The policy that EFF just advocated on their blog and the business outcome the NETGEAR CEO just announced are the same policy and the same outcome. And that’s a very bad thing. The consumer is the justification in both cases and the beneficiary in neither.

Whether their combined failure is coordination or convergent interest doesn’t matter. Both organizations take an externally imposed condition and narrate it as evidence of their own virtue.

• NETGEAR can’t sell new routers without a government waiver? Then the waiver becomes proof they’re trustworthy.
• EFF can’t generate traffic on X? Then they leave claiming it as proof they have standards.

These are identical and disappointing because they convert an unjustified constraint into a credential.

EFF’s position on router bans protects the same move NETGEAR is making to falsely credential itself. EFF argues for product-by-product evaluation instead of a geographic ban. NETGEAR is the poster child for that argument: a US-headquartered company manufacturing abroad that would sail through a Cyber Trust Mark certification while being caught in a geographic ban. EFF’s “better policy” argument backs up the literal corrupted regulatory environment where the NETGEAR letter from their CEO makes sense.

To our Valued Customers:

We’re pleased to share that NETGEAR is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company. We hope this recognition gives you added peace of mind — knowing that the network powering your home meets rigorous standards.

First of all, my name isn’t “our Valued Customers”. Did someone in China write this?

Second, “conditional approval” is a waiver from a blanket ban, not recognition or endorsement. It says “we licked boot” or “we kissed ring” and basically nothing more. The “transparency” process requires full management structure disclosures, supply chain disclosures, and a plan for onshoring manufacturing. None of that is real security. It’s basically a hostile roadmap for the Trump family to exert control over private companies. There’s no mention from NETGEAR how they navigated Andrew Jackson levels of federal corruption, and nothing has been proven about consumer safety let alone a security certification.

Third, at the risk of repeating myself, “rigorous standards”? What? I see none.

The traditional EFF position on this would frame Trump’s blanket ban on foreign hardware as overreach, full stop. Instead, their response has been to swallow expanded government authority and loss of liberty. Because why? Are they worried about certain forms of hardware or software being among the good stuff, justifying tailored controls? What proof of any gain in security do they need to prevent overreach?

Let me put it like this. The EFF says we can’t narrowly tailor speech to block Nazis. We have to let even the most heinous and deadly intent for genocide flow on networks. They take a reverse granular approach to find and support Nazis at risk of being held accountable, setting them free to do more harm. However, Cyber Trust Mark is suddenly their granular, case-by-case government evaluation standard we should get behind for devices that control speech? Why not apply that logic to content on them? The Cyber Trust Mark literally could judge whether the router is capable of filtering Nazi speech.

The Cyber Trust Mark evaluates a product’s security properties on a case-by-case basis. Content moderation evaluates speech properties on a case-by-case basis. How different are they?

Hello, is this thing on? Can you hear me?

Is your router blocking me? I joke but UK Virgin routers literally block this blog by default as unsafe content because… I talk about Nazis being bad. That’s true.

EFF champions and rejects the same thing without a logic to sustain the contradiction. The router that passes Cyber Trust Mark certification could enforce the content standards EFF says nobody should enforce. The hardware and the speech run through the same device, and EFF has now argued for granular government authority over the device while arguing against granular authority over what flows through it.