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The Federal Communications Commission convened its July 2026 Open Commission Meeting this morning at 10:30 AM ET, and the five items on today's agenda amount to the most consequential single session for US communications policy in years. Votes are expected on all five before the commission adjourns. At stake: a nationwide ban on devices containing chips designed by Huawei's semiconductor unit regardless of who assembled the finished product, a spectrum auction framework that could generate tens of billions of dollars and reshape 5G and 6G competition for the next decade, a sweeping overhaul of satellite licensing that ends decades of individualized review, changes to broadband fee disclosures that consumer advocates are calling a rollback, and the first steps toward a stronger database to fight illegal robocalls.
For American consumers, the item with the most immediate supply-chain consequences is not the spectrum auction. It is Item 2.
Huawei's Chip Design Division Is Now on the Banned List — Even Inside Other Brands' Devices
The FCC today is moving to close what the agency calls the "component part loophole" in its Covered List rules. Under the rules that existed this morning, a device built by a third-party manufacturer — a router branded as a US product, a security camera sold under a European label, a smart home sensor assembled in Vietnam — could receive FCC authorization and land on American retail shelves even if its core processor was designed by HiSilicon, Huawei's wholly owned semiconductor subsidiary. That loophole closes today.
The new rules prohibit FCC authorization for any device that incorporates what the commission calls "logic-bearing hardware components" produced by an entity on the Covered List — a category that includes Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, Dahua, Hytera, DJI, and Autel. The key technical distinction is between programmable elements — processors and chipsets that can execute software or firmware — and passive components such as resistors, capacitors, connectors, and screws, which cannot. Passive components are excluded. Everything that carries programmable logic is now prohibited.
HiSilicon, Huawei's chip design unit, has supplied processors not only to Huawei's own smartphones and networking equipment but to third-party surveillance camera manufacturers including Hikvision and Dahua — both of which are themselves on the Covered List — before US export controls took effect. Companies that have been sourcing chips from HiSilicon or other subsidiaries of Covered List firms would need to find alternatives, potentially facing months of redesign, testing, and qualification.
This is not the first expansion of the Covered List, but it is the deepest. The commission added all foreign-manufactured drones to the list in December 2025, banned new Chinese-made consumer routers in March 2026, and expanded its ban to pre-2022 legacy models of Covered List gear in a June 2026 action covering the Covered List expansion timeline. Today's order moves the ban from the assembled-device level to the chipset level. If the accompanying Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is eventually adopted — and the commission is seeking comment on it today — the next step would require every device applying for FCC authorization to submit a full bill of materials naming all entities that produced any component. That would make FCC equipment authorization the first mandatory supply-chain transparency mechanism for consumer electronics in US regulatory history, analogous to the Software Bill of Materials concept that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been advancing for software supply chains.
The FCC estimates the adopted rules will generate approximately $50 million in annual compliance costs while producing national security benefits the agency values at more than $100 million per year, according to the FCC's own compliance cost and benefit analysis. Online marketplaces that list, distribute, or offer unauthorized devices are now covered by the marketing prohibition and will be required to display a device's FCC ID at the online point of sale. The FCC cites Section 302 of the Communications Act as the authority to subject e-commerce platforms to enforcement action — a legal theory that has not yet been tested in court.
What Chinese Law Actually Requires of DJI and Huawei
DJI, the Chinese drone manufacturer that controls approximately 70% of the global consumer drone market, was added to the Covered List in December 2025 and is explicitly named as a Covered List entity subject to today's component-level ban. DJI disputes the designation. Adam Welsh, DJI's Head of Global Policy, said in a May 2026 independent security assessment statement that the company commissioned "confirms what DJI has consistently maintained: our products are secure, our data practices are transparent, and the concerns underlying our FCC Covered List designation are not supported by technical evidence." DJI notes that since June 2024, US drone flight logs are not automatically uploaded to DJI servers, that Local Data Mode allows users to fly with all internet connectivity disabled, and that data is encrypted with AES-256.
The Pentagon, in an April 2026 memo, told a different story. The department said its determination that foreign-built drones pose unacceptable risks to national security and public safety relied on both classified and unclassified intelligence, including a classified annex submitted to Congress — all detailed in reporting on the Pentagon's national security determination. A US court upheld the Department of Defense's national security designation of DJI in a September 2025 ruling; DJI filed its appeal in October 2025.
The structural reason the US government cannot simply take DJI's word for it comes down to Chinese law, not DJI's stated practices. Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law, enacted in June 2017, states that all organizations and citizens "shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law." Article 14 of the same law allows intelligence agencies to demand assistance. The US Department of Homeland Security has warned that under this law, a Chinese government request could compel a company to provide data about US persons or install backdoors in equipment. Companion legislation — the Data Security Law (2021) and Cybersecurity Law (2017) — imposes data localization and government-access provisions on top of those obligations.
These legal obligations apply regardless of where DJI assembles its drones, where its servers are physically located, or what its privacy policy says. The obligations are structural conditions of operating under Chinese jurisdiction and cannot be waived by corporate policy or foreign incorporation.
What practical steps can drone owners take? Existing DJI drones authorized before December 22, 2025 remain legal to own and fly in the US — only new product sales are blocked. Using Local Data Mode disables internet connectivity from the drone app, minimizing live data transmission risk. Commercial operators in sensitive contexts — energy infrastructure, agriculture near military zones, law enforcement — should consider migrating to US-manufactured alternatives such as Skydio or other domestically produced platforms. Network segmentation (keeping drone control devices on isolated networks) limits the exposure surface. No mitigation fully resolves the underlying legal framework governing the manufacturer.
Upper C-Band Auction: A 5G Super-Band That Could Rival the $81 Billion Lower C-Band Sale
The commission is also voting today on a Report and Order that makes 160 megahertz of Upper C-band spectrum (3.98–4.2 GHz) available for flexible-use terrestrial wireless services via competitive auction, as detailed in the Upper C-band auction order. The order fulfills a statutory directive in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025, which restored the FCC's general spectrum auction authority — that authority had lapsed in March 2023 — and mandated an Upper C-band auction by July 4, 2027.
The strategic rationale extends beyond the 160 MHz being auctioned. The Upper C-band (3.98–4.2 GHz) sits immediately adjacent to the Lower C-band (3.7–3.98 GHz), which the FCC auctioned in 2020 and 2021 in a proceeding that raised approximately $81 billion for the US Treasury. Today's order harmonizes technical and service rules across both bands, creating what Chairman Brendan Carr has described as a "Super Band" — a contiguous 440 MHz block of mid-band spectrum that would be the largest such allocation in the industrialized world. For carriers that already hold Lower C-band licenses, winning Upper C-band licenses would allow spectrum aggregation for higher-capacity 5G deployments and, eventually, 6G.
FCC Chief Economist Jonathan Williams has noted that artificial intelligence is driving new demand for spectrum, as AI model inference and data center connectivity require wireless backhaul capacity that existing mid-band allocations may not be able to satisfy indefinitely.
One complication carries over from the Lower C-band experience. Terrestrial transmitters in the Upper C-band could interfere with aircraft radio altimeters, which operate in the adjacent 4.2–4.4 GHz band. Radio altimeters measure altitude above terrain by bouncing signals off the ground and are essential for instrument approaches and automated landings in low-visibility conditions. The FAA airworthiness directive AD 2023-10-02 determined that radio altimeters "cannot be relied upon to perform their intended function" if they experience interference from C-band wireless operations. Today's order creates a rebate program for aircraft operators and owners who upgrade to forthcoming FAA altimeter standards. The rebate is limited to aircraft operators holding US certificates under FAA Part 119 — foreign-registered aircraft operators are excluded, meaning international airlines flying into the US would not be subsidized to upgrade their equipment. The FAA is expected to issue a final altimeter interference tolerance rule later this summer.
Incumbent Fixed Satellite Service operators currently using the Upper C-band must transition out of the spectrum on a defined schedule: the top 75 Partial Economic Areas must be cleared by December 30, 2030, with wireless service permitted to begin on December 31, 2030, and remaining areas must clear by June 30, 2031, with wireless operations commencing July 1, 2031. The specific financial incentive payments tied to meeting those deadlines are redacted from the public draft of today's order.
Satellite Licensing Gets Its First Overhaul in a Generation
The third major item replaces Part 25 of the FCC's rules — governing satellite and earth station licensing since the era when geostationary satellites were rare and individualized — with a new Part 100 for Space and Earth Station Services. The problem with Part 25 was architectural: every satellite application received bespoke individualized review from the ground up, treating each filing as a novel policy question. SpaceX waited more than 15 months, from October 2024 to January 2026, for FCC approval to upgrade its Starlink network to gigabit speeds.
Part 100 replaces that approach with a "licensing assembly line": a modular, presumptive framework in which an application that complies with the FCC's rules is presumed to serve the public interest and can be granted once found technically compliant, without additional public interest showings. The new framework extends license terms to 20 years for most space and earth stations, removes surety bond requirements for most non-processing round licenses, expands use of certifications in place of detailed technical showings, creates a new Variable Trajectory Space Station license category for satellites with unconventional orbital profiles, and includes, for the first time, explicit statutory processing timelines for applications — providing the schedule certainty that investors committing hundreds of millions of dollars to satellite systems have long demanded. The FCC's Space Bureau has already reduced its application backlog by approximately 43% during 2025 and an additional 15% in the first five months of 2026, according to the agency's Build America Agenda progress report.
One notable carve-out: SpaceX's January 2026 application for a system of up to one million satellites designed to function as distributed AI computing infrastructure remains subject to the old Part 25 review process. The FCC has concluded that novel, large-scale constellations warrant individualized review regardless of the new streamlined framework.
Does the FCC's Broadband Label Rollback Hide What You Pay?
The fourth item modifies the broadband nutrition label rules adopted in 2022, which require internet service providers to display standardized speed, pricing, and fee disclosures at the point of sale. The changes reduce label granularity in several ways. Providers would be permitted to describe label information over the phone in conversational terms rather than displaying the full formatted label. Passthrough fees — local administrative charges that currently must be itemized separately — could be bundled into a single aggregate line item. Providers could display a hyperlink or icon in lieu of the full label at the online point of sale. The requirement to make label contents available in a separate machine-readable spreadsheet would be dropped, as would the obligation to archive discontinued service plans' labels for two years.
Eight US senators formally opposed these changes in a December 2025 letter, led by Senator Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media, and Senator Adam Schiff of California. The senators, in their opposition letter, argued the changes "move in the opposite direction from what the law requires and what consumers deserve" and that Congress gave the FCC explicit instructions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to create the labels. The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, a nonprofit focused on broadband access equity, noted that machine-readable label data allows comparison shopping tools and academic researchers to monitor ISP pricing practices at scale — capabilities the elimination of that requirement would remove.
Supporters of the changes, including the International Center for Law & Economics, argue in their broadband label comments that itemizing location-variable fees creates "clutter that makes it more difficult to focus on total monthly costs, the most decision-relevant figure."
Robocall Database Gets a Proposed Tune-Up
The fifth and final item is a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that seeks comment on strengthening the Robocall Mitigation Database, which voice service providers use to certify their anti-robocall efforts. The FCC is proposing clearer definitions of "voice service" and "voice service provider," enhanced applicant screening to prevent bad actors from entering the database, new audit and enforcement tools, and alignment between the RMD and know-your-customer obligations. Unlike the other four items, this is a notice rather than a final rule — implementation is months away at minimum.
What Today's Votes Mean for You
For Americans who own or plan to buy a drone, router, security camera, or smart home device: the chip-level ban means any product with a HiSilicon, ZTE, or other Covered List processor is now off the table for new US market authorization. Devices already authorized before today's vote are not immediately recalled, but their long-term resale value and continued vendor support become uncertain. Commercial drone operators who depend on DJI hardware — which has dominated the US market with roughly 70% market share — face an increasingly narrow window for replacement planning. US-manufactured alternatives exist but do not yet match DJI's product range or price points in every use category.
For wireless subscribers: the Upper C-band auction, expected to conclude by mid-2027, sets the competitive landscape for 5G capacity for the next decade. Carriers that aggregated Lower and Upper C-band spectrum will be positioned to deliver the kind of high-throughput 5G that makes AI-intensive applications viable on mobile devices.
For satellite internet users: the Part 100 overhaul should eventually translate to faster FCC approval of new satellite capacity and services, though the largest constellations — including SpaceX's proposed AI computing network — still face the old process.
For broadband households: the label changes reduce the granularity of fee information available at the point of sale. If you are choosing between ISPs, requesting the full itemized fee breakdown directly from the provider — rather than relying on the label alone — will become more important under the new rules.
Beijing has previously characterized Covered List restrictions as protectionist measures that violate World Trade Organization rules. The FCC has consistently maintained that the restrictions are grounded in independently verified national security determinations, including evidence gathered through the intelligence community. China's National Intelligence Law creates a structural legal obligation for Chinese companies that no privacy policy, independent audit, or corporate assurance can fully override — not because those measures are irrelevant, but because the law's requirements exist independently of what any company chooses to do or disclose.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I still buy and fly my DJI drone in the US?
If your DJI drone model received FCC equipment authorization before December 22, 2025, you can continue to own and operate it legally — the FCC's current rules grandfather previously authorized models. The ban blocks new DJI products from receiving authorization and entering the US market. Flying a previously authorized DJI drone is still legal under FAA rules. What has changed is that new DJI models released after the ban date cannot legally be imported, marketed, or sold in the United States.
What is a "logic-bearing hardware component" and why does the FCC's new rule matter for everyday devices?
A logic-bearing hardware component is a processor, chipset, or other programmable element that can execute software or firmware. The FCC's new rule prohibits authorization for any device — regardless of who assembled it — if its processor or chipset was designed by a Covered List entity such as Huawei's HiSilicon semiconductor unit. Previously, a router or security camera assembled by a non-Chinese brand but using a HiSilicon processor could receive FCC authorization and be sold legally in the US. Under today's order, that is no longer possible. This matters because HiSilicon chips have appeared in third-party products across multiple consumer electronics categories, meaning the ban's reach extends well beyond Huawei-branded products.
The FCC is also proposing to require a full parts list for every device seeking authorization — what does that mean?
The accompanying Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking asks for comment on requiring device applicants to submit a complete bill of materials — a signed list of every entity that produced any component — as a condition of FCC equipment authorization. If adopted, this would be the first mandatory supply-chain transparency mechanism for consumer electronics in US regulatory history. It is analogous to the Software Bill of Materials concept that federal cybersecurity agencies have been advancing for software supply chains. The requirement is proposed, not yet adopted; the public comment process must conclude before it becomes final.
What is the Upper C-band spectrum, and why is the FCC's auction important?
The Upper C-band (3.98–4.2 GHz) is mid-band radio spectrum that sits immediately adjacent to the Lower C-band (3.7–3.98 GHz), which wireless carriers acquired in a 2020–2021 auction that raised approximately $81 billion. Mid-band spectrum is sometimes called "Goldilocks" spectrum because it combines the wide-area coverage of lower frequencies with the throughput capacity of higher ones. By harmonizing the technical rules across both C-band segments, the FCC is creating a contiguous 440 MHz block that carriers can aggregate for higher-capacity 5G deployments. The actual auction for the spectrum licenses is expected to begin by mid-2027.
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