Trump FCC Hilariously Bungles Chinese ‘Drone Ban’

from the real-keystone-cops-shit dept

Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration’s unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president’s sons’ drone investments than it does protecting national security or consumer privacy.

Right on queue, The Verge has an interesting feature on just how easy it has been for some companies to bypass the FCC restrictions. The Trump ban was supposed to encourage drone makers to create devices here in the U.S.; but instead companies are simply setting up the laziest fake companies in the U.S, and the Trump FCC appears too short-handed or incompetent to notice.

So the over-arching impact of the ban has been to create a flood of new companies selling popular DJI-made Chinese drones under a litany of new names. They don’t try very hard to disguise them:

“When software developer and journalist Konrad Iturbe began watching FCC databases for those frequencies, he realized that DJI was preparing to play a grand game of Whac-A-Mole in the United States. Well ahead of the December 2025 drone ban, a host of new companies had suddenly appeared selling barely disguised versions of DJI technology. He dubbed them “DJI front companies.”

To pretend these drones are made in the U.S., the companies use fake U.S. front locations to pretend that the drones are assembled here. Again, they’re not trying very hard to disguise them, and most could have been unearthed with basic Google searches:

“But it’s easier than that. Odyssey Robot declared that its drone was designed, developed, and manufactured at 21 Miller Alley Suite 210 in Pasadena, California. Even a basic Google search can show you that’s not the address of a factory — it’s a coworking space called Industrious that explicitly prohibits members from manufacturing anything onsite.

Odyssey Robot also declared that its drones are assembled at eTak Worldwide Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas. With 80,000 square feet of warehouse space and 15 loading docks, you could theoretically build drones there. But again, a basic Google search would show you that eTak isn’t an assembler; it’s a recycling company that collects e-waste, including old batteries, then sorts and dismantles them.”

Like most of what Trump does, none of this appears thought out very well, and the administration isn’t competent enough to even do basic investigations to enforce its own restrictions. And like elsewhere in the administration, Trumpism rejoices at the idea of dismantling regulators; then throws these weird sorts of complicated demands in their lap expecting productive outcomes.

Again, in a functional world, you’d allow Chinese companies to do business in the United States, but you’d fund, staff, and legally empower your regulators to strictly enforce competition, labor, environmental, and consumer protections. Because that would result in U.S. companies making less money and having to try harder, we instead get this weird jumbled tangle of corruption and buffoonery.

The primary justification for the Trump Chinese drone ban is that these devices pose meaningful privacy and national security risks. But there’s been absolutely no evidence presented by the administration supporting this allegation. There is, however, ample proof that administration greed, corruption, and incompetence has been indistinguishable from a foreign attack.

Filed Under: ban, chinese, drones, fcc, hardware, made in the U.S., trump

Companies: dji