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Lawmakers are weighing an FCC ban of DJI that could ground the company’s drones entirely.
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After moving to ban TikTok in the US, the federal government could target the China-based DJI next. A report from The New York Times highlights a bill advanced by the House of Energy and Commerce Committee last month that could ground DJI’s fleet of drones across the country.
If passed, the Countering CCP Drones Act would add DJI drones to the FCC’s list of equipment covered by the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019. This bars communications equipment or services that “pose a national security risk” from running on US networks. It also prevents companies from using federal funding to purchase banned equipment. Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE are already included on the FCC’s list.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) first introduced the Countering CCP Drones Act in 2022. She tells the NYT that government agencies have found that DJI provides information about “critical infrastructure” in the US to China. “DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America.”
The government has already taken action against DJI before. In 2020, the US Department of Commerce put DJI on its Entity List, preventing US-based companies from exporting technology to DJI. The US Treasury later added DJI to its Chinese Military-Industrial Complex list over reports its drones are used to surveil China’s Muslim Uyghur minority, while the Department of Defense put DJI on a blacklist of its own in 2022.
In a blog post published in March, DJI says the lawmakers backing the legislation “continue to reference inaccurate and unsubstantiated allegations regarding DJI’s operations, and have amplified xenophobic narratives.” The company also says DJI hasn’t “engaged in activities that violate or abuse human rights” but notes that it doesn’t have “control over how our products are used.”
Scrutiny of Chinese-made products has only ramped up in recent weeks. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed a bill that will ban TikTok from operating in the US unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests the app in nine months. The House could vote to move forward with the Countering CCP Drones Act in the next month or so, according to the NYT.