The Exemption Mystery: Why the FCC Handed Netgear a Foreign-Made Router Monopoly

As is often the case when no one in Washington wants to ask too many follow-up questions, the news arrived softly. Less than a month after informing the rest of the industry that the identical foreign-made Wi-Fi routers posed a national security concern, the Federal Communications Commission gave Netgear conditional approval on April 13 to continue selling them in the US.

Reading the order gives me the impression that someone believed it would go unnoticed. The following day, Bloomberg discovered it. At first, very few others did.

A vast array of upcoming products, including Nighthawk routers, Orbi mesh systems, cable gateways, mobile hotspots, and more, are covered by the exemption, which is valid until October 1, 2027. It’s reasonable that Netgear still needs to put each device through the standard FCC certification process. However, the practical result is that one company, with its headquarters located in San Jose but producing in Asia like everyone else, suddenly rests comfortably on the right side of a wall that the industry as a whole is gazing at. TP-Link, Asus, Linksys, Eero, and D-Link are all still observing from the sidelines.

The rationale is not fully explained in the FCC’s order. After reviewing Netgear’s application, the Defense Department determined that the products “do not pose risks to US national security,” and that was it.

There is no information, no methodology, and no response to the obvious question: what makes a Netgear router made in Vietnam safer than a Linksys router created next door? Questions have not received a response from the agency. As the “first retail consumer router company” to be granted trusted-vendor certification, Netgear has been turning the occasion into a marketing slogan. There is a lot of effort put into the phrase.

It’s difficult to ignore how uneven this appears. Since almost every router on the Best Buy shelf is manufactured in Southeast Asia, the initial prohibition, which was announced in late March, essentially eliminated the future for almost every router brand sold in America. In Texas, Starlink constructs a few. Beyond that, everyone employs the same small number of contract manufacturers in the supply chain. Therefore, the playing field doesn’t just tilt when one company has an 18-month advantage while its rivals must contend with the possibility of constructing American plants, a multi-year, capital-intensive wager that might never pay off. It falls apart.

From a consumer’s point of view, it’s easy to think the other shoe will fall. The politics of a one-company monopoly are detrimental to everyone, including the FCC, and more exclusions are likely to follow. While Netgear’s next-generation devices continue to arrive on time, shops will have to spend the remainder of 2026 explaining to perplexed customers why the Asus router they wanted last summer isn’t being updated. That has a subtle strangeness to it. The brands tend to blend together, with similar plastic shells, blinking lights, and ambiguous coverage claims, as anybody who has spent time in a big-box store’s routers department will attest. All of a sudden, only one of those crates has a federal seal of approval.

It is much more unclear what will happen after October 2027. According to the FCC’s published guidelines, Netgear may request an extension, but only if it can demonstrate progress on US manufacturing and onshoring plans that were included in the first application. It’s unclear if that refers to an actual Ohio plant or a token assembly line for politically useful photos. The business has its window for the time being. The industry as a whole needs to make a phone call. As is customary, customers are left in the middle, holding a router that continues to function well and asking why a single business might produce the box on the market the following year.