This Trump FCC Cybersecurity ‘Fix’ Is About To Make Hardware Way More Expensive For Everyone

from the weird-and-racist-performance-art dept

Last week the Trump FCC quietly announced that it was cooking up a new ban on any labs that have testing offices in China from testing electronic ‌devices such as smartphones, cameras and computers for sale in the United States.

That’s going to create some major issues given that roughly 75% of all U.S.-bound electronics are currently tested in Chinese facilities. Many of these operations are owned by U.S. or European companies that have testing facilities in China because that’s where the lion’s share of technology is manufactured, so it’s simply more efficient for testing evolving iterations of new product.

That these companies have offices in China doesn’t inherently mean the testing labs are somehow all magically compromised and in dutiful service to the Chinese government, though that’s certainly the implication the xenophobic Trump administration is making (and has made before in previous, similar announcements).

One major problem outside of the raw logistics of it all: Carr’s planned cybersecurity fix would be significantly more expensive, driving up costs for everyone:

“27 of the affected facilities are Chinese subsidiaries of major Western testing firms, including Intertek, SGS, TUV Rheinland, and Bureau Veritas. Those companies operate labs in the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan that can absorb redirected work, but the shift won’t be seamless. Basic FCC certification testing runs between $400 and $1,300 at Chinese labs, compared with $3,000 to $4,000 at U.S. equivalents.”

Who is going to eat the difference in those costs? You are, of course. In addition to the higher costs from the AI boom, the tariffs, and Trump’s pointless war in Iran. Whatever companies lobbied Carr and Trump will do great. You probably won’t.

Given the terrible nature of smart IOT home security standards (more a byproduct of unregulated crony capitalism than China-based testing locations), having a more direct line of control over the testing of U.S. bound hardware makes superficial sense.

But then you have to remember that this is Brendan Carr, who does nothing authentically in the public interest, and is likely just looking to drive more business to a handful of U.S. companies that lobbied for his attention. And you have to remember that these folks, as you saw when they talked about shifting smartphone production to the States, don’t actually know what the fuck they’re doing.

The other major problem: Trump and Carr’s rabid deregulatory, anti-governance zealotry on other fronts has repeatedly worked to undermine U.S. cybersecurity, making these sorts of fixes leaky and highly performative, even if they were to be successful (which they won’t be).

While Carr and Trump profess to be super worried about Chinese threats to national security, with their other hand the Trump administration has gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom networks in history), dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and fired oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Brendan Carr is also engaged in a massive effort to destroy whatever’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight authority, despite the fact that the recent historic Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (caused in large part because major telecoms were too incompetent to change default administrative passwords) was a direct byproduct of this exact type of mindless deregulation.

The Trump administration’s stacked courts are also making it extremely difficult to hold telecoms accountable for literally anything (see the Fifth Circuit’s recent reversal of a fine against AT&T for spying on customer movement), which also undermines consumer privacy and national security, and ensures zero real repercussions for companies that fail to secure their networks and sensitive data.

So, with one hand you have Carr claiming he’s “fixing cybersecurity” with stuff like this or his recent foreign router “ban” (which as we’ve noted is really a lazy extortion scheme), while with the other he’s doing everything in his power to ensure that domestic telecoms don’t really have anything even vaguely resembling meaningful privacy and security oversight.

Here’s where I’ll remind you that because the U.S. is too corrupt to pass even a basic modern privacy law, we also have a vast and largely unregulated data broker industry that hoovers up your every movement and online habit, then sells access to it to any random asshole (including foreign and domestic government intelligence agencies).

Here too, weird zealots like Trump and Carr have rolled back efforts to regulate data brokers or do anything about it. As authoritarian racists, they’re too blinded by personal self-enrichment and racism to have any genuine understanding of how any of this stuff actually works.

As with the TikTok “ban” (which basically involved shoveling ownership to Trump’s billionaire buddies), so much of this is heavily xenophobic, nationalistic, transactional, self-serving, and performatively detached from any actual reality. By the time the check comes due, guys like Carr and Trump will already be off to the next grift.

Filed Under: brendan carr, china, cybersecurity, fcc, privacy, security, testing