Biden Urged to Protect Repair Rights in Indo-Pacific Trade Talks

The Biden administration should protect the right to repair for consumers, farmers, and small business owners in ongoing “digital trade” negotiations in the proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, advocacy groups wrote in a Tuesday letter to the White House.

The National Farmers Union, iFixit, and the American Economic Liberties Project were among the groups expressing concern that the 14-country economic initiative will include a “source code” clause that would provide corporations will broad secrecy rights over software and algorithm specifications and descriptions.

“This rule could thwart right to repair requirements imposed on manufacturers, including obligations to grant access to diagnostic software and the sharing of digital ‘keys’ needed to fix equipment,” said the letter, which was also signed by the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Reports, Public Knowledge, and others.

The right-to-repair movement has picked up legislative steam at the federal and state levels over the past few years. Numerous states have passed right-to-repair laws for consumer electronics and automobiles, and Congress has seen a set of bipartisan repair bills introduced.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2021 instructing the Federal Trade Commission to examine how equipment manufacturers are hindering consumers’ right to repair a range of electronic and mechanical devices. Right-to-repair groups have also sought to amend federal copyright law to provide greater access to device firmware.

The Office of the US Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce entered a fifth round of negotiations over the economic framework on Sunday in Bangkok, Thailand. The IPEF, first proposed by Biden last May, aims to strengthen trade and supply chain resiliency between the US and about a dozen countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including India, Australia, Vietnam, and South Korea.

Tech companies heavily lobbied US trade officials over the agreement’s digital trade rules to protect them from regulation in other countries, Bloomberg previously reported.

The advocacy groups said the tech industry is pushing for a source code clause modeled after language from the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the 2020 replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

The letter acknowledged that the Biden administration had not included such a clause in its initial draft IPEF text shared with other countries in February, but said the administration should provide greater transparency into the trade negotiations.

The USMCA’s source code clause includes a definition of “algorithms” that is so broad that it “could even cover a diagnostic test that is coded into devices’ firmware,” the letter said.

Many of the current state right-to-repair laws and bills require the equipment manufacturer to make diagnostic software, tools, and documentation available.

“Inclusion in U.S. trade pacts of language that could be read as a broad, potentially open ended ban on policies that require firms to give fair access to software’s source code and algorithms would undermine our efforts to ensure that consumers and small businesses can fix their own devices and equipment,” the groups’ letter said.