If US manufacturers (or manufacturers in allied countries) do this, legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable. Not so with China.

(That is not to say that the FCC change will move the needle on the underlying issue of router security; as some of the ancestor comments have said, lax security practices are common industry-wide, irrespective of country of development/manufacture.)

▲

lmm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable

Maybe in theory. I think the practical chance of enforcing anything meaningful through those legal avenues against a US manufacturer is not meaningfully higher than the chance of doing so against a Chinese manufacturer, so it doesn't make sense to treat them differently on these grounds.

▲

pyrale 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Snowden leak showed that Cisco routers had been altered to enable surveillance [1]. Whether or not the manufacturer is complicit, or how the alteration is performed is ultimately irrelevant to the end user. Ultimately, the only people that got in legal trouble for this were Snowden and people who provided service to him.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

	▲	b112 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Actually it's entirely relevant how, in the context of this conversation. Here, we're discussing product as shipped, not product intercepted and modified. We're discussing if products are shipped secure or not. The Snowden disclosures are important, but not relevant in this case.

▲

mindslight 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable

Oh, sweet summer child. Disclaiming these possible avenues of liability is the main goal of clickwrap "terms of service".