Auslandsrouter

Wenn Namibia Investitionen eines weißen Milliardärs ablehnt, können die USA auch ausländische Router verbieten – aus, nun ja, Sicherheitsgründen:

The government’s not taking away my router, right?

No, you can keep using your router in the United States of America no matter where it was made — the FCC is crystal-clear about that. You can even go buy a replacement: Consumers will continue to be able to purchase previously authorized routers, it writes.

Is there a recall on vulnerable routers? Do I need to patch them?

Nope, despite the alleged national security threat, no action is required. Consumers currently using covered routers in small and home offices do not need to do anything, writes the FCC. There are no restrictions on existing routers whatsoever, it adds.

What about outside of the home? Will the government stop using vulnerable routers?

No, the FCC says the government can keep using them. And US agencies do buy products from companies it has claimed to be worried about: for example, the Department of Defense and NASA have purchased equipment from TP-Link, which has been investigated by the government but still controls at least a third of the market for US consumer routers.

That’s a whole lot of nothing. So just how bad is this threat?

Here’s a document attempting to justify the ban. Hackers have been able to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes, steal intellectual property, create botnets to disrupt US communications, and more, it claims.

Additionally, routers produced abroad were directly implicated in the Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks which targeted critical American communications, energy, transportation, and water infrastructure.

Sounds bad. But if they’re not recalling the routers, and they’re not fixing them… what the heck is the government actually doing?

It’s banning future routers that haven’t been made yet.

You’re not making a lot of sense.

I warned you this was a story about Brendan Carr, known dummy and anti-consumer FCC chairperson! Specifically, the FCC is keeping new, previously unannounced, foreign-made consumer routers out of the US… unless it decides to exempt them. For reasons. We’ll get to those. [...]

If it’s not about security, why is the Trump administration doing this?

The stated goal of Trump’s isolationist policies is to bring back US manufacturing, create US jobs, and use that independence to ensure the US can make things — if, say, China invades Taiwan and severs the entire tech supply chain that relies on Taiwanese chips.

But practically, this looks a lot more like the latest shakedown. The Trump administration has repeatedly used nebulous national security claims to extract tariffs, personal flattery, and billions of dollars in fees, and this feels like the latest attempt at Gangster Tech Regulation that uses xenophobia as a cudgel. Remember when a ban on Nvidia selling AI chips to China was about national security, yet later Trump approved those sales for 15 percent now 25 percent of the proceeds?

Falls die Erpressung nicht funktioniert, lassen sich wenigstens die angeblichen Ziele durch einen Verzicht auf internationales Routing erreichen. China und Iran haben in diesem Bereich viel technologische Expertise, die sie sicher gern teilen, während Russland wie üblich improvisiert.

Update: Moderne Mobilfunk-Router wird es im US-Staatskapitalismus auf absehbare Zeit nicht mehr geben.