Lobbying records in New York state show Apple, Verizon, and tech trade orgs oppose the Fair Repair Act that would prohibit software locks that restrict repairs
Jason Koebler / Motherboard :
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York disclosure lands two months after a Nebraska state senator publicly warned that Apple was working against the state's own right-to-repair bill, with similar measures then moving through seven other legislatures (Nebraska right-to-repair bill). The records make the opposition concrete: Apple, Verizon, and tech trade organizations are registered against the Fair Repair Act, whose core provision would prohibit the software locks used to restrict who can complete a repair.
The filing is an early data point in a fight that has since become a multi-state pattern — by 2021, reporting showed Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon lobbying against such bills with roughly half of those introduced across 27 states already voted down or dismissed (state-by-state lobbying against repair bills).
First-order effects
- New York legislators weighing the Fair Repair Act now have documented, named opposition from Apple, Verizon, and the trade organizations representing the broader tech industry, not just anonymous industry pushback.
Second-order effects
- The software-lock provision targets the mechanism behind manufacturers' authorized-repair monopolies — the same repair economics Apple would later defend to Congress by claiming it loses money on repair services (Apple's claim it loses money on repairs), a framing critics called deliberately vague.
Third-order effects
- If the state-by-state pattern holds, the fight shifts from individual bills to whether software locks get carved out of repair law entirely — the question still open when Apple reversed course to back California's Right to Repair Act in 2023 while leaving software locks and design choices as the movement's next targets (Apple backing California's repair law).
The trend: Right-to-repair is moving from scattered state bills toward a national contest over software locks, with manufacturers' lobbying shaping which provisions survive.