US may revise Right to Repair laws for phones and consoles – but by how much?

 In the coming days, US President Joe Biden may take action on a subject near and dear to gadget fans’ hearts: the liberty to repair their own devices. He’s expected to ask the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to revise the country’s Right to Repair rules, consistent with a Bloomberg report.

The Presidential Directive will instruct the FTC to draft new rules which will stop manufacturers from restricting consumers from fixing their own devices, and can specifically mention mobile manufacturers and Department of Defense contractors as “possible areas for regulation,” a source conversant in the plan told Bloomberg. Farmers, who buy tractors and other equipment that require proprietary repair tools and software also can expect to ascertain some relief.

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To be clear, this is often a directive, and doesn’t guarantee any certain action from the FTC. But it does show regulatory attention on a problem that’s forced consumers into following manufacturer protocols to repair their gadgets rather than fixing them on their own. This affects many sorts of devices, but especially those from big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft that have made it tough for consumers to repair devices themselves through software and hardware restrictions.

In Apple’s case, this has meant taking devices in (or shipping them to) the company’s retail and repair locations, or to authorized third-party shops. The FTC went thus far on blast Apple with a report published in May that condemned its repair restrictions as anti-competitive, like limiting access to service manuals and requiring unannounced inspections of these third-party shops, explained 9to5Mac. Even hardware design was criticized, like tying components to logic boards and making battery replacement so tough and cost-inefficient to encourage browsing Apple’s channels, if not simply buying a replacement device.