FCC vs the PRC

I mean, Carr has got a lot of coverage for his approach to the media inside the US during Trump's second term, but he's been pretty active in implementing some of the Trump administration's China policy too.

What's been the main way that the FCC under Carr has implemented restrictions on China? And what, and what's been the effect of that?

So you're right, Andrew.

At least in America, Brendan Carr is far better known for this long-standing dispute with the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel than anything to do with China.

But at the same time, he has also quietly transformed his agency, which is pretty small by government standards at least, into this big player in, in China policy.

And the way that he's doing that is through essentially import controls, and he's done so in a creative way, creating bans that functionally target China but don't actually mention China at all.

The way he's done that is by adding different kinds of foreign-made products to an import control list called the Covered List.

And if you're on that list, then Americans and American companies can't buy or import your technology unless they follow some specific rules.

So far, the FCC has added new models of foreign-made drones, routers, power inverters, and different types of robots to the Covered List, and it's followed up those designations with basically a whitelist of companies that can continue importing and selling foreign-made versions of those products in the United States.

Naturally, no Chinese company, whether it's a firm like DJI in drones or Unitree in robots, has gotten onto one of those whitelists.

So voilà, you end up with a reverse-engineered ban on Chinese technology.

Fascinating.

How's China responded to all of this? After all, this seems to run counter to the trade truce that, um, Xi and Trump negotiated last year in, in Busan in S- South Korea.

So I just wonder how they're responding to all of this.

Certainly, China has protested, uh, the FCC's moves on nearly exactly those grounds.

Last month, a spokesperson for China's commerce ministry said the FCC was undermining the deal that Trump and Xi reached in Busan last year.

But it's worth noting that it took a while for China to say anything at all.

There wasn't an official response to the drones measure, which the FCC took way back in December of last year, and there wasn't anything in response to the routers measure, which took effect in March of this year.

And so far, China has responded relatively mildly, uh, with retaliatory measures that mirror some of the FCC's actions.

They've introduced new controls on exports of drones to the United States, for example, and they've also introduced a national security investigation into printers and copying machines, many of which use US software.

And that may well be disappointing for makers of that software, but we haven't seen anything like the big rollout of rare earth export controls that threaten to upend the auto industry ahead of Trump and Xi's meeting in South Korea.

So it's kind of a, a quiet, uh, trade conflict that's going on underneath the radar here.

Noah, one of the things I've learned from reading your stories, editing your stories, and those of our colleagues at The, The Wire China is that often the US government, like many other governments, has different departments, and they're not always necessarily on the same page.

Um, does the way the FCC has acted under Carr actually sort of tie into the approach of other government departments in the US and agencies under this second Trump administration?

There can be quite a divergence.