Government regulation is critical to a healthy market economy. No economy should be totally unregulated as it will end in a monopoly. Instead you need a moderate level of regulation to prevent people from abusing positions of power. That's what this is. They're purposefully making their products impossible to repair without them, and using their market dominance to enforce it. You're welcome to disagree, but every stable economic theory relies on some regulation.

It isn't a free market. It is a regulated market and that regulation benefits both innovation and the producers and consumers in the market.

What public interest is served by allowing companies to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices like locking people into proprietary systems?

The world is a better place because regulators mandate things like interoperability in phones or requirements that auto manufacturers supply parts for 3rd party mechanics to fix vehicles.

1) agricultural equipment relies on a network of local dealers to sell and maintain the equipment.

For this reason, it's very hard for competition to break in. No one wants to wait 2 weeks for a part for their tractor during crop season.

2) No other manufacturers offer real choice (and the required logistics I mentioned above), so it's not something the free market will fix.

This is a frustratingly bad take. Bad repair practices are gradually taking over the entire market and they clearly represent a failure of said market to provide good products, ie the strategy consists of making the product irrefutably worse in order to make a bit more money. Every major phone manufacturer, for example, has followed in apple’s footsteps to make independent repair more difficult purely to extract more profits. In other words, how does the corporate shoeshine taste?

Except you can't because they abuse the shit out of the paten system. The paten system was a great idea when it protected up starts from being destroyed by the competition, but now it's used by incumbents to stifle markets.

I would agree only if John Deere is not allowed to use provisions like DMCA[1] to prevent repair of their hardware.

[1] https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyri...

It's a captured market. Free markets are where no one has extreme market power like with a mono/duopoly or monopsony or whatever. A free market would be one where Deere is broken up by antitrust action. Making right to repair rules is the soft-touch approach to curbing their abuse.

Incredibly short sighted. Extrapolate this to the point where all of the manufacturers use DRM / abuse the legal process to prevent an owners right to repair their own devices. Where's your "free market" now?

Are you saying companies should be able to sell bottles of bleach as "baby formula"?

> This is certainly abuse from the executive branch and I hope the courts stop it.

“Actually I think it’s good that companies don’t allow you to repair their products. And it’s an abuse of power for the government to stop them”

You realize that forcing companies to respect the right to repair actually makes the economy stronger?

Independent repair shops can exist in that environment. The market becomes more free in that sense…

"Free Market". Yeah sure Jan.

Yeah! If the children want to lay my rail road lines for pennies, who the hell are the regulators to tell me and them we can't do that?!?!?