Michael Oberdick owns two small gadget repair shops in northwestern Ohio. He and his technicians spend their days at iOutlet replacing busted screens, repairing battered motherboards, and generally making life easier for people who’ve done something stupid with their gadgets. He found this job far easier just five years ago, when he started repairing phones for friends. Back then, anyone with basic tools, a little patience, and an instruction manual could fix just about anything.

But these days, performing all but the most basic repairs requires specialized tools and knowledge that companies like Apple and Samsung guard jealously. That makes it hard for people like Oberdick to earn a living, and for people like you to repair your phone when you drop it. And that is why Oberdick made the long trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, to spend three minutes urging state lawmakers to approve a right-to-repair bill.

“If we do not continue fighting for the right to repair, we may not be here in a few years,” he told me. “It wasn’t a choice, in my opinion, to show up. It was a necessity.”

WIRED Opinion About Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit, an online repair community and parts retailer internationally renowned for its open source repair manuals and product teardowns.

Oberdick joined dozens of gadget fixers and recyclers, mechanics and farmers at a hearing on March 9 in Lincoln to support legislation making it easier for consumers to repair broken products. Nebraska is one eight states considering right to repair legislation this year. Bills pending in Kansas and Wyoming focus exclusively on farm equipment, but legislation in Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, and Tennessee apply to all consumers electronics.

Right to repair laws, also called fair repair laws, typically require manufacturers to publish repair manuals and sell the parts, diagnostic software, and tools needed to fix their products. The goal is to ensure consumers can repair their own devices, or pay an independent outfit to do so. Simply put, these bills argue that you bought the device, and you should be able to repair it.

Not long ago, anyone with the time, tools, and patience could repair damn near anything. That changed as computers and processors took on a greater role in just about everything you own. The mobile revolution exacerbated the problem. Packing increasingly sophisticated technology into smaller, sleeker devices led manufacturers to adopt new manufacturing techniques. That made it far more difficult for home tinkerers to fix a laptop, a television, or smartphone—let alone a car or farm tractor—making independent repair outfits essential. Then manufacturers started using copyright laws to keep their repair manuals offline, proprietary fasteners to seal their products, and in some cases, digital rights management to protect their software.

“We have a growing list of devices that we cannot service at all,” Jason DeWater, a professional repair technicians who owns iFixOmaha, told lawmakers.

DeWater told lawmakers his employees cannot safely open a growing number of devices without specialized documentation, diagnostic software, and tools. Even if they succeed in opening a device, they can't always get the parts needed to repair it. That helps manufacturers and hurts you, the person who paid good money to buy that device in the first place. Nikon stopped selling replacement parts to independent shops in 2012, for example, all but shutting down independent repair shops and monopolizing repairs with its 20-odd authorized shops.

The problem hits rural areas especially hard. If you're among the 2 million people who live in Nebraska, don't let anything happen to your iPhone. The state has exactly one Apple store. Warranty mail-in services can help, but take days to do what someone like DeWater can do in hours.

Even if someone like DeWater can get into your device this time, there's no guarantee he can do it next time. Manufacturers constantly update their designs and their manufacturing techniques, requiring independent techs to start from scratch with each new device. When Apple introduced proprietary Pentalobe screws, repair shops had to reverse engineer them and build the tool needed to remove it. Gluing down the batteries in the iPad required repair shops and recyclers to create a method of removing it. I do this stuff for a living, and even I found the Samsung S7 Edge maddening. It remains one of the most challenging things I've ever disassembled. You try opening one without cracking the glass.

Making repairs difficult leaves consumers with one choice: Replacement. And that invariably means the busted device ends up in a landfill, or a recycler. And guess what? The same short-sighted policies that make it difficult to repair your phone or tablet make it equally hard to recycle it. All the challenges facing independent repair shops effect independent recyclers, too.

Right-to-repair legislation would make it easier to fix anything electronic. Laptops. Televisions. Drones. Smart refrigerators. Even tractors. Anything driven by a processor or controlled by software has become all but impossible to repair. Just ask a farmer. Ten years ago, any farmer with a lick of sense could repair a tractor or other equipment, or summon a mechanic to do it. Now they find themselves beholden to dealerships with proprietary software and diagnostic tools. Two years ago, I tried to help a friend repair a blown sensor on his six-figure tractor, only to find this simple operation required access to diagnostic software protected by digital rights management—software John Deere refused to sell him. He's hardly alone in this.

“It’s imperative that you keep equipment running. Farmers have been able to do that for generations, but now that little brain—that software component—is stopping the mechanics of it from moving,” Republican state senator Lydia Brasch said during the hearing in Lincoln. She introduced the right-to-repair legislation to help farmers fight that monopoly on tractor repair, but recognizes its importance to all consumers. “It’s about ownership rights, is what it boils down to,” she said. “We should all able to choose where and how we repair our equipment.”

Of course, the companies making these devices have deployed battalions of lobbyists to defeat these bills. And they offer the most outlandish reasons for opposing them. You'll hurt yourself. Knock-off artists and copycats will glean trade secrets. Unscrupulous repair techs might claim to be factory trained. John Deere argued that rogue farmers might hack their tractors to dodge emissions requirements. Apple claimed a right-to-repair law would flood Nebraska with black-hat hackers.

Such concerns have little basis in reality, but that didn't stop interests aligned with the industry from tabling Nebraska's legislation. But the fight is far from over. It continues in seven other states where lawmakers feel you, the consumer, ought to be able to decide for yourself whether, where, and how to fix that gadget you paid for. It's a fight for self-reliance, a fight for the environment, and a fight to wrest control away from manufacturers and return it to you.

After testifying in Lincoln and making the trip home, Oberdick received "hundreds" of supportive messages from repair technicians. He plans to continue fighting for right to repair bills because he believes the issue is of vital importance to consumers, to small businesses, and to the environment. Manufacturers want to throughly control how people use the products they sell, but their interests rarely align with those of society. It’s time to fix that.