[msbarnett]

I believe he or she is thinking of the FCC proposal regarding software-defined radios.

It was widely (and incorrectly) reported as requiring all routers to have locked firmware, but that's not really the case, and if the proposal were to go forward there are a variety of ways that the SDR could be locked down while allowing firmware updates in general.

It's not clear that the FCC is even going to go forward with it, though; industry pushback was quite heavy.

edit: it looks like they went forward with the guidance, after amending it to be clear they specifically weren't going after open-source firmware

[chatmasta]

TPLink has already started locking down its firmware in response to FCC:

http://ml.ninux.org/pipermail/battlemesh/2016-February/00437...

[msbarnett]

Eh, I'm skeptical that a chat customer-service flunky really has deep insight into high level regulatory-compliance decisions -- especially surrounding regulations that have only been floated as a proposal and which don't, yet, even exist (edit: the guidance seems to have moved forward, but only after amendments making it clear that the FCC specifically wasn't banning open source firmware)

TPLink has always been a shit company when it came to firmware, and routers with locked firmware predate by decades this FCC proposal. I'm not convinced there's a cause-and-effect relationship here.

Edit: Anyway, from the horse's mouth back in Nov 2015 after the comment period closed on the proposal:

"One immediate outcome of this ongoing dialogue is a step we’ve taken to clarify our guidance on rules the Commission adopted last year in the U-NII proceeding. Our original lab guidance document released pursuant to that Order asked manufacturers to explain “how [its] device is protected from ‘flashing’ and the installation of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT”. This particular question prompted a fair bit of confusion – were we mandating wholesale blocking of Open Source firmware modifications?

We were not, but we agree that the guidance we provide to manufacturers must be crystal-clear to avoid confusion. So, today we released a revision to that guidance to clarify that our instructions were narrowly-focused on modifications that would take a device out of compliance. The revised guidance now more accurately reflects our intent in both the U-NII rules as well as our current rulemaking, and we hope it serves as a guidepost for the rules as we move from proposal to adoption."

If TPLink really is locking out firmware "because of the FCC", they've simply misinterpreted things.