Technology

The cool thing is that you can make basically any combination of parts into a router if you install Linux or BSD on it. Not terribly helpful for end user consumers that will get shafted by this, but at the end of the day it’s just a small computer.

Otherwise, smuggle some “foreign routers” in from Mexico or Canada like it’s the prohibition era?

This seems awfully convenient for everyone, but the consumer.

So you now can be absolutely certain that Netgear is actively and openly giving fascist authoritarians what they want.

At least before you could be fairly certain it was just the secretive three letter guys that roughly knew what they were doing at least. Now it's even the blatant dumb fucks in charge.

Definitely will have no backdoor or monitoring installed as default.

Not surprising . . . . .and this still does nothing to help domestic network device production in the US, since Netgear outsources their manufacturing to Taiwan.

TrendNet is far superior and based on Torrence anyway. Netgear and Linksys are junk anyway. Get yourself an open hardware platform, or something that can run OpenWRT. Skip the corporate manufacturers who all kind of suck.

It's not clear what makes Netgear's currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro.

This is all evidence that it's not really about safety. It's a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA. It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it's easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.

Do they run openwrt?

Sounds like a non-tariff barrier to trade that other countries should bring up in trade negotiations.

Er, there’s at least 5 consumer router manufacturers that meet the new requirements. Interestingly, one of them is TP-Link.