Here's That Detailed US Manufacturing Plan: "Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand"

TL;DR: The FCC approval queue kept moving. Eero got waved through. Nobody announced any US manufacturing plans. I went and checked the SEC filings. Funny story. Also: who exactly does the government trust, and why?

The queue is still moving.

Since part two, Amazon's eero joined the approved list — every product in the eero and Amazon Leo lineup, approved through October 2027. Same process. Same result. Same explanation from the Department of War: the devices "do not pose risks to US national security."

No criteria. No methodology. No elaboration. Three approvals now, three identical non-explanations.

The FCC's published approval guidelines formally require applicants to submit a detailed, time-bound US manufacturing plan, committed capital expenditures, financing details, expected timelines and milestones, and quarterly progress updates post-approval.

That's not a suggestion. That's the stated criteria.

So I went looking for the manufacturing commitments. Netgear is a publicly traded company. If they had committed to a major capital investment in US manufacturing, that's a material fact — legally required to appear in SEC filings.

A few outlets noticed Netgear hadn't announced any manufacturing plans. The Verge flagged it. 9to5Mac raised an eyebrow. Nobody pulled the actual filing.

So I did.

Here's what the 8-K Netgear filed with the SEC after receiving their approval says about their manufacturing:

That's the whole filing. Indonesia. Vietnam. Thailand. No US factory. No capital expenditure commitment. No timeline. No milestones. Nothing that looks remotely like a plan to onshore anything.

One of two things is true. Either Netgear submitted a detailed manufacturing commitment to the FCC that they are simultaneously not disclosing to their own investors — which would be its own interesting legal situation — or the manufacturing plan requirement was effectively waived and the real approval criteria were something else entirely.

Nobody is saying what the actual criteria were.

I'm not saying they filed paperwork that didn't exist just to get a stamp of approval.
Not at all.
Total coincidence, I'm sure.

Amazon hasn't filed anything with the SEC about the eero approval — at least not yet. To be fair, eero is small enough relative to Amazon's total business that they may not be required to. Which is either a reasonable explanation or a very convenient one, depending on your mood.

Worth checking back on. Contestant number four is probably already in the queue.

Then there's Adtran — the Alabama-based enterprise networking company most consumers have never heard of. Their press release actually mentions "continued investment in US-based manufacturing capabilities" and "US-led software development." They make carrier-grade enterprise routers sold to ISPs, not consumers. They're headquartered in Huntsville. They appear to actually have US manufacturing.

Adtran makes complete sense.

Which means we now have a control group. The process can produce a coherent result. One out of three isn't bad, depending on what you were actually optimizing for.

Stand back and look at who got approved and ask why.

Adtran — legitimate enterprise vendor, real US manufacturing, sells to ISPs not consumers. Makes sense.

Netgear — US headquartered, manufactures in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand per their own SEC filing, zero public manufacturing commitment. Also approved. Probably because as we covered in part two, they're already in the server cabinets.

Eero — subsidiary of Amazon, which runs AWS GovCloud and holds billions in federal cloud contracts. So embedded in government infrastructure that approving their router subsidiary is almost bureaucratically inevitable. The DoD review of eero probably went something like:

Nobody at the Department of War is going to be the person who flagged Amazon's hardware. Because then somebody has to explain to a very senior person why Amazon is either threatening to pull their cloud instances or calling their lawyers over breach of contract. That career move doesn't end well.

Three approvals. One legitimate. One because they're already in the building. One because you don't tell Amazon no when Amazon runs your classified workloads.

Starlink was held up early in this saga as the obvious safe harbor — American-made, presumably fine. Turns out some current Starlink routers are made in Vietnam.

No explanation has been offered for why that's different.
I'm sure there's a very good reason.

DJI's constitutional challenge to the drone ban — which uses the exact same FCC mechanism as the router ban — just got more concrete. Their April brief put $1.56 billion in projected 2026 losses on the record. 14 existing products voided. 25 planned launches blocked.

Their reply to the government's opposition is due May 11. If DJI's former-Solicitor-General legal team can force any transparency around the classified evidence the Pentagon is using to justify these bans, the precedent extends well beyond drones. Same Bureau. Same Covered List. Same no-vote, no-review process that produced three approvals with no public explanation and one SEC filing that says Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Watch May 11.

The approval queue keeps moving. The SEC filings keep saying what they say. And the set of people with both the standing and the incentive to demand a real explanation remains approximately empty.

All this has happened before. It's still happening.