The FTC is trying to find out if John Deere’s repair policies broke the law

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The agency is trying to figure out if John Deere’s practices violate the law.

By Lauren Feiner, a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.

Oct 18, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is probing whether John Deere used unfair practices related to the repair of its agricultural equipment that might violate the FTC Act.

The investigation into John Deere’s restrictions on customers’ right to repair agricultural equipment was revealed by data analytics company Hargrove & Associates, Inc. (HAI), as it fights a subpoena-like civil investigative demand (CID) from the FTC to hand over sales data. As reported earlier by Reuters, the company fears sharing the information the FTC seeks about agricultural equipment sales could harm its business relationships.

The stated purpose of the FTC’s CID is “[t]o determine whether Deere & Company, or any other person, has engaged in or is engaging in unfair, deceptive, anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, predatory, exploitative, or exclusionary acts or practices in or affecting commerce related to the repair of agricultural equipment in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.”

Screenshot: Hargrove & Associates, Inc.’s Petition to Quash or Limit Civil Investigative Demand (FTC)

“We are cooperating with the FTC, at this time we cannot comment any further while an investigation is ongoing,” John Deere spokesperson Jen Hartmann said in a statement.

Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) warned John Deere that it could be violating the Clean Air Act by excluding information in their manuals about farmers’ right to choose a repair shop from which to seek work on their equipment’s emission control devices.

John Deere has been one of the main targets of the right-to-repair movement (along with Apple), which seeks to give customers more options to repair equipment with third-party services to expand access and lower costs. But companies that have resisted fully opening their ecosystem tend to cite issues with security, which is a message John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman echoed during his 2021 appearance on the Decoder podcast. He argued, “Do you really want a tractor going down the road with software on it that has been modified for steering or modified for braking in some way that might have a consequence that nobody thought of?”

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