It's purpose is to legally force other companies to serve the interests repair shops over consumers. Instead of letting the free market, consumers, dictate what aspects of a device are important repair shops want to be able to profit off of every device and stay relevant even if it results in worse products for the consumer.
We've "let the free market decide", and the consequence is that consumers got fucked.
In general, this tired adage about "market efficiency" has stopped making sense to most people a long time ago. Whatever unregulated markets are efficient at, it's not making the average person's life better. Don't be surprised then that said average person votes for regulation.
The entire point is that companies are vertically integrating the repairs market into their product business. This directly removes competition from the market. The regulation here is to preserve the free market you are advocating for here.
1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.
2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.
3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
1. They do have a choice. No one is forcing them to buy a specific product.
2. A product who is more complicated and expensive to repair is not necessarily a worse product. This could be a trade off in favor of something consumers value more.
3. It's normal to target a lifespan for a product. For mature products ignoring it is a sign of amateurs. This is not the same thing as making a product bad on purpose.
1. Choice isn't binary, there's infinite levels of choice. Other comment mentions information asymmetry, that's part of it. Not all choices are clear, some choices take unrealistic amount of time to make, some of them are incompatible with work or contracts, and on and on.
2. Sure, but this is not why it's being done. It can be a trade-off, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that a lot of products are specifically made worse because you can make more money that way. Anti-repair is a racketeering scheme first, any other "benefits" are secondary. That doesn't mean they aren't real benefits, but it does mean that they were never the intention.
3. Planned obsolesce is the same as making a product worse on purpose to make more money. That doesn't mean that targeting a lifespan is bad. But when you shift from making washing machines that last 20 years to ones that last 5, that's an intentional choice to get more money from consumers.
There's some significant information asymmetry involved such that it's a lot of effort to know how repairable a new product is. The consumer may not even be the one to perform the repair; there are a lot of independent repair shops replacing things like smartphone displays. It would be a nasty surprise for someone who got their screen replaced for $80 on their last phone to learn it's first-party-only and $300 on their new one a couple years into ownership.
The overwhelming majority of consumers are also employees.
What's better, low prices and low wages, or high prices and high wages? The "Chicago school of macroeconomics" holds the first position. I'm highly critical of that position.
Even if you do agree with the Chicago school, there is a problem: by vertically integrating the repairs market, you take away the consumer's ability to repair their own products. The consumer is forced to pay the business to do the repairs, instead of doing it themselves for free. That's objectively more expensive for the consumer.
By allowing companies to vertically integrate repairs into their product business, we have allowed them to create an entirely new market of rent-seeking. This both monopolizes a service (preventing competition) and adds extra cost to consumers. It doesn't matter what your ideological stance is on economics: this is objectively bad for consumers.
Consumers can still by products they can repair themselves if they value such an aspect of a product. I'd it is an extra cost than that gives a competitive advantage to other products who aren't vertical integrated like that.
That's only true of there aren't market implications to this newly-introduced rent-seeking model.
If your position is that market competition is what will overcome the negative implications of anticompetitive behavior, your position is logically incoherent.
The reality is that the only way to be competitive on price (and thereby survive as a business) is to do your own rent-seeking. We can all plainly see that this is how it has played out in reality. No business can actually rely on the promise of right-to-repair obsessed consumers to keep them afloat.
Thats because there isn't one and there hasn't been for a long time, and I'm not talking about libertarian fever dreams. Regulatory capture and legislated protection for big corporations at the expense of smaller ones are rampant. They don't want real competition and they don't want real regulation, only regulation that will make it hard for others to enter the market without significant cost.
