Policy

Khan’s FTC forges ahead to protect right to repair

It's committing to cracking down on anti-consumer and anti-competitive repair restrictions.

FTC chair Lina Khan speaks into a microphone.

FTC chair Lina Khan's set her sights on right to repair.

Photo: Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is taking steps to ensure consumers can repair their devices, including expensive farm equipment and hardware. The move comes as the agency's new chair, Lina Khan, takes a swing at Big Tech companies.

All five of the commissioners voted on Wednesday to issue a policy statement on repair restrictions as part of the agency's new series of open meetings. At Wednesday's meeting, the FTC's three Democrats also opened up a path to impose new disclosure and pre-approval requirements on companies that have previously pursued unlawful acquisitions.

While the development of new policy statements like the one on right-to-repair might seem like a small step, such statements tell businesses which actions the agency will allow and which it might try to stop.

"While efforts by dominant firms to restrict repair markets are not new, changes in technology and more prevalent use of software has created fresh opportunities for companies to limit independent repair," Khan said.

In May, the FTC told Congress in a report that there was "scant evidence to support manufacturers' justifications for repair restrictions" and suggested more "access to information, manuals, spare parts, and tools." A recent sweeping order from President Joe Biden also urged the FTC to issue rules boosting consumers' rights to repair devices and equipment themselves or at third-party repair shops.

In principle, manufacturers like Apple can't condition warranties on consumers' use of particular brands for repairs, but the FTC found in its report that manufacturers have used a variety of other techniques to effectively curb consumers' rights anyway. They have, for instance, imposed limits on sharing parts and information, steered consumers toward their own repair shops or partners, and enforced software rights.

Consumer groups have long argued that manufacturers' limits on users' ability to repair items drive up costs and force consumers to buy new products before their old ones break down. Manufacturers say they are trying to protect intellectual property and device integrity.

The policy statement said the FTC "will devote more enforcement resources to combat these practices" and look for violations of the laws on warranty requirements, deceptive practices and anti-competitive behavior.

Both Republican and Democratic commissioners celebrated the united vote. Following the adoption of the statement, some members of the public also applauded the decision, including the head of a group representing companies that service electronic devices.

"We've been waiting 25 years for today," said the group's president, Joe Marion.

During Wednesday's session, the FTC's three Democrats also voted to rescind a prior statement from 1995. In that statement, the FTC said it would largely stop imposing certain requirements on companies that settled with the agency after pursuing deals the FTC moved to stop.

Khan and her fellow Democratic commissioners, Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Slaughter, said that settlements that require companies to seek pre-approval for, or give notice of, certain future deals help save FTC resources and indicate which mergers it considers illegal. The Republican commissioners, Noah Phillips and Christine Wilson, objected that rescinding the statement risked creating too many costs for businesses and discouraging legal mergers.

While much of the antitrust scrutiny on Big Tech has focused on the companies' conduct, the bread-and-butter of competition law actually focuses on deals, and there's been bipartisan interest in limiting the mergers and acquisitions that have allowed giant companies like Facebook and Amazon to grow to their current sizes.

The Wednesday changes come after a series of votes earlier in July, when the FTC, which has faced a series of stinging court losses recently, opened the way to pursue a broader range of competition cases and issue rules that govern entire sectors such as food-delivery apps.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins