FTC's John Deere Lawsuit: The Redactions Say A Lot!
The FTC's legal complaint against Ag giant John Deere is heavily redacted, omitting key details about Deere's actions. But for repair advocates, the message is clear.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week announced a long-expected lawsuit against the agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company. In a January 15th statement, the FTC along with the attorneys general of Minnesota and Illinois announced it was suing Deere & Company “over its use of unfair practices that have driven up equipment repair costs for farmers.”
In a statement (PDF), outgoing FTC Chair Lina Khan said that unfair repair restrictions like those alleged to have been enacted by Deere & Company “can mean farmers face unnecessary delays during tight planting and harvest windows. For some, these delays can mean that months of hard work and much-needed income vanish, devastating their business.” For farmers, long accustomed to fixing their own farm equipment, “these artificial restrictions can seem especially inefficient, with tractors needlessly sitting idle as farmers and independent mechanics are held back from using their skill and talent,” Khan wrote.
FTC calls out Deere’s decades of “unlawful practices”
For decades, Deere has engaged in “unlawful practices (that) have limited the ability of farmers and independent repair providers to repair Deere equipment, forcing farmers to instead rely on Deere’s network of authorized dealers for necessary repairs,” the FTC said in a statement. Deere’s actions juiced its multi-billion-dollar profits on agricultural equipment and parts at the expense of farmers who are burdened with higher repair costs, the FTC’s complaint alleges.
That sounds about right.
As this publication has reported on time and again in recent years, Deere & Company is an iconic U.S. brand that, in the last two decades, has also become a poster child for the trend towards what author and futurist Cory Doctorow has termed “enshittification” - the strategy of using software locks and maximalist copyright laws to pursue restrictive and anti-competitive business models that turn owners into tenants of their devices, drastically increase the costs of owning and operating devices, while undermining the very notion of “ownership.” (E.g. ‘if you own it, you can fix it.’)
Right to repair advocates were encouraged by the lawsuit from the FTC and states.
“We shouldn’t tolerate companies blocking repair,” said Nathan Proctor of the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) in a statement. “When you buy something, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The FTC’s enforcement action will help farmers, and everyone else who believes people should be able to fix their stuff.”
Deere [redacted]?! How dare they!
As to the specifics of Deere & Company’s misdeeds that prompted the lawsuit? Well… that’s a bit less clear, in large part because the FTC’s complaint is heavily redacted, with many of the details of Deere’s business practices and internal deliberations related to repair restrictions blacked out.
For example, a passage in the complaint regarding Deere’s efforts to use its dealer network to increase parts sales obscures what appear to be accounts of the company’s internal deliberations on restricting options for farmers and independent repair providers (IRPs). The section reads, in part:
93. Deere commenced [redacted]
94. A key pillar of [redacted]. Deere’s internal documents refer to this strategic objective as [redacted]. As one Deere executive explained, [redacted]. Deere had long recognized the importance of its parts sales to the company’s [redacted].
95. By contrast, an equipment owner or IRP performing a repair is more likely to use non-Deere generic parts. The same Deere executive observed, [redacted]
A consultant supporting Deere (and who later became a Deere executive) observed that [redacted].
96. Thus, Deere seeks to steer service business away from equipment owners and IRPs and towards its dealer network, so as to generate increased parts revenue and profit. As the consultant noted [redacted].
In response to a request by Fight to Repair News, an FTC spokesperson said that Commission, “like other law enforcement agencies, redacts information in legal filings to protect competitively sensitive commercial or financial information or sensitive personal information from being publicly disclosed.”
“When filing a legal document, the FTC works to ensure as much public transparency as possible, but the Commission is required by law to protect such information from public disclosure unless a court determines that public disclosure will not cause any harm,” the FTC spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.
Willie Cade, a board member at the Repair Coalition said the redacted content doesn’t lessen the impact of the FTC complaint. “You don’t need to know what was said there. The FTC did a great job of setting up what the quote was going to say,” Cade said.
And, in fact, redacted passages of the complaint often seem besides the point, popping up amid otherwise overt statements about Deere’s alleged misdeeds. For example, Section 98 of the complaint reads:
98. One significant way in which Deere [redacted] is by withholding from equipment owners and IRPs Deere’s Full-Function Customer Service ADVISOR repair tool and making available only the degraded Customer Service ADVISOR tool.
Software-based restrictions on trial
Deere’s strategy of withholding from customers and independent repair shops software needed to diagnose issues and complete repairs of equipment have been at the center of complaints by farmers about the company’s unfair practices. Farmers and independent repair shops have long sought access to the same versions of its Service Advisor application that are given to Deere dealerships and authorized repair providers.
Multiple observations by company executives redacted from the complaint appear to provide details about internal deliberations that spawned such anti-competitive practices, obscuring what appear to be the company’s knowledge of the impact of its decisions on competition, decisions about specific actions to hinder owner and independent repair, and the anticipated financial benefits that the $123 billion firm realized from their implementation of alleged repair and maintenance monopolies.
Farmers fear speaking up
Cade said that the extreme levels of control that Deere and its local dealers have over farmers who rely on them exclusively for farm equipment sales, maintenance and repair means that going on record against the company is fraught with risks. “Because farmers can’t talk I’m glad the FTC did,” Cade said. “And they nailed it.”
Fight to Repair submitted a request for comment on the FTC suit to Deere & Company. The company has not responded to our request. In a statement released shortly after the complaint was filed, Deere called the case “meritless” and accused the FTC of engaging in politics. “This lawsuit, filed on the eve of a change in Administration, ignores the Company’s long-standing commitment to customer self-repair and the consistent progress and innovation we have made over time,” the statement reads. “The complaint is based on flagrant misrepresentations of the facts and fatally flawed legal theories, and it punishes innovation and procompetitive (sp) product design. John Deere will vigorously defend itself against this baseless lawsuit.”
The FTC’s lawsuit: a long (long) time coming
The FTC case has been a long time coming. The FTC declared as early as 2021 that it would be prioritizing “investigations into unlawful repair restrictions” and “devote more enforcement resources to combat these practices.”
In March, 2022, a coalition of farmers unions, farm advocacy groups and right to repair advocates filed a complaint with the FTC alleging Deere & Company unlawfully withheld the software and data necessary for farmers and ranchers to repair their Deere machinery.
Despite that, farmers who have long been promised relief from monopolistic “BigAg” practices continue to suffer the consequences of anti-competitive practices and have seen little progress. That makes some advocates for reform wary.
“I’m skeptical any good will come from this,” said Kevin Kenney, a Nebraska farmer and repair advocate. “There’s no way to make peace with these guys. They’ve hired lots of lawyers and they’re going to fight it,” he said. Success for Kenney would mean unwinding Deere to separate its equipment manufacturing, finance and software-based telematics businesses, restoring competition to a hopelessly concentrated market.
Stay tuned for more Fight to Repair coverage of the government’s case against Deere in the months ahead. In the meantime: got thoughts? We’d love to hear them. Leave a comment and let us know what you think of the FTC’s efforts to reign in John Deere.