This spring the United States banned all future foreign-made consumer routers — in effect, all future routers — unless manufacturers could convince the government they were not a national-security threat and submit “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States.” As of September 9, Asus has an exemption, just in time to bring its first Wi-Fi 8 routers to the US market.
What Asus will not say is how it got it. The company has not publicly announced any plan to move manufacturing to the US, and it would not confirm to The Verge whether it submitted such a plan at all. A spokesperson initially offered a carefully worded statement: “ASUS has submitted the required plan to the FCC and is working with trusted manufacturing partners to support our future networking product portfolio in the U.S.” When The Verge repeatedly asked whether that meant equipment made in the United States rather than equipment for the United States, the company went quiet — more than 12 days without an answer.
The episode illustrates how the ban works in practice. According to The Verge, the FCC does not ask companies a single question about security to grant an exemption; the criteria are about where routers are made. Nor is the agency testing individual products for vulnerabilities — Asus received a blanket exemption covering all of its future routers through March 2028. Security researchers and critics have argued the policy is industrial policy wearing a security costume.
The underlying tension is structural: very few consumer products are made in the United States today, for a long list of economic reasons, and router manufacturing is concentrated in Asia. Requiring US manufacturing as the price of market access therefore pushes companies either to build stateside or to negotiate exemptions without public commitments. Asus’s silence leaves customers, competitors and regulators unable to tell which route it took — which may be exactly the point.
