Cable Lobbyists Show How Trump FCC’s Extortive ‘Foreign Router Ban’ Isn’t Workable

from the going-great,-thanks-for-asking dept

Back in March I noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.

Several router manufacturers (like Amazon’s Eero and Netgear) have subsequently received exemptions from the Trump administration, but because there is zero transparency to the process, we have no idea what they agreed to. Did they pay the Trump administration a bribe? Did they agree to surveillance backdoors for ICE operations? Who knows? Great stuff.

Now the cable lobby appears to be balking at the purported foreign router ban. In a petition filed with the FCC last week (spotted by Ars Technica) NCTA (The Internet & Television Association) — the cable industry’s biggest lobbying org — asked for a massive exemption from the restrictions, noting that they’re simply not practical in real-world practice:

“NCTA requests an expedited grant of this waiver to enable its members and their suppliers to navigate unavoidable supply chain shortages and prevent disruptions in the availability of broadband for NCTA members’ customers, while still fulfilling the rules’ national security and public safety purpose.”

So basically you’ve got a ban on foreign routers that is more about extortion than protecting national security. Which the cable industry says it can’t adhere to because AI hype, tariffs and unnecessary wars have driven up the costs of many internal router components, making adherence expensive if not impossible. Great stuff, very savvy policymaking by people who definitely know what they’re doing.

Part of the “foreign router ban” was supposed to involve forcing hardware manufacturing to return to the states. But because Trump and much of his administration have a fourth-grader-level understanding about how this stuff works (like his desire to suddenly have smartphones built in the U.S.), the cable industry’s filing notes that the “onshoring” of manufacturing and supply chains isn’t realistically possible either:

“Like AT&T, NCTA members are encouraging their suppliers to quickly pursue required onshoring, and, in the meantime, seek Conditional Approvals for Covered Routers as necessary. However, unavoidable supply chain shortages in critical substrate material and memory modules (including both volatile and nonvolatile memory) significantly constrain the industry. AT&T’s suppliers are not unique; the same impediments they are experiencing impose inevitable limitations on NCTA’s suppliers. Accordingly, NCTA seeks the same relief on behalf of its suppliers. Given the immediacy of these issues and the concrete harms that would result from disruptions to the availability of broadband to large swaths of US consumers and businesses, the grant of this Petition is warranted.”

These companies, many of which supported and enabled Trump, now have to pretend this all makes sense as they navigate a costly minefield of weird bullshit that won’t accomplish any of its purported goals.

This is all exceptionally chaotic and dumb, and it’s unlikely that Brendan Carr, who spends most of his time trying to censor comedians and whining about “wokeness,” is capable of managing the scale of this sort of overhaul — even if it were practical, which it isn’t.

When you read most press coverage of this router ban, they don’t really make it clear to readers that this is all very unworkable and stupid. Trump and his administration are given undeserved credit on competency and policy, as the press, companies, and policymakers all try to trip over themselves to normalize the sheer pointless stupidity and expense of it all.

If the country cared about national security we’d focus on corruption. We’d pass a meaningful modern internet privacy law. We’d shore up, staff, and properly fund cybersecurity regulators. We’d regulate data brokers. Instead we get a giant pile of unworkable extortion slop being overseen by weird zealots.

Filed Under: brendan carr, hardware, national security, onshoring, privacy, router ban, routers, telecom

Companies: ncta