The FTC suing John Deere is a possible tipping point for more repairable hardware

Today, the United States The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against farm equipment maker Deere & Company — makers of the iconic green John Deere tractors, combines and mowers — citing its longstanding reluctance to prevent its customers from fixing their own machines.

“Farmers rely on their farm equipment to make a living and feed their families,” FTC Chair Lina Hahn wrote in statement together with full complaint. “Unfair repair restrictions can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest windows.”

The FTC’s main complaint here is related to a software problem. Deere seats limitations of its operating softwaremeaning that certain features and calibration of its tractors can only be unlocked by mechanics who have the correct digital key. Deere only licenses these keys to its authorized dealers, which means farmers often can’t take their tractors to more convenient third-party mechanics or simply fix the problem themselves. The suit would require John Deere to stop the practice of limiting the repair features that customers can use and make them available to those outside of authorized dealerships.

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of the renovation retailer iFixit and an occasional WIRED contributor who first wrote about John Deere anti-repair tactics in 2015. In an interview today, he noted how frustrated farmers are when they try to fix something that’s gone wrong, only to run into Deere’s policy.

“When you have something that doesn’t work, if you’re 10 minutes from the store, it’s not a big deal,” Wiens says. “If the store is three hours away, which is for farmers in most of the country, that’s a huge problem.”

The other difficulty is that US copyright protection prevents anyone but John Deere from making software that counters the restrictions the company has placed on its platform. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. makes it so that people cannot legally oppose technological measures that fall under its protection. John Deere equipment is subject to this copyright policy.

“Not only are they anti-competitive, but it’s literally illegal to compete with them,” Wiens says.

Deer in the headlights

Wiens says that although there was a a decade on push back v. John Deere of farmers and proponents of the possibility of repaircustomers using the company’s machines have not seen much benefit from all this discourse.

“Things really haven’t improved for farmers,” Wiens says. “Even with all the hype around the right to repair over the years, nothing has really changed for farmers on the ground yet.”

This lawsuit against Deere, he believes, will be different.

“That has to be the thing that does it,” says Wiens. “The FTC will not agree until John Deere makes the software available. This is a step in the right direction.”

Deere’s reluctance to make its products more affordable has angered many of its customers and even won over a generally bipartisan support from Congress for repair in the agricultural space. The FTC alleges that John Deere also infringed legislation adopted by the Colorado government in 2023 that requires farm equipment sold in the state to make operating software available to consumers.

“Deere’s illegal business practices have increased repair costs for farmers and impaired their ability to make timely repairs,” the suit says.

Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Right to Repair Campaign at the advocacy group US PIRG, wrote a statement praising the FTC’s decision. He believes this case, regardless of how it plays out, will be a positive step for the right to repair traffic more broadly.

“I think this discovery process will paint a picture that will make it very clear that their equipment is programmed to monopolize certain repair functions,” Proctor tells WIRED. “I expect Deere to either fix the problem or pay the price. I don’t know how long it will take. But it’s such an important milestone because once the genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put back in.”