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The Federal Communications Commission has announced that Netgear has been given conditional approval that effectively exempts it from a previous ban on foreign-made networking routers. The conditional approval gives the company a de facto — though potentially temporary — monopoly on the selling and servicing of new consumer routers in the US.
"We're pleased to share that Netgear is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company," Netgear CEO CJ Prober said in a statement. "As a US founded and headquartered company, Netgear is aligned with the vision for a more secure digital future for our customers. For the last thirty years, we have been, and continue to be, committed to leading the consumer router category for the United States and setting the bar for quality, performance, innovation and security."
Both Netgear's lines of Nighthawk and Orbi mesh routers are covered by the approval until October 1, 2027, which appears to mean that the company can continue to offer software updates to both lines and presumably release and sell new models in the future.
The FCC dramatically expanded the Covered List, a collection of communications equipment seen as posing a risk to national security, to cover all foreign-made routers in March 2026
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Find out if your router is banned, when to expect firmware updates and what the latest news on the Federal Communications Commission ban means for your home network.
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Websites that act like a super-chatty colleague who just won't shut up and let you go when a conversation should be over are among the most annoying things on the internet. Google is now doing something about that scourge.
Picture the scene: you look up something on Google Search and — instead of relying on potentially hallucinating AI Overviews — you click through to an actual website for your information. But, when you try to leave the site by hitting the back button, your browser doesn't immediately take you back to the previous webpage. Instead, the website first displays an "oh, while you're here..." page that suggests other content in which you may be interested in checking out or just a bunch of ads.
This shady move that some traffic-hungry websites have adopted is called "back button hijacking." No one in their right mind likes it, and nor does Google.
Under a new policy that 9to5Google spotted, Google will treat back button hijacking as an "explicit violation of the 'malicious practices' of spam policies" alongside the likes of malware. As such, it may punish websites that engage in such practices by treating them as spam and downranking them in search results.
"Back button hijacking interferes with the browser's functionality, breaks the expected user journey and results in user frustration," Chris Nelson, from the Google Search Quality team, wrote in the
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 The FCC just requested more time to review the proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile.
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