Today in Repair

The Association Lobbies That The Right To Repair Legislation Should:

• Protect a pro-consumer and competitive motor vehicle repair market

• Provide independent repair shops with the rights to critical information, tools, and equipment needed to repair modern cars and trucks

• Task the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration with developing cybersecurity standards and guidelines to protect vehicle data and systems when repair and maintenance data is accessed by vehicle owners or their designees. (tirereview.com)

• Providing Information to Consumers: Sellers offering goods in store must inform French consumers regarding whether spare parts are available for their product.
• Enforcement: French consumers benefit from extended legal warranties under the EU Sale of Goods directive and from specific additional protections covering repaired products. Warranty periods are thus suspended during any repair, and a 6-month warranty applies to a repaired product.
• Incentive: To incentivize repair over replacement, France will introduce a repair fund by the end of the year. Similar to a polluter-pay framework, manufacturers will work with accredited environmental organizations to finance and manage a fund to cover 10% on average of total product repair costs.
• Influence outside France: In context of European policy, French industry advocacy groups favored a strategy that protects consumer rights and put an emphasis on the need for a balanced EU-wide approach that preserves EU manufacturers' competitiveness. (mondaq)

Big tech now dominates the list of the EU's biggest corporate lobbying spenders, effortlessly outspending and eclipsing any other digital technologies public interest group. This lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg, given how much effort goes into influencing public opinion and policymakers in both Brussels and the EU member states through advertising, and funding third parties and seemingly independent interest groups.

Tech regulation today is understood mostly in terms of a strict competition regime, rules to keep privacy-invading platforms in check and deal with algorithms. But the Digital Services Act shows that regulation needs also to be a struggle against the tech sector’s capacity to influence public institutions, civil society and policy discourse, often in opaque ways.

Europe needs therefore to build an effective “tech control” ecosystem. I see five conditions for judging success. Big tech cannot be a partner or stakeholder at the centre of efforts to control it. Six decades of tobacco control efforts taught us that industry interference is the most significant barrier to effective regulation. (The Guardian)