Colorado's Right-to-Repair Rollback Is a Gift to Manufacturers

I'm not someone who usually jumps into state politics.

I'm a tech nerd. I like taking things apart, figuring out how they work, upgrading them, repairing them, and keeping them alive longer than the manufacturer probably intended. I believe that when I buy a laptop, router, server, or any other piece of technology, I should have the right to maintain it, modify it, and fix it. That should not be a radical position.

And yet here we are.

Colorado's SB26-090 is one of those bills that sounds narrow and reasonable until you actually look at what it does. The bill would carve out an exception to Colorado's right-to-repair protections for "information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure." That sounds technical and limited. In practice, it is exactly the kind of loophole manufacturers love: broad, vague, and easy to exploit.

Right to repair is about more than hobbyists with screwdrivers. It is about ownership.

That is my core frustration with this bill.

The problem is not just the phrase "critical infrastructure." It is who gets to benefit from the ambiguity. Once you create a broad exemption tied to technology used in "critical infrastructure," you are opening the door for manufacturers to argue that all kinds of products should be off limits to owners, independent repair shops, schools, local governments, and small businesses. Critics of the bill have argued that the language is vague enough to cover everything from routers and servers to a much wider set of electronics, depending on context.

That is not consumer protection. That is manufacturer protection.

What makes this especially maddening is that Colorado has actually been a leader on right to repair. The state already passed a broader digital electronics repair law, and SB26-090 would weaken that framework by creating a new exemption. The bill's own summary says the point is to exempt certain information technology equipment from Colorado's consumer right-to-repair laws.

Supporters of this bill talk about cybersecurity and safety. I take those concerns seriously. But restricting repair is not the same thing as improving security. In a lot of cases, it does the opposite. When owners and independent repair professionals cannot get parts, tools, firmware access, documentation, or diagnostic information, repairs take longer, cost more, and become dependent on manufacturer permission. That is not resilience. That is artificial dependency. Repair advocates have made exactly this point in opposition to the bill.

And that gets to something bigger.

Right to repair is about more than hobbyists with screwdrivers. It is about ownership. It is about whether buying a product means you actually control it. It is about whether communities can keep essential systems running without begging a manufacturer for permission. It is about whether consumers get a fair market for service and support, or whether companies get to wall off repair behind legal and technical barriers.

It is also about culture.

If you spend any time in tech communities, repair communities, Discord servers, or on YouTube, you know this issue resonates deeply with people who care about building, fixing, and understanding their tools. A lot of us are not professional activists. We are just people who are sick of disposable technology and sick of being told that the only acceptable relationship to the things we own is passive consumption.

That is why this issue pulled me in.

I have not been especially active in state politics before. But SB26-090 is the kind of bill that makes you pay attention, because it reveals how quickly a good law can be hollowed out by a "reasonable sounding" exception. If lawmakers want to address a truly narrow and specific security concern, then write a narrow and specific fix. Do not hand manufacturers a broad exemption and pretend that consumers will not feel the consequences.

As of April 7, 2026, the Colorado General Assembly website shows SB26-090 as under consideration, with a Senate General Orders second reading scheduled for April 7 after the bill advanced out of the Senate Business, Labor, & Technology Committee on a 5–0 vote on April 2.

If you are in Colorado and you care about your ability to repair, upgrade, and maintain the technology you own, pay attention to this bill. Because once lawmakers start carving out rights based on broad categories that manufacturers can stretch to fit their interests, the "right to repair" starts becoming the right to repair only when a corporation says it is okay.

And that is not a right worth much at all.