almost all statutes and agreements use the same formula fair and reasonable terms comparable to those of authorized dealers and none of them specify a price a functional scope or an application standard. A commitment without measurable proof is a commitment to discuss later

The consumer electronics side has moved in the opposite direction which is worth noting. After years of opposing such legislation Apple launched a self-service repair program in 2022 and publicly endorsed California's Right to Repair bill in 2023 and has since begun allowing the use of genuine used parts in certain repairs. One company that concluded the outcome was inevitable chose to shape it rather than fight it which is a strategydifferent and until now less litigious

The Counterarguments Deserve a Fair Hearing

The manufacturers raise four objections and not all of them are pretexts

Security is real for some categories. An improperly repaired battery airbag system or medical device can harm people and the manufacturer carries reputational and sometimes legal exposure for failures it did not cause. Security This is true for devices containing personal data or biometric hardware where an unauthorized component could in principle compromise the trust model which is the strongest defense offered for part pairing. Intellectual property Concerns about releasing schematics and firmware are legitimate in principle.and counterfeit parts They genuinely circulate and genuinely fail

The reasonable answer is that each justifies something more limited than what is practiced. Safety justifies training requirements not rejection of parts. Safety justifies authentication of safety-relevant components not each camera and battery. And a manufacturer that cites counterfeits while refusing to sell genuine parts to independents has undermined its own argument

Where the Repair Movement Overreaches

Having built the business case against the restriction there are four places where the defense goes beyond the evidence

The aftermarket profit pool is not universal. The example above describes capital goods where service is genuinely a profit center. For many consumer products warranty service is a net cost repair networks lose money and the manufacturer would be happy to have someone else do it. Applying farm equipment analysis to each product category assumes a business model that often does not exist

Fair and reasonable is not a standard. All statutes and agreements use the phrase and none define it. A manufacturer that complies by offering a diagnostic subscription at a price that no independent shop can justify has met the requirement. Until a law specifies prices in relation to what dealers pay or a functional scope legislation primarily relocates the argument

The safety arguments for part pairing are stronger in a reduced set of components than its proponents admit. A fingerprint sensor or secure element cryptographically linked to a device is actually harder to substitute maliciously and that's a real property rather than a marketing claim. The honest position is that pairing is defensible for a handful of components at the trust limit and indefensible for a battery or a camera and the movement often argues against the entire practice rather than its scope

Repairability is offset by things that customers demonstrably want. Adhesives instead of screws are how devices become waterproof thin and light. Soldered components become fast and small. Customers have repeatedly chosen these attributes with their money. One mandate that ignores compensation is to ask regulators to override a revealed preference which may be correct and should at least be acknowledged

My view is that the aftermarket motive is real and dominant in the case of capital goods that the safety objection is real and limited and that useful legislative work is to define terms rather than to declare rights

What the Laws Actually Require

State right-to-repair statutes have converged on a common core: Manufacturers must make parts tools and documentation available to independent repair providers and owners on fair and reasonable terms comparable to those received by authorized dealers. Coverage varies by product category with automobiles consumer electronics and farm equipment most commonly addressed and medical devices and video game consoles frequently excluded

The provisions that matter most in practice are those that address software since part availability alone is of little use if the part cannot be activated. Several jurisdictions have taken steps to specifically restrict the pairing of parts which is the frontier of the fight rather than a set point

Reading the Commercial Consequences

For manufacturers with large service revenues mandatory access compresses a high-margin business and the revelations worth watching are the mix of revenue between equipment and services and any comments on connection rates. For independent service companies and parts distributors the same rules expand the market they address. And for the buyer of any capital good the object lesson is to negotiate access to repair at the time of purchase when there is still leverage rather than discovering the restriction during abreakdown

The Bottom Line

The right to repair is a dispute over who gets the aftermarket conducted in the language of safety and security

The arithmetic shows why neither party will budge. On a $400,000 machine the sale produces about $60,000 in gross profit and twelve years of parts and service produces about 108,000 so the aftermarket is worth 1.8 times the sale. Losing half costs about $54,000 per machine close to the full sales margin. On the customer's side three days of downtime inA ten-day harvest period can put $80,000 worth of harvest at risk versus a repair that would have cost a few hundred dollars with access to the tool

John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation in January 2023 promising access on fair and reasonable terms and the FTC still sued it in January 2025 over control of its diagnostic software which is what happens when a commitment does not include measurable testing. Both the business reason and the technical objections are real and the useful distinction is between restrictions that protect something specific and restrictions that eliminate competition.As software becomes the gatekeeper of hardware the question stops being about screwdrivers and becomes a question of who has the keys to a machine that has already been paid for