The increasing prevalence of “right to repair” legislation will cause a shift in companies’ pricing in response to their broken repair monopolies, but is that necessarily a good thing?

On Oct. 10, 2023, California became the most recent state to recognize the “right to repair”, after its Right to Repair Act passed nearly unanimously through both chambers of the state legislature. Under the law, companies which sell technology that costs more than $100, excluding industrial equipment, alarm systems, and video game consoles, are required to make replacement parts available to consumers or third-party repair shops at “fair and reasonable terms” for seven years after releasing the product. Failing this, the maximum fine specified is just under $13 000 000.

This legislation affects both a large consumer base for technology and many tech giants’ headquarters, including Apple and Google. Both produce all sorts of technology which falls under the realm of the new law, and it could push them to make repair parts available to the rest of the country or the world out of uniformity, as is the case with the Google Pixel 8.

Companies, notably Apple, make their fortunes selling replacement products necessitated by planned obsolescence. With this strategy stripped by the new “right to repair” legislation, an issue of Management Science built an analytical model which unintuitively predicts that manufacturer profit will drop, consumer spending will rise, and the issue of technological waste will be exacerbated.

According to the article, without control over the repair market, corporations may decrease product pricing to compete with the cost of repairing an old product. In the case of increasingly common repairs, manufacturers may hike prices to increase profit from their sparse sales. Both cases ruin corporate profit: the former damages the environment with more products being produced, and the latter increases consumer spending on both new and repaired devices as the low sale volume from the manufacturer eventually causes a shortage of aftermarket sales.

What can be done? With corporate profits reliant on consumption and its eventual damage to the environment, “right to repair” legislation appears to only harm the equilibrium of new sales, repairs, and discarded items. However, more consumer-facing solutions exist, and these are not reliant upon governmental regulation.

Purchasing used products or those from companies devoted to repairability as well as installing different software onto devices can increase the longevity of technology, saving cash and the environment. Both Lenovo and Framework already sell replacement components for their relatively affordable laptops. Also, installing a new operating system on a phone or laptop is a straightforward process which increases the responsiveness and the battery life of older and newer systems alike.

While consumers can play a role in decreasing their own spending and technological waste, the fact is that “right to repair” legislation attempts and fails to decrease consumption by increasing repair and reuse. This results in lower corporate profits, harm to consumers’ wallets, and more damage to our common home than is caused now.