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?

I hate to say anything that would defend any of this, but cheap Chinese routers are very prone to security issues. There’s a guy that has a youtube channel built arond taking apart and reverse engineering all kids of electroncis. He’s found some pretty bad stuff in generic routers, static logins, telemetry sent home, remote executable code in the admin portal while not logged in.

I agree there’s a lot more here they hope to gain, and that those gains are their primary objective, but there are some real issues from consumer network electronics.

If I read this right it goes beyond the cheap no-name Chinese stuff that we hopefully all know to avoid by now. This would prevent US companies from outsourcing manufacture to foreign countries, which pretty much all companies do at this point