Deere settlement is a win for the Right to Repair. But advocates say there’s a catch

Claire Kelloway, a researcher at Open Markets Institute, says those details distinguish the FTC agreement from Deere’s previous voluntary commitments.

“If you look at the appendix of this settlement and where it outlines all the resources that Deere has to make available on ‘fair terms,’ it is a very detailed list that includes some key things that advocates have been asking for in other settlements,” Kelloway says.

Kelloway says those provisions, such as the access to repair tools and the compliance period, give advocates a stronger legal tool than Deere’s earlier agreement with the American Farm Bureau Federation, which many repair advocates argued was insufficient.

The settlement has raised questions about why the Trump administration chose to resolve the case instead of pursuing a trial.

“We know that the Trump administration, on the whole, has been moving to settle antitrust litigation,” Kelloway says. “As much as they’ve talked about challenging [food] monopolies in particular, they’ve shown an unwillingness to bring cases to trial—and have had a general posture of settling.”

While trials carry risk, she says that a court victory could have established “stronger precedent than you can with a settlement,” while potentially imposing “a stronger penalty” than the one Deere voluntarily accepted.

Though the case could have been pushed further, Kelloway points to the involvement of state attorneys general, including Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, as evidence that negotiations likely strengthened the final settlement terms.

“If this was an egregious, huge giveaway to Deere, we might not expect someone like Keith Ellison to sign on to it,” she says. “Because presumably the states were negotiating to get a settlement that they could, in good conscience, feel they could sign on to.”

That doesn’t, however, signify the end of the road.

Ellison wrote in a statement, “This settlement is a win for the right to repair that farmers and small, independent businesses have fought so hard for and richly deserve … There’s more to do and we’re going to do it.”

Similarly for Willie Cade, a board member of Repair.org and longtime right-to-repair advocate, the proposed settlement represents progress, but nowhere near a resolution.

“As I read the settlement, it’s a positive, but it’s not sufficient,” Cade says. “It leaves so many loopholes that John Deere could drive a tractor through it. It really won’t encourage John Deere to change their behavior.”

Cade’s concerns are rooted in accountability and the potential difficulties for independent repair providers to access what they’ll need to make repairs in a timely and reasonable manner.

The settlement specifies the functions that Deere must make available through its repair software, but Cade is not convinced that these are the full scope of the resources authorized dealers can access.

“I don’t know if it’s a complete list of the functionality that the dealers have,” he says. “It would be important, I think, for a third-party evaluation of the software to say: these are the ones that are included, these are the ones that are excluded, and why. Because frankly I don’t believe that the FTC has the expertise to say that this is everything that could and should be included.”

He notes that software-based repair systems present a unique enforcement challenge, as the tools are housed in a digital cloud rather than in, say, a physical repair closet.

“When they first brought out PRO Service, the new owner tool, we did some testing [and got results],” says Cade. “When we re-tested the exact same questions this year, the software returned a response that indicated that they had withdrawn some capabilities from the software.”

This is the underlying reason that Cade argues “a third party needs to constantly review what is and isn’t being granted.” Without that oversight, he warns, changes could occur “very stealthily.”

Kelloway says advocates will continue pushing for state legislation and broader reforms that require equipment to be repairable by design rather than relying on case-by-case settlements.

“I don’t think anyone expects this settlement to solve everything,” she says. “They’re still going to be pushing for policy changes.”

For Cade, the next phase is ensuring Deere complies with what it has agreed to. Whether it ultimately changes the balance of power between Deere and farmers may depend less on the language of the agreement itself than on how rigorously it is enforced in the years ahead.