The FCC's New Robot Rules

**Jordan Schneider** (0:00)
But, so what exactly is in the water at the FCC? Over the past year, the FCC has dramatically reshaped the US import market for drones and robots, not to mention routers and undersea cables. Adam Chan of the FCC joins us to discuss what has gone into these regs, what their aims are and how they may evolve in the future. Aqib Zakaria of ChinaTalk co-hosts today. Adam, welcome to ChinaTalk.

**Adam Chan** (0:29)
Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you both so much for having me. Glad to be here.

**Jordan Schneider** (0:34)
So the FCC and National Security. People don't appreciate this, but this dates back to like, the founding mandate of you guys. We've got a big resurgence, a renaissance perhaps.

**Adam Chan** (0:49)
Communications Act of 1934, Section 1, establishes the FCC. One of two purposes is for the purpose of national defense.
And so right there, from the beginning, there was kind of a national security focus in the FCC's mandate. That mandate is still there. And I think you've seen actually just over the last decade, like a sort of growing role for the FCC and National Security. Chairman Carr, obviously, national security has been his priority for years. And so I think he's brought that focus to the chairmanship for the first time. You know, he brought me on as sort of a kind of unique person within the chairman's office to just sort of focus on and coordinate on the national security side of things. We've set up this new sort of Council on National Security within the FCC to kind of coordinate a lot of the national security work that the commission is doing across multiple different bureaus and offices sort of within the FCC itself.

**Jordan Schneider** (1:55)
Yeah, it's cool, like, because in the 1930s, it was very much a forward-looking thing to see, like, oh yeah, radios are the future of warfare. And of course, World War II comes, you get the Battle of the Beams, you have, like, radio that enables this sort of, like, you know, battlefield operations at a wide scale, which weren't necessarily possible in the course of World War I. And here we are in 2026 with the FCC on the bleeding edge of technology talking to us about robots and drones.
Let's start with robots, since this was the latest thing you guys do. Maybe walk through the timeline a little bit of, like, how something like this gets on the FCC's radar as a topic that may need some more aggressive regulation and sort of how something like this evolves before we talk through the specific of what's actually in the regulation.

**Adam Chan** (2:52)
Yeah, so I guess I'll wind the clock back probably further than you want me to wind the clock back to...

**Jordan Schneider** (2:59)
I just brought us back to World War I, okay? You can go as far as you want, Adam.

**Adam Chan** (3:04)
Right, okay, there you go. So 2020 and 2021, actually, I think two sort of important years. Congress actually passed two standalone pieces of legislation, right? I think the sort of good governance folks out there who are constantly saying, Congress has to do more, why isn't Congress doing its job?
Actually, sort of FCC authorities represents an example where Congress in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion, I think, with just a handful of no votes in the House passed Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act in 2020, and then the Secure Equipment Act in 2021 that sort of established this new regulatory framework known as the FCC's covered list. The way that works is we have a covered list of equipment and services that is established under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act. In that mechanism, it's actually the FCC. We can't actually update our own covered list. So this is different than, say, OFAC sanctions list or BIS and their entity list or the 1260H list of military companies at the Department of War.
Instead, we require another national security agency or interagency body to actually make a determination that is sort of the legal predicate by which the FCC then updates the covered list and enforces the rules. One of the primary implications of a device or devices being on the covered list means they can't get authorized for import or sale in the United States. I think a lot of people don't know, a lot of people know the FCC for its regulation of spectrum or maybe broadcast media, but also virtually all electronic devices. So any device that emits radio frequency, which is pretty much all electronic devices, need to get FCC authorization before being imported, marketed or sold in the United States. You've probably seen a little FCC logo on a lot of your devices, but as part of that, that also gives us the tool to shut off new models of devices from coming into the country. So that's sort of broad overview of the FCC's covered list and what the tools are. I think obviously you've seen the covered list used a lot over the last few years. Most recent action just last week was on advanced robotic devices, sort of think kind of mobile robots generally and power inverters.