Legislation catches up, partly

The laws that arrived, and what they left out

Repair legislation spent most of the 2010s as a campaign rather than a statute. The European Commission's Ecodesign Regulation for electronic displays ↗, which came into force in 2021, was among the first to put hardware durability into binding law: manufacturers of certain product categories must supply spare parts to professional repairers for a defined number of years after a model is discontinued. Similar provisions followed for washing machines, dishwashers and lighting. iFixit, which had been scoring repairability publicly since 2010, found its vocabulary — screws versus glue, part availability, documentation — suddenly appearing in regulatory text.

The United States moved state by state. Colorado passed the first US right-to-repair law for agricultural equipment in 2023. New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, signed the year before, required manufacturers of digital electronic equipment sold in the state to make parts, tools and documentation available to independent repairers and consumers. Several other states followed with similar bills in 2023 and 2024. The Federal Trade Commission had already signalled that repair restrictions could constitute unfair trade practices, in a 2021 report to Congress.

What the laws share is a focus on the physical: a screw you can turn, a part you can swap, a diagram you can follow. What they largely do not address is the software half of the problem — the server handshake that a tethered device needs before it will operate at all, the firmware lock that prevents a replacement part from being accepted, or the cloud service whose retirement turns functioning hardware into e-waste overnight. Revolv's shutdown in 2016, when Nest killed the hub's server and left hardware in people's homes doing nothing, is still the cleanest example of a failure mode that no current statute would prevent.

Where the gap sits

But neither open protocols nor self-hosted control are yet a legislative requirement, and manufacturers have no statutory obligation to design for what happens when their service ends.

Parts and documentation requirements carry an implicit assumption: that once you reassemble the device, it will work. For a drill or a toaster, that assumption holds. For a connected thermostat, a smart lock or a home hub, it does not. The device may be physically perfect and still refuse to operate because an authentication server is gone, a certificate has expired, or the vendor has simply ended the relevant API. Legislation written around physical repairability does not reach that condition.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance's Matter protocol, and the longer-established open radio layers underpinning Zigbee, represent an industry-side answer to part of the problem: if the device speaks an open protocol, a vendor's exit is survivable. Projects like Home Assistant demonstrate that local control is technically achievable for a wide range of hardware. But neither open protocols nor self-hosted control are yet a legislative requirement, and manufacturers have no statutory obligation to design for what happens when their service ends.

The EU's proposed Right to Repair Directive, which moved through the legislative process in 2023 and 2024, goes somewhat further than the Ecodesign rules, including provisions intended to keep software updates available and to prevent manufacturers from using software barriers to obstruct repair. Exactly how "software barriers" will be defined and enforced in practice remains to be worked out through implementation. The directive's scope does not plainly cover parts-pairing — the practice by which a replacement component that is physically identical is still rejected by the device because its serial number was not enrolled by the manufacturer — though the European Commission has indicated that serialisation-based restrictions are within its concern.

What the legislation has done is shift the cost of poor repairability. Manufacturers selling in regulated markets now have reasons, and in some categories legal obligations, to think about part supply and documentation at the design stage. That is real. What it has not done is close the gap between a repairable device and a device that keeps working when the vendor leaves the room. For a buyer trying to judge what a connected product will be worth in five years, the law is now a partial protection — worth knowing about, but not enough to rely on.