The End of Windows 10 Support Is an Environmental Disaster (With Nathan Proctor)

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast. I'm Jason Kepler. And this is another one of our... I think we're going to be doing this every week starting very soon. Interview podcasts. So we're calling them interview podcasts, but I think there'll be more conversation style podcasts. I'm joined today by Nathan Proctor, who is the head of rights to repair at USPIRG. Nathan, I've known you for an extremely long time. You do incredible work and have really been pushing very strongly for right to repair all over the United States, I would say primarily using a state-by-state approach. Can you first tell us a little bit about what your job is before jumping into the specifics of right to repair?

0:52Sure. I like to say that I'm a professional citizen. And so it's my job every day to try to use the system of American democracy to improve our lives and to address problems that affect everybody. and I've done work on just a whole range of topics from the way our tax system works to benefit large multinational companies at our expense or improving access to early childhood education programs. But for the last eight years, I've been focused on right to repair. Yeah, you say focused on right to repair, but I feel like you're primarily... Well, not primarily, but you do a lot of legislation and reports and research.

1:49And I guess rights repair has so many different elements to it. There's the software aspects of it. There's the legal aspects of it. There's the parts access issue. There's the tooling issue. And I feel like you really attack it from all sides. I've written quite a lot about rights repair over the years, which for people who don't know is broadly the idea that you should be allowed and able to fix the electronics and other devices that you buy and own. So this has a lot to do with manufacturer monopolies over repair parts and having to go to the Apple store to get your iPhone fixed because your local unauthorized or independent repair person maybe can't get the parts or can't get the tools needed to do so.

2:43And I feel like this is a movement that I've been writing about now for over a decade, I would say. And I think you've been a part of it for most of that time. And there's been tons and tons of progress over the years. And that progress has been on all fronts. It's been state-level legislation, which took many years to pass, but now there are... How many states have rights to repair laws? A couple dozen? No, no, it's, I mean, it depends on, it's about, it's about a dozen, but it depends on how you count them, right? Because there's some that are very, very narrow, and then there's some that are much broader.

3:20But yeah, it's about, it's about a dozen that have passed some version that we support. and um you know it started with you know just a very narrow actually a pretty good bill passed in new york that governor hochel cut down to its uh to be really narrow and then we passed a wheelchair bill just covering power wheelchairs in colorado and then we passed a pretty broad bill in minnesota and then we keep on we keep on coming back and improving it and passing stronger and stronger versions. And, you know, it's been a really exciting campaign to work on because I think we're just winning the fundamental argument.

4:05Like people should be able to fix the stuff that they own. And when they can't, a lot of different problems come about and they're just like, you know, those problems are totally unnecessary. and the benefits to a manufacturer for controlling who can fix products and when you're forced to upgrade or when you're forced to pay through the nose to get the manufacturer-approved person to touch it. That's not a good situation. There's so many downsides to that. And the more and more we talk to people about it, the more I think fed up people are with those conditions. and uh yeah so that's we you know we i i would say even though the kind of real engine of right to repair is this stuff at the states these bills of the states which have really driven um the changes uh there's so much that we've done like in terms of in the marketplace and you know we've worked with the federal trade commission there's been lawsuits filed by individuals which have been based on the research that we've contributed about the specific issues that are going on so you know i think of right repair as kind of being like an all fronts kind of issue um and i don't ever want to be like i mean when when your job every day is to like out you know kind of like hoodwink giant multinational companies who have as much money as you know as as is possible to have to throw at something, you've got to be pretty unpredictable.

5:42You've got to keep them guessing and you've got to be able to dictate the terms of the debate in a way that they can't win it because they basically have every other advantage over us. Yeah, I mean, I think that all fronts line is sort of the best way of looking at this because I don't know, it's one of the easier stories to tell over time. it's like a lot of rights to repair is rooted in this idea of like American tinkering, like people fixing their tractors for generations, people, you know, modding their cars and repairing their cars and things like that. And for a very long time, we were used to in the United States, like being able to fix the things that we own and having things that last a really long time and maybe taking pride in being able to fix things.

6:33And then I would say like early 2000s, we start to see the introduction of software into everything. And with that came a lot of technological protection measures and DRM and things like that, where not only do you need to know how to fix a device, but you also sort of see the rise of really cheap electronics manufacturers trying to make things really thin. and so they're like hard to open and they have like proprietary screws and a lot of glue in them and it's just like you see the end of replaceable batteries things like this and then I just feel like over I don't know like the last 15 years you say to someone like oh like when's the last time you got anything fixed and for a lot of people the answer is never it's like something breaks and you go and buy a new one.

7:28And that's sort of like by design from the manufacturers. And I feel like over the last five, six years, specifically, you and the right to repair movement have called bullshit on this state of affairs. And I feel like we're starting to see a lot of progress in the opposite direction where people say, people are like fed up with buying a smart dishwasher that lasts like, you know, 18 months and then fails to get software updates. So you need to get a new one or whatever. And I feel like when you raise this now, people actually know what you're talking about. And on that front, it's a real public affairs campaign.

8:09It's not just enough to lobby state legislators. You need to make sure that the public is informed that this is all happening and that they say that, you know, this is not something that we like. Like this is something that needs to be fixed. I mean, is that a good way of describing it, you think? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the powerful things about Right to Repair is that it's not like some big mysterious thing, right? It's an experience that people have had that they maybe haven't taken a second to reflect on, but then once you actually do stop and think about it, you're like, yeah, you know what?

8:47This has changed. I have noticed this. And is this something that's good or bad? And then they think about it and they think, no, no, it's definitely bad. I think that you identified the rise of software and also the change in copyright law to give tremendous power to copyright holders, even for basically purely functional software code. That's a really big part of the story. But then I also think there's another part of the story, which is kind of like the economy is kind of primarily about absurdities in at this point in our development as a species. Like most of the stuff we buy, we don't actually need.

9:35Most of the industry is producing things that are not all that necessary. And mostly innovation in the marketplace is like trying to figure out how to get people to buy stuff that they don't actually need. And planned obsolescence is a feature of that kind of absurdity, right? So it's like, oh, shoot, we used to make good, high quality products. And then everyone bought one. And now they all have one. Now we need to figure out a way to get people to buy these products constantly so that we can keep moving in this direction. And I think that there's some real kind of systemic problems that are kind of evidenced by, yeah, we need to push back.

10:17I mean, we don't really need to have an economy where giant multinational companies come up with absurd and ridiculous and preposterous plans to get us to spend more money so that they can keep this machine going. Like, this is, it's not worth it. Like, you know, the stuff that we're seeing now around AI is so much of it is driven by this. Like, well, we have to figure out how to create a new monopoly. So, you know, maybe we can replace human friendship with chatbots. And it's, you know, you see the things that people are coming up with. And I think write your pair is just one way that we're saying like, no, there's a limit to the usefulness of these things.

10:59And we should make human-centered decisions about the stuff that we have, how it works. and um you know i i see it as not just a project to like talk to consumers about what is happening in the marketplace and how we should be able to fix products and it's really like let's think about what we're being what our economy is delivering to us right now and what we actually want and how can we organize it so that we get good stuff that we actually want to use and keep using. So much of the technology that we have now is just kooky. There's one thing that really crystallized this for me. And it's an old example, but it's seven years ago.

11:41Amazon released something called the Amazon Dash Button, which is literally a button that was connected to your... I think it was connected to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or something like that. And it was a physical button that I think they would send you for free or maybe it cost like a dollar and they would have like a little label on it like pop tarts or like nerf darts like these are the examples i'm seeing now um and like whenever you wanted to order more like laundry detergent you would just push that button and these never really took off but they were a tiny electronic device with a battery in it that was designed to get you to just like buy new stuff whenever you were out of it or maybe even when you weren't out of it and this was something that was introduced, I think it was only around for a few months.

12:28They probably sent out millions of these, who knows how many. And I went to an e-waste center while doing some reporting a few years ago. And there was this gigantic crate of dash buttons being recycled there. And I think what people don't know and what I've talked about before, but people still don't know because You know, not everyone listens to what I say. It's like a lot of this stuff is not actually recyclable. It's like it gets shredded into tiny little pieces and, you know, they do something with it. But basically, it was like a circuit board and a battery. And there are like humans who have to disassemble this to make sure because if you shred out a lithium-ion battery, it starts a fire.

13:14And so this is like a shitty electronic that was designed to be e-waste from the start, whose only use was to help you buy more junk. And that was a real radicalizing moment for me, was these dash buttons. But you can think of a million other things that are just like that. For me, it's the disposable vapes now that I've connected to Bluetooth and have video game little screens on them. And it's a disposable nicotine delivery device. But it's a full-fledged piece of electronics. There was some guy that made an electric bike from all the batteries from discarded vapes. It's crazy. We're doing just crazy, absurd things.

14:02And we're also having these conversations about critical minerals, and there's geopolitical conflict over the access to these materials. and they want to send robots two miles underneath the surface of the ocean to dig up polymetallic nodules in environments that we know absolutely nothing about and could be doing huge widespread ecological damage that we don't even know or understand. And then what are they going to do with that? Like make vapes with Tetris on them? And then how is this sensible to anybody? um so yeah i mean to me right to repair is is about challenging that consumption system but also like recognizing that this consumption system that we built is totally disempowering to us the people in the world um it like requires taking away our agency to function right because like on our own we would never like act this way we would never like just throw everything away That behavior has to be enforced upon us because it doesn't come naturally.

15:12And so that's one of the really rewarding things about organizing on rights repair is that it just makes sense. At the end of the day, it's just like when something is broken, you fix it. That's common sense. And the absurdity is the length of which manufacturers have to go now. You know, and your reporting on John Deere, for example, is one great example of the lengths that manufacturers have to go to take away people's ability to do things with their own equipment.

16:06Yeah, another one that comes to mind for me is just like the McDonald's ice cream machine, which we talked about many times. But I think people are very used to people who go to McDonald's, like, it's a meme that the McFlurry machine is out of service. And it's crazy because it's like, McDonald's is a gigantic corporation, but they are sort of at the whim of this manufacturer that creates the ice cream machine and it has embedded software in it. The parts are hard to get to. And it seems like even a lot of companies that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, it's like they don't always own the equipment that they're using.

16:44Very often they are renting it, leasing it. They're subject to these service contracts with the manufacturer. I've written a lot of articles about hospitals and medical equipment. They have all these in-house technicians who are really good at repairing things, but increasingly they're not able to repair the machinery in the hospital because the manufacturers won't sell it to them. They'll only lease it to them with these service contracts that mean that you kind of have to wait for their own technicians to come through and fix things at great cost. It's like driving up the cost of everything across our entire society.

17:24And I think the great thing is that with the passage of some of this legislation, we're starting to see some of that change. I think one of the frustrating things for me and surely way more frustrating for you is that in some cases, it feels like you have to go industry by industry where it's like, well, there's an electronics right to repair law or bill. There's an agricultural right to repair bill and legislation. There's wheelchair right to repair. There's been numerous cases of people who have wheelchairs that break. They can't fix it and then they can't get around. And people with prosthetics and things like that.

18:00But there's powerful lobbies from all of these industries. And they seek carve-outs to the devices that they make. Because they say that, well, we don't necessarily oppose right to repair for a piece of electronics. but if it's medical equipment, you can't possibly allow trained technicians who are not employed by us to fix these things. Is it annoying to you to go industry by industry playing whack-a-mole to inform legislators? No, these exemptions are not necessarily needed. It's the same issue across all of these different types of devices. Honestly, no. I mean, I love the people that fix medical equipment, and I love the people that fix consumer electronics.

18:52And it's really cool to get to meet and understand these different industries. And, you know, obviously, you know, let's just take medical equipment because you can imagine if you're a lawmaker and you file a bill and you say, hey, write your pair should be for everything. And the fundamental template of the legislation says the manufacturer has to provide equitable access to the parts, tools, and information they use, which means the same materials, essentially, that they use when they repair them themselves. They have to make that available to the owner of the product and to independent repair technicians.

19:30It seems like, I mean, that's just basically what the bill does. and medical device manufacturers will be the first ones that come in and say, yeah, but medical devices are different, right? And therefore, we really need to make sure that not anyone's fixing medical devices. And I heard that argument, right? And I was thinking like, okay, well, here I am. I'm here because I was really frustrated about consumer electronics. like as a consumer organization, that's kind of more of what we hear from our members and such. That argument seemed okay to me. I was like, okay, I guess that might be true.

20:10I don't know. And then I asked somebody who fixed medical devices, and they told me exactly why that's the craziest thing that they ever said. It's like, yeah, of course, not just anybody fixed medical devices, but we don't deputize the manufacturers to choose who can fix them and who couldn't because then they would just give themselves a monopoly. And by the way, monopolies in healthcare are not, generally speaking, beneficial. They're, in fact, quite dangerous. And also, the biggest problem why American medicine is ridiculously expensive is because there's so much anti-competitive, absolute robbery going on in this system.

20:55A lot of people that are doing very little work or getting a lot of money. And repair is just another example. And so you learn how the repair actually happens, how the system prevents unsafe repairs from happening. The FDA looked at 2.1 million error reports from devices to see if their repair was an issue. It wasn't an issue. And so you check the data, you talk to the experts, and then And you end up being like, yeah, you know what? All right, add this to the pile of industries that I'm now fighting. But I haven't found a single case where right repair is not righteous. If you should be able to fix stuff, when you can't fix stuff, when the manufacturer decides how stuff gets fixed, they just design the repair programs to benefit their shareholders in ways that harm the rest of us.

21:54And there's not a single example where that's a smart or good thing. It's always causing problems. And it's not just causing cost problems. In the case of medical equipment, you have equipment that you absolutely need. Otherwise, somebody's going to not be able to go into surgery or you're not going to know which medication to prescribe because, for example, there's two kinds of strokes. and you could if you have stroke a and you take medicine a uh you're you they can save your life but if you take the medicine for like stroke category b you die and the only way that you can really know what kind of stroke it is is if you run a cat scan and if your cat scan machine is broken and the manufacturer is going to take a week and you have somebody coming in with a stroke and you have a trained technician in your hospital who's not allowed by the manufacturer to touch that machine, that could be somebody...

22:50That's a life or death situation. And so it's not just about the manufacturers making more money. It's about them creating a system that is totally dependent on them for financial reasons. And then when it fails, you end up paying the cost in a lot of different ways. One of my favorite and most horrifying stories that I did about this was during the initial surge of COVID-19, ventilators were in short supply. And we had not experienced anything like COVID before. And so it maybe wasn't that big of a deal if a hospital had five ventilators and two of them were broken and it took three weeks to fix them or whatever, because the manufacturers only have a few different service technicians.

23:40But then And during COVID, it's like, well, you have this huge surge of needing ventilators all over the country. You have a very limited number of manufacturer-approved technicians. And so you have these insane wait times and you have people dying of COVID who need access to the ventilators. And so I wrote an article about that problem, but also about a Polish hacker who was selling software bypasses to the DRM locks that were preventing hospitals from actually fixing this stuff themselves. Because again, they have technicians at hospitals who can fix this stuff. They just are artificially unable to do so because of the software or access to parts or whatever.

24:22And I mean, that's an example exactly of what you were saying, where like during a crisis, same thing with tractors, where it's like if your tractor breaks during harvest time, like all your crops go bad because you might need to wait days to have a John Deere technician come out, which is kind of exactly what is happening in a class action lawsuit that we've written about before. Right. I just want to say very quickly, annoying was the wrong word to use. I guess more like... Because I find it very interesting myself to learn about all these different industries and the intricacies of them. And it's like almost universally, any repair person that you talk to or service technician you talk to is the most interesting person you've ever met.

25:09Honestly, my dad has been a mechanic for my entire life, so I'm super interested in it. But I guess it would be nice if perhaps the wins came across all industries very easily, is maybe what I should have said.

25:28Yeah, it would be great if my job was super easy. Yeah. It's not super easy. It's actually pretty hard. Yeah. I want to talk about the initiative that you have going on right now. You talked about planned obsolescence earlier. And I think we're about to see one of the most egregious examples of planned obsolescence that I can think of. And so it makes sense that you made a big deal out of it. on October 14th, Microsoft is going to end free support for Windows 10. And this is a very bad thing. It's also tied to rights of repair. It may not sound like it, you know, sort of initially. It's like, oh, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10.

26:15Like, what do we care? So that's the question. What do we care? Like, what's going on here? And why is it such a huge deal? Yeah, it's a huge deal for a couple reasons. The first is that Windows 11 will not run on a lot of computers. Microsoft had decided to put these hardware requirements on Windows 11, which was kind of surprising given that Windows 10 was backwards compatible with almost everything out there that could still run. But when it comes to Windows 11, they're like, no, no, no, no, we need this TPM 2.0. And so you essentially need a newer processor and more RAM to run it than some huge number of computers.

27:02And the estimates are up to 400 million computers that are currently running Windows 10 cannot upgrade to Windows 11. So just that fact alone was kind of creating a bit of a stir, right? Like, wait a second. What's going to happen to those 400 million computers, right? And, you know, Microsoft says, oh, you might want to consider buying a new computer on the page where they recommend, you know, where they outline the hardware requirements for Windows 11. So that's not great. Because if you're running, you know, a 7th gen Intel processor computer, you know, that's just fine for pretty much most things that people need computers to do these days.

27:48Like, you can watch YouTube or Netflix. You can do emails. You can use cloud applications. This is part because most of our computing these days is done on the cloud. Our computers are actually not processing as much data. They are as big of a share of the data as they used to. Really, we don't really need computers that are all that fast anymore to do the things that we typically need to do. So they're cutting off all these computers for support. and um that's a kind of a crisis for for like the for two main reasons the first is like if if everyone does replace those computers like that's 400 million computers that are you know going to enter the waste stream um that's a disaster you know in terms of just the sheer volume and of course we know a lot of people who you know maybe older relatives or whatever Most people are probably just going to ignore the warnings and use their computer that's insecure.

28:55And so there's going to be some widespread security problem with these older, unsupported, unpatched, no longer getting security updates computers. this is going to be very, very true of places where, you know, people don't have money or, you know, like if, if you, if you're living, you know, if you're kind of on the edge of being online, you know, and, and you have, you're using older laptops and, you know, maybe you're in a developing nation or you're somewhere else in the world or, you know, like a lot of rural elderly folks have, you know, kind of older computers and are kind of more on the kind of edge of digital access.

29:39They're just going to be targets for, you know, ransomware and other kind of cyber crime. And we're really, really worried about that. Both those things are kind of like, it's like two crises at once, right? You know, billions of pounds of electronic waste and massive security problems at the same time. to me it's just crazy that Microsoft isn't extending support for Windows 10 I mean when it came out they kind of promised it would be the forever version of Windows super popular people like it a lot better than the other versions and 40 % of people are still using it 40 % of Windows users still use it so to cut support for something that is like legitimately like a flagship product is almost half of their computer user base.

30:35I think people know this, but I'll just say it. Repairing an old device or keeping an old device for longer is so much better for the environment than buying a new device. I think universally, I mean, there's been multiple studies, maybe you know more about the specific numbers than I do. But anytime you make a new device, that means new raw materials that have to go into it, new critical minerals, sometimes conflict materials, things like that. So even just keeping your phone for one extra year, I've done some reporting on studies. It saves a ton of carbon emissions, of mining resources, things like that.

31:21Not to mention if you get rid of something early, the environmental cost of disposing, of that computer or dishwasher or whatever gadget you might be talking about. So that's why this is such an important environmental issue or at least one of the reasons that it's such an important environmental issue because you're having, as Nathan said, 400 million computers that are going to lose support. And so you have not only this waste crisis of what to do with all of those devices, but then all the devices and the mining and resources that are needed to replace them, correct? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did a study where I looked at just cell phones and we have a tool, the Environmental Benefits of Repair, which actually outlines this for a lot of different products.