A security rule that exempts the threat it names

A security rule that names a threat and then exempts the products already demonstrating that threat is not aimed at the threat. It is aimed at the next generation.

That is what the FCC's "advanced robotic devices" ban, as Gizmodo reported, produces in practice. The Covered List FAQ invokes "unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States" and targets devices "capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement on the ground." Robots already approved for sale in the United States remain on shelves, and current owners may keep theirs. A capability-based definition drawn this wide sweeps in articulating-arm robomowers that have not yet been approved, while leaving the class of connected devices with documented flaws untouched.

The falsifier is already in the public record. A hacker took over a Yarbo automower, one of the connected robots the rule does not block, and drove it over a Verge reporter's body. The same FCC FAQ that names the threat as national security declines to extend its remedy to that device.

The reusable pattern: when a regulator defines a hazard by capability and then writes a grandfather clause wide enough to cover everything currently on sale, the rule protects today's products from tomorrow's competitors, not the country from the named risk.