JDo3

I am the Director of Repair Authorization at John Deere. Today the FTC made us give farmers the right to repair the machines they already own. It took a lawsuit, a 10-year settlement, and $1 million paid to 5 states. Read the terms. We kept the part that matters. Here is what we sold you. Steel. 400 horsepower. A cab, a seat, a mirror, a nameplate with your county's dealer on it. You own all of it. It is yours the way a piano is yours. Here is what we did not sell you. The word go. A modern tractor does not run on diesel alone. It runs on authorization. When a part fails and you bolt in a new one, the machine does not simply work. The new part has to be paired, and pairing happens through our software, and our software lived, until this morning, only in the hands of a dealer. You could hold the wrench. You could not give the machine permission to accept what the wrench installed. And when an emissions sensor trips, the machine does something my department is quietly proud of. It goes to limp mode. Full steel, full fuel, reduced to walking speed. 3 miles an hour, in October, with rain in the forecast and the whole year standing in the field. The only thing that lifts it is our authorization, and for years the only hands that held our authorization drove out from the dealership, when they could, for a fee. We sell the steel once. We sell the permission forever. So when they say we lost today, read the settlement the way I read it. 10 years. We report our compliance every 60 days, then once a year, which is to say we have turned handing you your own machine into a paperwork schedule that runs through 2036. Any new repair tool we build, we only have to share once more than 50% of our dealers already have it. We decide when a dealer has it. We build the clock and we wind the clock. They call it the right to repair. What we granted is the right to ask our software for permission, on terms we file every 60 days. You own the tractor. You always did. We own the word go. And today we agreed, in writing, to a ten-year plan for slowly, carefully, on a reporting schedule, learning to say it a little less often.

If communism worked, wouldn't it have worked somewhere by now?