If you're a manufacturer or other innovator looking to find new and profitable uses for the latest humanoid and quadruped robots, or a developer of solar-power farms, last week's action by the U. S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban foreign imports of new models of both categories of goods has hit you where it hurts.
At first glance, seeing the FCC ban certain types of hardware that nominally have nothing to do with communications sounds odd, like watching the Federal Reserve trying to stop Madonna concerts. But FCC chair Brendan Carr knows where the levers of power are in his agency, and he's manipulated them in a way that is technically legitimate, though questionable on a larger scale. Virtually all electronics sold in the U. S. needs an FCC seal of approval, and without such approval, it can't be sold.
Solar-power farms use a technology called power inverters—circuits and systems that take the varying amount of raw DC power produced by solar panels and convert it into a form of AC that will smoothly mesh with the standard AC power grid. Many of these devices have features that allow communications with them over the internet. The nominal concern is that there might be rogue software in the inverters that could be used by an offshore miscreant to cause massive power blackouts remotely, for instance. (Some types of inverters don't connect to the internet, and they are not covered by the ban.)
No such software has ever been found, but that doesn't mean it's not there. Anyway, the subtext hidden under the nominal reason for the ban is that Chinese manufacturers dominate both the humanoid-robot and solar power-inverter markets. Banning newly-designed products of these types from China will cut off the U. S. market for these goods. Evidently the hope is that such trade restrictions will move China in a direction more favorable to U. S. trade goals, whatever they are.
But increasingly, trade and tariff restrictions are beginning to look like efforts to cut off one's nose in order to spite one's face. By the time the tiny U. S. manufacturing base for power inverters grows to fill some of the huge demand, many solar projects will be slowed or halted. Politically, that would be just fine with the present administration, which has already displayed an animus against renewable energy in other ways.
The wider question ethically is whether protectionism in high-tech goods is a good thing for the U. S. or not. While there are things to be said on both sides of the issue, a recent article by Daniel Foster in National Review throws a historical light on the situation. Briefly, the rise of protectionism may be only one symptom in a geopolitical crisis that is just now getting under way.
Foster looks to history to find a relationship between the well-being of international trade and power balance among nations. During periods such as the late Victorian era or the Cold War, when a single nation exerts hegemonic power over the globe (Britain or the U. S., respectively), conditions are favorable for free trade enforced, explicitly or implicitly, by the "hegemon" in charge. This idea is borne out by the great expansion of manufacturing and consumer-goods availability during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution from 1850 to 1916, and during the post-World-War II era from 1950 up to about 2000.
But when the dominance of a single power declines and some nations begin to feel that their time in the sun is running out, each nation feels like it has to look out for itself first, because the formerly dominant power has forsaken it. With the whiplash-inducing foreign policy that the U. S. has followed under President Trump, one can scarcely blame any other nation for feeling that way now.
And as the night follows the day, Foster claims that a prominent feature of "multipolarity"—the lack of any single dominant nation—is going to be a rise in protectionism around the world. And that's pretty much what we're seeing now.
Things haven't deterioriated to the extent that U. S. products can't find markets abroad at all, but in the confusing tit-for-tat world of tariffs, farmers and other producers of U. S. goods have suffered losses already, with more likely to come. The argument going back to Adam Smith that free trade is better for all parties, other things being equal, is still valid. If I can make needles and need thread, and you can make thread and need needles, it's silly for each of us to try to do both jobs, one of them badly, when trading between experts can result in mutual benefit.
But if the geopolitical winds are blowing against free trade, then the specific actions of the FCC against two specific products appears to be only one more straw blowing in that wind. One can quibble about the way it was done. Arguably it is a misuse of the agency's authority to withhold approvals of new designs, not because they would realistically cause communications problems, but for some other reason.
This is not the first time the FCC has banned categories of technology for reasons that are just as political as technical. The giant Chinese telecomm manufacturer Huwei has been subject to import bans for many years, out of a concern that Chinese monitors could use its phone systems to spy on the U. S.
But that is not as much a stretch as it is to think that Chinese controllers would jump in one day and disable all the production lines using their robots, or all the solar farms using their inverters. We are living in an interconnected world, for good or ill, and if we start getting too paranoid and pull up the drawbridges that connect us to other countries, where do you stop?
Foster closes his article with the prediction that a world of protectionism and unstable touchy governments likely to take proactive military action will be a world that is poorer and more dangerous than it has to be. And he's probably right about that. While we can make some progress trying to restart U. S. manufacturing in neglected areas, it may not make up for what we've lost. And that may take some getting used to.
Sources: The Associated Press article by Chan Ho-Him "US bans foreign-made humanoid robots, targeting China over national security," appeared in numerous news outlets and can be found in its original form at https://apnews.com/article/china-us-humanoid-robots-ban-tech-c9f5e3c94d91d00eff3b61b141fab366. Daniel Foster's article "Something Is Going to Happen" appeared on pp. 29-33 of the September 2026 issue of National Review. I also referred to an article in PV Magazine at https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/07/28/fcc-bans-foreign-produced-solar-inverters-grid-lockout-begins-today/ and the Wikipedia article on Brendan Carr.
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