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The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason

• duxup 6mo ago
  I feel like pretending a department under this administration's thumb is actually going to act honestly is a bit absurd. They made a donation ... somewhere. Now they're all good. None of Trump's bluster is honest, they're just graft gates. It wasn't any different during the first administration. I worked at a company slated to be acquired by a foreign company. But the approval just never came from the feds. Then one day the acquiring foreign company CEO visited the White House and that day Trump approved it. Trump even made a little speech about jobs. Then we were all told we were going to be laid off... just like that almost all the American jobs gone. Shortly after one of Trump's companies announced a big land deal in the home country of the acquiring company. MEGA ...
  • da02 6mo ago
    What was the home country of the acquiring company? UAE? Argentina?
    • tfwnopmt 6mo ago
      MEGA was founded by Kim Dotcom, who currently lives in New Zealand
    • sathackr 6mo ago
      MEGA is now headquartered in Hungary...who until very recently was run by someone very much aligned with the far right movement.
  • cjbgkagh 6mo ago
    The looting stage of collapse, people tend to think someone will come and save things but so long as there is more money in decline the leaders will do that instead.
    • ericmay 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      • cjbgkagh 6mo ago
        I know there is a personal responsibility / call to action in there but I think it elides both how politics work and how people work. Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe. Encouraging people to tilt at windmills is one of the ways to undermine effective opposition. Pitting them against each other is another way. I think actual effective opposition is localism / a general devolution of power. It’s all moot anyway because AI is already smart enough to upend the economy / social order. A productivity boom without a consumption boom will kill margins across the board.
        • ericmay 6mo ago
          I’m aligned with your critique, and especially aligned with a focus on local efforts. The more local the better has generally been a good guiding principle for democracies. > Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe. I agree with you in the effect - people for whatever reason just believe what they’re told to believe, but I disagree with the hint of “can’t do anything about it” that underlies your writing here. If that’s not your intent - my mistake.
          • cjbgkagh 6mo ago
            A big part of undermining opposition is to encourage your opposition to operate in ways that are ineffective. Regardless of who won the 2024 we would have gotten the war with Iran, the US has a long history of electing peace candidates and getting war. We live in a managed democracy, part of that management is ensuring the opposition are grifters, Trump was not viable for 2024 until democrats came after him legally, I am confident the decision makers there knew that going after him would make him more popular. They would rather have run against Trump a third time than against a likely more effective candidate like Ron DeSantos. There are things people can do, I left the US for a small country where politics are so boring I don’t even know who the president is and don’t care to.
  • pseudohadamard 6mo ago
    "In completely unrelated news, the Trump Presidential Ballroom Fund just received a ten million dollar donation from an unspecified donor".
    • ssl-3 6mo ago
      "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. Fuck you, I'm eating!"
  • jjav 6mo ago
    > They made a donation ... somewhere. Likely some kind of gold statue was involved. And just like that, laws change in your favor.
• oldge 6mo ago
  Either they agreed to put the back door in their routers or someone got paid off.
  • Gigachad 6mo ago
    Mysterious new buyer for one of Trump's crypto coins.
  • Melatonic 6mo ago
    Considering most have a basic VPN server built in already they sort of have a built in back door by design
• xvxvx 6mo ago
  They paid the shakedown fee.
  • nielsbot 6mo ago
    that’s the outcome of soft fascism: a lot of pay to play.
    • cjbgkagh 6mo ago
      I passed on an invitation to tender a number of years ago because there was no way to meet the minority / women quota that was tied to it. The big players use pass through front companies which isn’t feasible for me as I’m a solo operator. The Netgear thing is more egregious but the quotas are more pervasive. I would like to be rid of both.
      • Spooky23 6mo ago
        It’s very possible to do so. Partner with someone in the space and they take a vig. An even better option is to partner with a veteran owned entity, which often allows you to bypass the bidding process.
        • cjbgkagh 6mo ago
          The funding was tied to women and minorities only, so no veteran option. Also I would have had to get certified for that specific location which involves a third party that comes in and interviews the women / minorities to make sure they have actual positions of power and were not just figureheads. They had a scale down option so they could opt for a very small purchase that would actually be smaller than the audit cost let alone the cost of passing such an audit.
          • Spooky23 6mo ago
            Gotcha. Well, at least it's a legit program, although that doesn't help you. In some places this stuff is so vague that using a minority business (like say SHI) is essentially a sort of tax to win discretionary purchases with governments.
• Bender 6mo ago
  no obvious reason Could it be related to Netgear being manufactured in Vietnam Thailand and Indonesia to avoid China tariffs and that somehow got them through an audit? I only ask if the overall unwritten goal is to avoid China.
  • palmotea 6mo ago
    > Could it be related to Netgear being manufactured in Vietnam Thailand and Indonesia to avoid China tariffs and that somehow got them through an audit? I only ask if the overall unwritten goal is to avoid China. That goal isn't even that secret: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-xi-beijing-e247250d https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-xi-beijing-e2472...: > Pursuing activities antagonistic to [China] has become further paralyzed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordering staff that they need his signoff for any China-related actions, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, even senior Commerce officials at times sit by his office waiting or outside the building, watching for his car. Officials at other agencies pursued a ban on a China-linked router maker by styling it as an order that doesn’t name the company or China. > ... > One such office had already determined that China-founded router company TP-Link and China-linked internet-connected trucks and buses pose national security risks. Officials thought vulnerabilities in their software could provide China access to spy on U.S. communications or access sensitive infrastructure. > Interagency reviews had reached a similar conclusion about the risk of TP-Link and supported a ban. Staff had set in motion new rule-making to restrict U.S. sales of those products before they were put on hold and office leadership dismissed, according to officials familiar with the process. > ... > Supporters of a ban on TP-Link in March eked out a victory. The Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on new imports of all foreign-made routers, “regardless of the nationality of the producer,” a blanket prohibition that also accomplishes sidelining Chinese routers without naming the country or TP-Link. The new rule was designed in part to minimize disruptions to Trump’s relationship with Xi, people familiar with the matter said.
• 0o_MrPatrick_o0 6mo ago
  ‘The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that.` ??? No obvious reason? What if the Executive Branch is a dog chasing cars? It’s just doing things.
  • simonsarris 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • bediger4000 6mo ago
    If by "doing things" you mean "accumulating mysterious anonymous crypto payments" and "getting a large draw from one of your shell companies", then yes.
• frugalmail 6mo ago
  I was under the impression the ping back to china security issues are what prompted this, until they were evaluated. I don't think Netgear would have a problem passing the audit.
• jonahbenton 6mo ago
  Why is TP Link still being sold.
  • wtallis 6mo ago
    Among other reasons: the recent ban was on FCC approval for new products. Existing products that had already secured FCC approval are unaffected by the new policy and can continue being sold.
    • mcmcmc 6mo ago
      In other words: it’s security theater and dubious economic protectionism, not a genuine attempt to counter a cyber threat.
      • nathanaldensr 6mo ago
        Yes. "There are already foxes in the hen house, but we'll ban new foxes from entering!"
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
  • abofh 6mo ago
    [flagged]
• elevation 6mo ago
  I would love to see the US rekindle the domestic manufacture of affordable consumer/prosumer network hardware. The US can already manufacture SoCs, PWBs, and chassis hardware, we just need a business case for putting it all together. Managed well, sustained protection from international competition could provide this business case, and buffer against global shipping disruptions, while the sheer volume of CPE equipment would eventually drive down costs. But fickle bans will never get us there.
  • m000 6mo ago
    Domestic manufacturing is not coming back because there are no guarantees whatsoever that this ban is going to last. Nobody is going to shell out hundreds of millions to setup manufacturing for such a low-margin product when it is much cheaper and risk-free to just sidestep the ban.
    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
      All Xi has to do is send Him a plane.
    • palmotea 6mo ago
      Mikrotik manufactures routers in Latvia, of all places. I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be.
      • NewJazz 6mo ago
        Eastern Europe is very different socioeconomically than the US.
      • ssl-3 6mo ago
        Mikrotik manufactures a lot of stuff in Latvia, yes. That's where they're based, and where most of their engineering happens. Some of their stuff is also stated to be made in, at least, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China (in no particular order). And I really don't have much of an idea how much of the devices are made in any of those places, but it's not hard to find an occasional clue. For example: The Mikrotik wAP AC that is hanging on the wall in the room where I write this is was labelled as having been made in Latvia when I bought it. But the main brainbox IC inside of it, a Qualcomm QCA9556, is manufactured by TSMC. That's probably not something made in a Latvian plant. What of the rest? The metal and plastic components of the housing? The connectors, the PCBs? The jelly-bean parts on those PCBs? --- The recent ham-fisted FCC rules make it so any foreign-made component of a new router design excludes it from sale in the US, by default. It may be harder than you think it is to get this done. Even the simple stuff might be hard: Do we even make LEDs in the States? I don't mean anything high-power or fancy (we definitely don't make those here), but I also can't find any evidence suggesting that we can even manufacture a lowly status LED in the US at this point. Or, something mechanical: PCB-mount 8P8C ethernet jacks. I don't find any of those manufactured in the States, either. (Can we even muster up the effort to make those? They're mostly injection-molded plastic, which we haven't forgotten how to do stuff with. But they also use beryllium copper, which is a special kind of a spooky to work with in terms of health hazards.) I'm not sure that Mikrotik putting together some stuff in Latvia, of all places, represents a very good example: If they were doing in Nebraska what they presently do in Latvia then their products would still be excluded by default.
• akulbe 6mo ago
  Follow the money.
• SilverElfin 6mo ago
  Obviously the Trump family is being made richer or more powerful somehow. It’s obvious. Saying there is no obvious reason is as insane as believing the delay in banning TikTok wasn’t corrupt.
• OutOfHere 6mo ago
  My bigger fear is whether Netgear has one or more backdoors exploitable for use by the US government. It's firmware will have to be reverse engineered and then reviewed by AI, proof-based analysis, and security researchers. In the long term, an absence of competition bodes poorly.
  • kennywinker 6mo ago
    Why AI? An unproven proprietary tech is your go-to over skilled security researchers?
    • OutOfHere 6mo ago
      Updated parent comment. Ideally, looking beyond this work, and more generally, a funded AI would be used to do analysis and then to dispatch tasks to qualified humans. A network of available qualified humans would have to exist that the AI can access. Humans could then of course provide feedback to AI for the loop to continue with new tasks to humans. Think Uber but more generally for AI to tap into real-world work and expertise.
      • kennywinker 6mo ago
        That sounds dystopian as hell to me. Are security researchers willing to become interchangeable units of cognition, as devalued as uber drivers? I hope not. But your edit makes my original comment unneeded. I was reacting to this jump to “we need ai to solve this!” when the ai is still largely unproven marketing hype from a bunch of highly leveraged ai companies with manic gambler ceos.
        • OutOfHere 6mo ago
          You seem to be living in 2024 wrt your assertions about AI. Or maybe it is me who hasn't caught up with the AI-hate agenda of the hoi-polloi since 2024.
          • 6mo ago
• phendrenad2 6mo ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the router ban intended to affect foreign companies, not one based in San Jose, California? If so, that would explain why they get an exception.
  • boomboomsubban 6mo ago
    The router ban affects routers made in foreign countries, Netgear's headquarters should be irrelevant. The author's previous article spells this out better https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-2026-explainer https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-20...
• vfclists 6mo ago
  Sounds like pay to play, the usual Trumpian playbook (no pun intended)
• daft_pink 6mo ago
  It seems very obvious that they are probably going to give router companies that have an okay or above reputation time to comply with the law and cheap Chinese imports where they obviously have a strong relationship with the Chinese government or any sort of questionable reputation immediate ban.
• bradgranath 6mo ago
  The obvious reason is bribes.
• JohnFen 6mo ago
  I wonder if concessions to allow US government spying were made in exchange for this approval. It seems that at least a couple of these routers allow for replacement firmware such as OpenWRT, though, so it might be OK. But I'm incredibly suspicious.
• TwoNineFive 6mo ago
  Trump voters doing Trump voter things. https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1slngfa/the_fcc_just_saved_netgear_from_its_router_ban/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1slngfa/the_fcc_j... https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s1zz4l/fcc_bans_foreignmade_routers_as_a_national/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s1zz4l/fcc_bans_fo... https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s2thgj/the_fcc_router_ban_following_up_on_a_post_here/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pwnhub/comments/1s2thgj/the_fcc_rou... The posts are AI slop but not incorrect. I didn't have to look anything up to know there was some kind of bribery or insider corruption going on here.