Good article.

Glad to see that regulatory bodies can step away from the many claims made by manufacturers and address the issues straight on. We don't know where it will all end but, there seems to be a possibility for a rational outcome.

The Triennial Rulemaking Proceeding appear to be a hopeful step in the right direction, but I continue to be baffled by the silence in the laboratory instrument service arena.
There is clear headway being made in the right-to-repair movement of consumer, automotive, and agricultural products, spearheaded by the efforts of repair.org and other similar organizations. In the medical instrument field, IAMERS is doing a similar good work for the benefit of patients, consumers, and ISOs. Caught in the void between the two, is the laboratory service industry.
While laboratory instrument service and repair stretches its reach a little into both the other categories, there are many manufacturers who feel they are exempt from either of these two categories and blatantly snub their noses at ISOs, right to repair legislation, and anything else that doesn't maximize their bottom line, no matter how unethical it may be. For example, one manufacturer of cryostats used to sell their service manual for about $4000 per manual per model. (Already outrageous.) When my company finally decided we needed to buy one, we were told that "the FDA no longer allows the sale of the service manual." (A bald-faced lie, at best.) Many other companies don't even try to hide behind a lie and will simply tell you that they only allow their in-house technicians to service their instruments.
My search continues for an organization who actively represents this gap. It would seem that government agencies should embrace supporting ISOs for laboratory instrument servicing, since so many of them are also victims of this abuse by scrupulous manufacturers. Everything from colleges and universities to OSHA and environmental testing labs all end up overpaying for service when OEMs refuse to support ISOs. If anyone is aware of such an organization, I would love to know about it!