Technology

This is just their way of saying they want state sponsored backdoors into all private home networks.

… does America even manufacture routers?

If foreign made routers pose a severe cybersecurity risk then why would you let the current ones on the market stay? If they were truly a problem you'd remove them from the market, not grandfather them.

But like everything with this capricious administration the real reason they're doing this is probably because someone greased their palms.

Conditional approvals - it's a bribe scheme. Companies can ask for exceptions. Sure they wouldn't Grease any palms...

Awesome. So what used to be a $50 router is about to be a $150 router. Great.

This only applies to routers.

It's not widely known outside the ham radio community, but part of the 2.4GHz wifi band overlaps the 13cm amateur radio band. If you turn off 5GHz wifi and lock the 2.4GHz AP to Channel 1, it qualifies as a ham radio, and can be sold as a ham radio instead of an AP/Router. You do need a ham radio license to operate it as a Ham AP, but you do not need a license to buy a Ham AP.

If the end user wants to turn on 5GHz after the fact, there is not a damn thing the FCC can do about it.

The excuse that it's for security reasons just immediately falls apart when you get to this part of the article:

The notice from the FCC states that companies can apply for conditional approval for new products from the Department of War or the Department of Homeland Security. However, that requires the businesses to provide a plan for shifting at least some of their manufacturing to the US in order to receive that conditional approval.

So it's fine to supposedly threaten national security if you do some more manufacturing in the US? Uh-huh. How does that balance out exactly?

Next up, foreign VPNs and shortwave radios are illegal to use.

Then phone calls are restricted.

Then international mail has to be inspected and censored.

All hail Chairman Trump!

USA USA 👊🇺🇸🔥

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that this is a law to:

1. get bribes or favors from telecom equipment manufacturers.
2. Create a framework to force backdoors into consumer equipment.
3. Force users to use ISP provided equipment.

Even more isolationism. Knowing how the usa works, they discovered the equipment was set up for spying on their people and they want all of that "spying on their own people" power for themselves.

WHAT

I am really fucking glad I recently bought a high-end router, holy shit

I can understand the FTC being involved because trade. But the FCC? Maybe regulatory authority over WiFi? But this seems like massive over reach.

Remember when conservatives claimed to support smaller government?

Force consumers into US made, AI-laden, crappy hardware full of backdoors for the regime.

Gold colored Trump Router incoming

Only US allowed to spy on it's denizens!!1

People not being sure what their router is actually doing is the issue. Instead of hoping for local manufactoring why not mandate against black box software running on the router? Mandate routers come with schematics like all electronics used to do? Promote computer literacy while you're at it.

Consumer grade.

Because if they try and ban cisco they'll collapse

Build your own open WRT router or get one of theirs. It's the best way to go and you don't get dragged through the monthly fee wringer for stupid child security or other stuff that is not well designed.

First routers, then foreign operating systems, then cars…

Use openwrt.

You can always get your own non-router hardware of significantly higher quality and run PFSense or similar for an end result that blows any consumer grade router out of the water. Unless they start banning all PCs this is the better way to go anyway.

Does the US really make their own routers pretty much all electronics come from the China.

I suspect what's going to happen is that the components will come from China and then some white label manufacturer will just put them together in the US, therefore they were "made" in the US so are okay. But it'll be literally the same chips and circuit board and firmware as before.

But in fact USA and Israel are the countries that spy on anyone. I am more concern about USA and Israel spying than from India and China. In this point in history USA and Israel are the enemy of the world.

Outsourcing of manufactoring work is forbidden now? LOL

TPLink needed to get their shit in order for years. This has been cooking since 2019. However, this administration is just turned it into a bribery scheme.

Unintentionally shutting down ai data centers. Lol, we know this will only be selectively enforced!