FCC draft order would bar Chinese labs from testing US-bound electronics

The US Federal Communications Commission is moving to shut Chinese testing laboratories out of the certification pipeline for electronic devices sold in the United States. According to a report on dev.to, which republishes coverage from Hacks.gr, the agency is scheduled to vote on the draft order on October 29, and the new rules would take effect on December 1, 2028.

How the order would work

Before an electronic device can reach US shelves, it has to be tested by an approved laboratory. The draft order conditions that approval on reciprocity: test results would only be accepted from labs in countries that give American laboratories equivalent access to their own markets. More than sixty regions already meet that standard, dev.to reports, among them Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan. Mainland China is not on the list, so its labs would effectively be excluded from US certification work.

An 82 percent dependency

The order targets a strikingly concentrated supply chain. The FCC says 82 percent of the devices it approved for sale in 2025 went through initial testing in China, while agency chairman Brendan Carr has said that fewer than 4 percent of devices undergo testing at labs based in the United States. If the measure passes, the companies behind the vast majority of new products would have roughly two years to move their certification work to qualifying countries or to the US itself.

A pattern of restrictions

The proposal continues an existing trajectory. By the end of 2025 the agency had already blocked certain foreign devices from the US market, a category that has included drones, wireless routers, humanoid robots, energy converters and robotic vacuum cleaners, according to the report. The new order extends that approach from individual products to the testing infrastructure behind every device authorization.

Beijing signals retaliation

China's Commerce Ministry has responded critically, arguing that the rule would deal a serious blow to global trade and vowing to retaliate if it is adopted, dev.to reports. That raises the prospect of countermeasures against US technology interests and a further round of escalation between the two economies.

Why it matters

Certification is the gate every connected product passes through on its way to market, and today the bulk of that work happens in China. Redirecting it inside a two-year window would mean re-qualifying labs, rebooking test slots and renegotiating launch schedules across a large share of the consumer electronics industry, with the cost falling first on manufacturers and ultimately on product timelines. Smaller hardware companies could feel the burden most, since domestic testing capacity is currently minimal, at under 4 percent of devices. The order also marks another step in the regulatory separation of the US and Chinese technology sectors, aimed this time at infrastructure rather than components or finished goods, and Beijing's threatened retaliation suggests the fallout may not stay confined to testing laboratories.