On the heels of his televised interview with U.S. Farm Report earlier this week, SCL Partner James Kovacs was recently quoted about his views on the FTC’s “right to repair” case against John Deere, this time by Farm Journal.
In their article, “FTC vs. John Deere: Two Experts Answer Key Questions“, Farm Journal asked James if what the FTC is accusing John Deere would be difficult to prove. He responded with a summary on the topic of “right to repair” and John Deere’s own history within it.
“This is actually a very interesting topic that has been going on now for a number of decades, called right to repair. And right to repair within the antitrust space, which is where I practice, has to do with whether or not restrictions placed by the original equipment manufacturer, in this case John Deere, and what we call an aftermarket, which are the areas in which people compete for repair or service, whether those, you know, aftermarkets are being harmed. And so looking at whether people cannot either independently repair their own equipment or whether independent retailers or repair centers are also restricted as well. With these cases, really any monopolization case is challenging, but here I will say that the practices of John Deere, I think, are quite open and notorious.
“For a long time, people have been aware that farmers have been restricted from repairing their farm equipment. There are a variety of means, most of which are sort of technical issues in which the data and information necessary to perform the repair or the tool, which I believe is called the Service Advisor, has been restricted. And so, when the farmer or the independent repair center goes to fix the John Deere equipment, they are not able to access the necessary technical information to complete the job. And now the farmer can only do those types of repairs through a John Deere retailer, an authorized retailer.
“And so, this type of conduct within the right to repair market dates back to cases in the 1990s, in particular, with Kodak printers. And it can be found to be anti-competitive, wherein there’s an entity with basically complete control over the repair market who applies these types of restrictions. So, this is not something that is uncommon. And it’s something that’s seen quite an uptick in interest since the Biden Administration made it a priority. And when the FTC issued their initial report, called Nixing The Fix, that sort of got the ball rolling on the FTC’s interest in these types of cases.”
To read more of James’ insights on this subject, please find the full interview linked here.
