Regulators must crack down on big tech’s anti-repair practices

Related to our recent piece, Big tech environmental commitments: where is repair?, @Janet has produced another article for Open Democracy that ties together many of the monopolistic and anti-repair practices we’ve seen from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google.

It’s a good starting point for anyone less familiar with the need for the Right to Repair, so please feel free to share it with your networks!

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Planned obsolescence - an interesting article:

Thanks for sharing this Roger :+1:

It was great to see prominent coverage of this in The Guardian! Although with this particular article, it’s worth knowing that it gets a number of details wrong. For example it conflates the US Right to Repair campaign and the European Right to Repair campaign (of which the European Environmental Bureau is a member). They are separate entities, each focused on their respective side of the Atlantic.

It was also a little disappointing to see so little focus on the wider environmental aspects of obsolescence (i.e. it’s not just about tonnage of e-waste, but also the vast energy use and material extraction required to maintain this business model.)

There are also some topics here on Talk about some of the points raised in the article: