Score one for the people. Suck it, McDonald’s corporation. The Federal Trade Commission and Dept. of Justice are ruling in favor of franchise owners when it comes to whether or not they have the right to fix their broken ice cream machines. McDonald’s ice cream machines are so notorious for breaking down that it spawned a lot of memes and a whole-ass website, McBroken, which tracks broken machines almost in real time. As I am writing this, McBroken estimates that 17.64% of American McDonald’s have broken ice cream machines. The real issue, though, is that McDonald’s makes restaurants wait for an “authorized” technician (rather than fixing the machines themselves or hiring a third-party to do so), which typically takes 90 days. Franchise owners estimate that they are losing thousands of dollars per month as a result.

So, innovation took over and two people created Kytch, a device that franchise owners could put inside their ice cream machines to read its “internal communications” to an app to help them troubleshoot any issues. It’s basically a coder-reader. When Micky D’s head honchos found out about what was going on, they forbade them from using Kytch. To make matters even sketchier, Taylor, the company that made the ice cream machines, got a hold of a Kytch device and reverse-engineered it to make their own device. The FTC got involved on behalf of franchise owners in 2021 and in 2022, Kytch sued both McDonald’s and Taylor for $900 million.

The federal government wants to make it legal for McDonald’s franchise owners to use a third-party hacking device to fix chronically broken ice cream machines after the fast-food giant was sued because it didn’t allow them to do so.

The Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust unit of the Department of Justice are asking the US Copyright Office to approve an exemption to copyright law that would allow business owners to repair “commercial and industrial equipment.”

The feds said that not allowing business owners to hire third-party repair people limits competition and makes repairs more costly, according to comments filed Thursday amid deliberations seeking the exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Broken-down soft-serve machines cost business owners $625 in lost sales per day, the agencies estimated in their filing with the Copyright Office.

Since business owners aren’t legally permitted to fix the machines on their own or to hire a third-party technician, they need to wait for an authorized technician, which usually takes around 90 days, the comment noted. The agencies want the exemptions to apply to commercial soft serve machines, proprietary diagnostic kit, programmable logic controllers and enterprise IT, according to the filing, which was first reported by The Verve.

“In the Agencies’ view, renewing and expanding repair-related exemptions would promote competition in markets for replacement parts, repair, and maintenance services, as well as facilitate competition in markets for repairable products,” they wrote in the filing.

Last year, iFixit, the popular e-commerce site, asked Congress to approve the copyright exemption that would allow their technicians to fix the machines. Exemptions to DMCA Section 1201 are issued every three years, as per the Register of Copyrights’ recommendation.

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Good for the franchise owners! I’m sure it was super frustrating to be at the mercy of McDonald’s timeline and greedy rules. This seems to be a case in which the system has worked as intended by creating competition, inspiring innovation, and preventing monopolies. It’s wild that McDonald’s just didn’t give a hoot about the faulty ice cream machines and owners’ complaints at how long it took to fix them. I bet if these authorized technicians were out within a few days, the whole issue wouldn’t have gotten this out of hand. When CB covered this two years ago, she thought that this would make a great docuseries and I have to agree. The Great Ice Cream Machine Saga really did have everything, and now a ruling against a greedy corporation stifling competition seems like a good ending to me.

As for Kytch’s lawsuit, the most recent update I could find about that is from December 2023, when the startup revealed they had found a “smoking gun” email between Taylor and McDonald’s that proved a “coordinated effort to undermine” them as a “potential competitor.” I need to keep an eye on that case because it feels like it could get really good.