As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company?
Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All their links to the starter kit are dead and only options is to contact sales for enterprise deals.
Skydio exited the consumer market. Their drones had good autonomy and flight characteristics. However, they struggled with wireless link quality due to the use of consumer WiFi, and had much older, inferior camera sensors compared to even contemporary DJI drones. They were also ridiculously loud and inefficient. Their enterprise drones are comically expensive and loaded with nickel-and-dime cloud features.
Parrot drones struggle with the same issues as Skydio (Skydio actually used a Parrot remote controller for their consumer drones), plus their autonomy isn't nearly as good as even Skydio's, the overall drone behavior is "clunky" (slow boot times, slow connection times, non-responsive flight controls), and even basic flight is more challenging.
The main issues plaguing US consumer drones are imaging sensors and wireless link. LTE and other well-suited long range wireless technologies capable of handling speed differential between the station and access point are locked in a vault of patents. Imaging sensors are legendarily impossible to acquire in low to moderate quantities and image sensor parameters are carefully locked behind a billion levels of NDA (thus why even the Raspberry Pi camera is full of DRM).
I assume one of the goals of this is to change that by making it feasible for US companies to compete at least on the domestic market.
Ukraine has shown that having domestic at-scale consumer drone production is a critical military capability. I bet part of the motivation behind this is protectionism to make sure this capability can be built up. Otherwise any war against China starts with China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day, likely with mostly or entirely domestic supply chains, without even going to a war economy, while the US cannot manufacture the same class of weapon at any comparable scale.
>China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day
The US might be able to stop an invasion of Taiwan with just naval and air assets. My guess is that battery-powered drones don't have enough range to be a significant threat against naval assets (even for recon) and don't have enough speed to be relevant against air assets that are not themselves battery-powered drones.
I was on a project that was subject to the cleared UAS list you linked, and I cannot recommend either Parrot (incredibly long boot times, underpowered motors meant it was slow and had poor station keeping in high winds) or Skydio (bad heat management/low thermal cutoffs to the point that during the California high desert summer our unit wouldn't even start due to reporting that it was overheated) at all. So maybe its not too bad that they're no longer for sale.
Any guides or pointers on how to do this myself? Looking into pixhawk seems like most of the options are still pretty obscure.
I own a 3D printer and am not afraid of a soldering iron :)
That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason.
Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.
The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom.
“DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperature and heart rate.”
DJI's response
Technically, DJI suggests using drones for body temperature checks is unfeasible.
Allowing a company that repeatedly violates basic app store rules and exports data to a country with adversarial interests unrestricted access to our infrastructure via drones is highly problematic.
This problematic situation extends in many ways to critical sectors of our economy, including agriculture, energy, defense, etc.
The data collected by these drones is extensive and sensitive. Crop data alone is crucial, and if this information cannot be controlled, it should not be exported.
This stance is not anti-China, but no country should permit unrestricted access to its airspace for surveillance.
Data is the new oil as well, especially with AI. These drone derived datasets are becoming critical path information.
How else can you control the information besides a ban? I LOVE DJI and have several of these drones. But I don’t know how I feel about this because of the problematic data issues. It’s complex and the situation is very difficult.
Its funny because app store rules aren't laws. If we were really concerned about privacy, we'd have our own strong GDPR that mandated privacy and control measures and controls. Banning things doesn't work because the base foundational protections aren't there.
Unconvincing tbh. Research papers have shown that heartrate can be tracked from cameras with well under 4k resolution. Doing it with DJI's excellent camera tech should be quite easy.
As far as US infrastructure, google street view and bing maps seem to be a bigger information disclosure threat but I guess they do blur out faces.
Google street view isn't going to be driving around sensitive government facilites or electrical infrastructure though - and you really can't guarantee no curious citizens will try to fly their dji drone over said facilities. So all DJI needs to do is put in an if(location == government_facility) and sit back and wait for the camera feed from some idiot american.
In 2016, Tesla released the Model 3. When Chinese consumers wanted the most advanced electric vehicles, the Chinese government communicated with Tesla in 2017 about building a factory in Shanghai to produce China-made Teslas. Currently, Tesla is the highest-selling pure electric vehicle brand in China ( Model Y sales in China in December last year were 60,055 volumes
) The intense competition in the electric vehicle market has fostered the development of high-quality Chinese EV brands such as NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, BYD, Zeekr, Xiaomi, Aion... ...
In contrast, in the free and democratic America market, the response to competition in the drone market has been to ban DJI, and the response to competition in the short video market has been to ban tiktok.
Let’s see in ten years which market environment will foster advanced productivity.
A more accurate following of the Chinese model would be for the US to insist that DJI builds its drones for the US market in the US, insist on a partnership with a US company who would then siphon off the knowhow and IP to start building competing products.
The key is to stop rent seeking. Musk pilots the most competitive companies on earth, so of course he isn't scared of China or anyone else, because a truly powerful company takes many dimensions of superiority, not just a few patents.
It's a classic move from corporate America, foreign cars banned if less than 25 years old, high taxes on motorcycles for decades to protect Harley etc...
Probably yes. The industry can fight with quality or price against Chinese bad products and non Chinese good products, but products that are both Chinese and top notch quality are going to dominate the market because of comparatively lower costs.
Now, that law can indeed have some basis, in theory, but tailoring it to a single brand won't achieve much as the Chinese industry can rebrand products at a cost and in times that are a fraction of a fraction of what it takes to any western democratic country to adjust the law against another brand.
On the other hand, they can't make a generic law against say suspicious code running on consumer devices that could be used to exfiltrate personal data, as it would potentially hit every connected device out there, including western branded ones.
My impression is that they (the law makers) are almost facing the wall where they should admit that closed proprietary devices are generally unsafe and bad, but can't because it would hurt the same industry that contributed to their campaigns, so they direct all weapons against the external enemy. "We're good, they're bad", and end of the story.
If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
Drones are national security issues for two reasons -- one is that they could be used for surveillance domestically (similar problem with tik tok) and secondarily drones are now core warfare technology and the US has offshored so much of it's manufacturing capacity (not just for drones, but for all electronics) that the US is at real risk of losing any conflict with china because our supply chains will be absolutely wrecked if China cuts us off, so the US is trying to encourage more domestic production. I think China cutting off exports to the US would be way more devastating to the US economy than the US cutting Russia off from the world banking system was to Russia.
One of the largest drone manufacturers globally and backed by the Chinese government [0] and several Red Families [1]
> why is it being banned
It is very closely connected with Chinese government stakeholders, with worries around privacy and data retention [2].
There is also some lobbying by Skydio and Andruil [3][4].
They are also breaking sanctions against Russia with Russian forces using their drones [5][6] (though the Ukrainians are using them as well), as well as sanctions around Xinjiang [7].
> why should the general public care about this
They are a popular low cost drone option. It might also spark a rise in domestic drone vendors - especially in the industrial and defense space [8].
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Also, can we please have another source. DroneDJ is a DJI specific blog and as such is biased in favor of DJI.
I was looking to replace my GoPro with the DJI Action, but their app was not on the Play-store.
It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
> It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store, especially because their home market (China) doesn't even use the Play Store.
The iOS version of their app is Apple-approved and present in the App Store.
I do research in this space.
Their consumer apps are loaded to the gills with product-manager telemetry (tap/action tracing, etc., think Firebase/Flurry/whatever), and until recently they had a "sync flight logs" feature that would do what it said: give your detailed flight logs to DJI. It was opt-in, but it was easy to do by accident and many years ago there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.
They just removed this feature from US apps this week (too little too late, and too attached to reality and not attached enough to political pandering).
DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front, but sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware (this applies to US-based companies and US intelligence, too, of course).
However, their apps run on their own controllers are generally alright, and their enterprise apps run on their enterprise controllers in Local Data Mode are legitimately clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.
I fly DJI drones all the time using DJI RCs with network credentials forgotten, and I wouldn't hesitate to use one of these for consumer use. For the truly paranoid, use a burner email and a VPN to activate the drone.
I also wouldn't worry about using DJI Enterprise drones with the pro controllers in Local Data Mode for even moderately sensitive applications (infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.).
Of course I wouldn't use one for US military applications, insofar as it would be foolish to use any non-allied electronic device in this way.
ps - note that the analysis in the sibling comments are of older apps, DJI Go 4 and Pilot 1, not the newer flagship apps DJI Fly and DJI Pilot 2. The general theme (tons of dirty analytics platforms) remains the same, but the newer apps use more American platforms (Firebase, AWS-hosted proprietary stuff) rather than Chinese, and the "disable telemetry" and "disable data sync" options generally have fewer bugs now.
> I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store
If that was the case, then why jump through all the hoops of extensive code obfuscation for the Android app? [0]
> DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
Leaving the door propped open for everyone is also plausible deniability for doing bad things.
Juniper also had a “small bug” in their implementation of the NSA-mandated Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator algorithm that just so happened to leak the exact number of state bits onto the wire required to hack any VPN connection.
I don’t know if you’re an optimist or just a kind soul, but the rest of us are jaded for good reasons.
A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information, in the same way my car manufacturer has no business knowing where I drive.
That their “finger slipped” and they “accidentally” made opting out harder should tell you something.
I feel like you're underestimating the average large state actor's ability to employ subtlety when they really care about a long-term foreign intelligence operation.
For example, it doesn't have to be the case that DJI has ever been told to collect data for the CCP. That would be a big OPSEC violation — as soon as anyone in the foreign media learned of it, DJI would be as dead as Huawei or Tiktok.
Instead, it could just as well be that the CCP have left DJI themselves untouched, but have instead manipulated market conditions around them: arranging it so that DJI "just seems to never be able to" hire any security experts; and so that DJI (and everyone else) hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."
>I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front
In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front.
China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI an get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored. Same thing for tiktok and why legislators are killing that too. You're a Chinese company? You ultimately work for the state. No discussion.
China is not the US. People need to stop fitting the way things work in the US to the way things work in China.
Edit: For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.
I haven't used a DJI drone since I got my Spark, so this is a few years out of date, but when I set that up the procedure was incredibly locked down and invasive. You had to install the app, which had to have full access to everything, and which had to have an active internet connection to update the drone firmware. So at the least, it was extorting your physical location, details of any wifi network, access to phone photos, and iirc a bunch of other stuff (like I said it was a few years). The whole way through the app took a very authoritative tone ("do X, do Y, you must do Z") as well. I used a dedicated second hand phone with no SIM card (after initial setup) but it was still uncomfortable and there's no way in hell I'd have allowed the app on my main phone. No idea what it's like now but I'd be amazed if it's more free or respectful of privacy.
I don't think they're a CCP front, and their actual core product engineering is amazing, but my understanding is that like any sufficiently large organisation in China (or any country, I guess) they must comply with government instructions.
What I heard (third hand knowledge) is that the DJI Android software stack can't handle AABs and for some reason it's easier for them to just get people to sideload instead of fixing their toolchain.
Long ago I bought a DJI mavic. I generally don't use apps for any stuff.
I couldn't fly it with the joystick controller that came with it. It said "see app" or something on the controller. It was really annoying but I sent it back.
A cursory web search said it was sending all kinds of location/flight information/etc back to dji continuously.
I thought there would be outrage, but not much.
I think it is sort of annoying that they are going after DJI specifically.
I think congress should be going after device/app privacy itself for all devices/apps in a more fundamental way.
Do we know the official reasons they can't be on Play? All I can find are people speculating, but it would be really nice to know exactly what Google rejected them for.
I don't think "being in the Play store" means something is trustable, it just means you trust Google Play Services and Google with all of your data, and by extension, the US government.
Being located in the US, I am arguably far more concerned about the US government tracking me than the Chinese government. The US government has jurisdiction over me, the Chinese government does not.
> I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
Every Android in America is sold with a rootkit called Google Play Services and it can do absolutely anything on your phone. There is no limit to what Google Play Services can do on your phone unattended or clandestinely.
1.) DJI offers many drones related to infrastructure mapping and maintenance, as well as agricultural tasks. From a national security perspective, it is a non-trivial threat vector for a Chinese company to not only have intimate knowledge of US infrastructure by being their drone supplier, but also by becoming a dependency of US infrastructure. In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
2.) When it comes to protectionism, I'm generally against it, but I have different thoughts when it comes to China. They have banned Uber, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and just make their own versions of it. Then they have absolutely no respect for international laws when it comes to IP. They don't compete economically according to the same rules as everyone else, and don't deserve to be treated the same way.
3.) I have 2 DJI drones. The fact that there is no mention of compensation in this legislature is absurd. Fortunately, I don't rely on these for my business, but imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business. Not only are you grounding the tools that they've already come to depend on, but there isn't an existing viable alternative on the market for many of these tasks.
> In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
That's only an issue if the drone somehow depends on an external Internet-based server, instead of just a plain radio link between the drone and its controller. The law should target that unnecessary dependency, if it exists, instead of banning even standalone drones.
Kudos to you for being able to make the first 2 points fairly despite being personally affected by this. Rare that you'd see that. Most people would start with the 3rd point and try to minimise anything that contradicts.
> imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business.
Unfortunately I suspect this group is already quite small due to the existing heavy-handed regulation of drones for anything other than recreational use. Or they're at least "under the table."
You need a drone pilot's license to legally fly a drone for anything other than recreational use. This has already decimated a lot of the most direct and interesting use cases for us.
In this thread, people not understanding that we've literally watched in the past year as consumer drones with IEDs attached to them have made the $10 million M1 Abrams tanks obsolete and what that means for war and its downstream implications for manufacturing bases.
Although it should be noted that it's not DJI drones doing that damage. They seem to be used for spotting, while more DIY-style FPV drones are the ones blowing up tanks.
Of course, those parts likely also come from sources in China. However, the software is more along the lines of FOSS like ArduPilot or PX4.
All of these politicians who have these completely transactional relationships, I just find utterly gross. I mean, do they have any actual friends? For example, Trump completely disparaged Ted Cruz's wife and father in 2016, Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar" back then, only to do a total 180 and turn into another boot licker.
And if you need a backgrounder on Stefanik, she got elected before Trump, decided she preferred staying in DC to her hometown, sold out her previously-stated principles almost immediately when she saw a chance to gain power, and is now doing as much damage to civil liberties as Nixon and McCarthy ever managed:
She doesn't care about whether the bill does something valid or even whether it survives legal challenges, as long she can use it to score political points. It's a real shame. Congresspeople are supposed to be servants beholden to the public good, not power-hungry sycophants who can't be bothered with the details of governance.
I've never seen her. I've never heard from her locally. You can't fucking find Elise. It's all events in the past. There's never been a townhall up in this portion of her region.
China isn't militarily supporting Russia or Ukraine. Ukraine's drone army is built from cheap Chinese drones. China is neutral. The argument that it hasn't sanctioned Russia means it is a party to the war on Russia's side is an argument of the form "if you aren't with us, you are against us." But then, you'd think the US would levy the same kind of vitriol at e.g. India.
China is led by a General Secretary of the Communist Party's central committee. Taiwan and China are recognized by the United States by international treaty as one country.
China is "attacking" the US? The US and China are in economic warfare (an economic war started by the United States under the Trump Administration). The reason for this is the US sees China's economic rise as a threat to its global position.
They shouldn't be; they use DJI basebands, so banning DJI and their affiliates using the FCC Covered List should also prevent Anzu from getting new FCC equipment approvals. It's unclear whether the FCC would revoke existing approvals, although it certainly seems like what Congress wants. And if they do, it's unclear if they'd go to the effort to hunt down Anzu and Cogito, but on paper, they certainly should.
By the way, there's no US-written software on Anzu drones. They're just green Mavic 3 Enterprises with a phone app that integrates the DJI SDK. Flying a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise and an Anzu Raptor using Aloft Air Control will produce exactly identical results in terms of American-ness and data transfer.
DJI owns Hasselblad. It will be interesting to see if Hasselblad get hit by this as well. Not that I want to see it, just curious if there may be collateral damage.
So the amendment/act [0] makes a change to "47 U.S. Code § 1601 - Determination of communications equipment or services posing national security risks" [1] to add DJI. Although the direct inclusion of an entity in US code is odd, it does follow from the 2019 NDAA (Sec. 889. Prohibition on certain telecommunications and video surveillance services or equipment. "...Huawei Technologies Company or ZTE Corporation...") which included based on that bill's text.
This protectionism is just getting ridiculous now. You can't ship most manufacturing jobs overseas and expect china not to out compete eventually. Yes they are stealing ip, who cares, japan did the same thing. Trying to stop in now is just going to cause another depression.
Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
If DJI is doing nasty things, prohibit the nasty things DJI doing in the law, not the brand. Then condemn DJI if needed. How do this law protect from any DJi competitor doing the same stuff (or even a spinoff company through a complex scheme)?
I wonder, though, could this be considered an unconstitutional bill of attainder? That's an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, without a trial. Article I, Section 9, iii: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed".
That’s been my thought since the TikTok ban as well. It was meant for people, but this for sure seems to meet the spirit of the prohibition. Does it actually violate it? We’ll have to see once the cases work their way through.
I assume because the US doesn't care about the potential data collection of drones flying around as long as they have the data, they just don't like it when China has it.
> Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
People who want to move this country even further in the direction of Rule By Law, as opposed to Rule Of Law.
This sort of thing works out well for the already-connected and corrupt, and it's not like anyone in 2024 is deluded that we make principled decisions on anything.
There is no viable competitor to DJI for consumers when it comes to the software side especially -- DJI software is miles ahead of the other drone producers (on-drone and their mobile apps).
The Huawei ban's impact on smartphones was mostly a side effect. The real target was wireless infrastructure. Any time spent analyzing the phone stuff is a waste, that was all mostly collateral damage as we tried to prevent Huawei from dominating our domestic 5G (and related) networks.
> Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
I guess that depends on what the goal is? If a foreign company is the market leader, banning it allows US companies to take over the domestic market without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
Which US companies are going to have a $500 competent consumer drone with a great camera, solid reliability, and top of the line ease of use to sell me the day this ban goes into effect, or even 5 years down the road? The answer is none.
There are no US companies capable of serving this market. None can produce the product DJI did and consumers will abandon the market before they'll transition to a product that costs twice as much for half the value.
This is not like smartphones or laptops or televisions or any of that, it's not needed, it's a total luxury and hobby for 95% of buyers. They will walk before adopting a shitty US-based alternative and the market will shrivel and die.
So, this is a fine policy if hurting US consumers by destroying an entire field of hobby to thumb our noses at China is the goal. It's a broken policy of stimulating a US alternative is the goal. To accomplish the latter, subsidies and reasonable tariffs are the right approach, not bans.
> without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
This assumes end users will accept an inferior product. Without some additional pressure - subsidies or hell even nationalism - a ban alone won’t magically create on par US companies.
China has been doing this for decades so we don’t need to guess here. They seem to always bring much broader societal, financial and other support not just restrict access
We should ban Creality and Bambu Lab too. Imagine if we also strangled consumer 3D printing for dumb reasons. You should only be allowed to print on $100k+ Stratasys for natsec reasons, of course.
Creality/Bambu killed more small companies (and Reprap) than it bothered Stratasys IMHO.
But yes...there very well may be a security concern there too. Bambu sends/receives info from the companies servers. At least once this has allowed a supposed firmware update to cause a large number of printers to start printing uncommanded. This is a major safety and security risk and it was largely ignored by the consumer community due to Bambu "making things easier".
So yeah...perhaps we should start looking into these companies...and exactly where their subsidies do/may come from.
DJI isn't just a drone company. They've been actively moving into audio/video production very rapidly. If this ban sticks, they will lose their FCC license, and your Pocket 3 camera (or any DJI device) will no longer be able to connect to your phone.
Maybe I never got to the part of an economics education that covers exceptions having stopped at intro econ, but don't trade wars almost always lead to bad times?
Wider implications beyond just the consumer drone market. My company and several of our clients (who are all much larger companies than us) have $100,000s - $X,000,000s of DJI enterprise drones, batteries, and payloads (Matrice 300, 350, zenmuse p1 camera, etc)
I know the bill still has to go through the senate, but this is going to be a sore subject for a lot of American companies who use DJI equipment.
No reason for the Senate to not vote it into law. There are no lobbyists telling them to do otherwise. In an election year, they desperately need to show that they can get something, anything passed.
I wish there was a way for the public to vote on all of these bills! We need to be able to give feedback to these senators about what the public wants. And to me the public wants DJI.
That's how banned book sales work in China: the books don't sell well until the government bans them, and then everyone wants them after that (and can easily get them since China's black market is pretty open).
Once DJI gets banned, a new consumer company will come around and will happily import all the parts from China then slap on a substantial markup. I'm placing bets that DJI will somehow whitelabel the drones.
It's funny the lengths the US public and political machine will go to avoid blaming the business sector that outsourced all of everything to China over the last few decades. Chinese manufacturing got the tools and know-how to build these devices and have done a great job iterating on that knowledge across many different sectors and product categories.
Oh yes someone who calls out US stupidity must be earning 50 cents.
Funny how you forgot the (effective) ban on Chinese EVs (sorry "100% tariff only") too. Let's not even get into the ban of other manufacturers such as Huawei.
So, more $100,000 Elon Cybertrucks are going to save the planet from the climate crisis we are facing?
I stand by my question: what is the big plan here? Try to be somehow competitive by piece by piece banning the place you literally built up with your excessive imports?
Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?
Nothing, they could even buy it in US... the ban is on Chinese company using Federal Communications Commission frequencies and they have all the good ones or even all of them.
I can't imagine what it would take for them to enforce the ban, so people would highly likely continue using and buying DJI products.
Since the control apps tap into GPS so they know when you're in a restricted zone, the gov't could simply make them mark all of the US as a restricted zone and the drone will never fly. I have one, I'm not happy about this.
This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were. GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
The drone would look it up through a connected cell phone using a web service like this:
I think (hope) it would be a hard sell to send different data from faa.gov to DJI drone lookups versus other brands, but on the other hand this complete brand ban is apparently politically possible.
The US doesn't care if Americans buy them from Canada. The point of the law is to encourage US made drone manufacturing, because we'll need it during a war.
They don't care if a drone here or there slips thought, it's irrelevant to the point of the law.
Slightly off-topic, but it reminds me of the Tesla restriction around governmental buildings in China last year, citing the same set of reasons (data collection, national security, etc.). It seems that the restriction was lifted recently [1].
Is this going eventually impact TV companies like LG , Samsung and such? I bet there are more Chinese made devices already spread worldwide because of reasons….
> Oof, perhaps time to stock up if you rely on this equipment.
(I didn't read the bill, but based on the article alone...)
Looks like it's a tentative ban on usage, not sale nor ownership.
And currently with no "pre-ban" grandfathering-in, nor compensation for US people who'd be affected by the ban (e.g., investments in equipment, operations disrupted, migration costs).
Once again the US government dances around the broader issue of data privacy.
I understand it’s easier to get people to vote against Chinese products in the US on data privacy concerns but it’s irritating that Congress isn’t working on legislating rules for products that are not Chinese as well.
Keep seeing DJI drones at local police dept open houses. They even have a "drone unit" that specializes in SAR, hazardous recon type scenarios. Given extensive existing use throughout US local law enforcement, fire depts etc, not sure if this will actually happen.
Or maybe they all mass-migrate to Anduril solutions?
It's going to be a disaster for SAR, policing, firefighting, and all kinds of public good. The whole thing is an incredibly shortsighted move that will literally cost lives.
The goal, I think, is that these organizations will migrate to Skydio or BRINC (as they have the only reasonably viable drones for most of these use cases IMHO).
The reality is that they'll buy Autel (just as Chinese as DJI) or just keep using DJI and hoping the FCC Radio Police don't show up, which is probably a safe bet. Anduril don't really sell into this space.
In five years the US will have a prolific consumer drone industry and will have hardly skipped a beat. This is a good move for the US from a long-term security and economic standpoint. There are some short term pains but long-term this is good.
Did you get paid 50 cents to write all these posts?
There’s no reason for the US to allow any business with a nation that not only has named the US as an enemy state multiple times, but also regularly breaks international law against friendly countries, for example, in the south China sea. The US and European Union should formally sanction China.
Does this just ban importing DJI products (bad enough) or does it also ban owning and/or flying a DJI drone you already own? (really bad if that's the case, but also would be difficult to enforce)
It adds DJI to the FCC Covered List, meaning they can't get new FCC approvals. The FCC could choose whether or not to revoke existing FCC Equipment Authorizations for existing DJI drones.
If they do revoke the existing Equipment Authorizations, then the drones become illegal RF transmitters and wouldn't be legal to fly, although enforcement would border on impossible.
> There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there?
From a practical perspective, it could be at any time. China hasn't embraced the free market the same way the west does, and doesn't give private companies the same degree of autonomy you're used to seeing elsewhere. Broadly speaking, if the Chinese government needs a company within their jurisdiction to cooperate with them, they can enforce cooperation.
As an example, even with publicly held companies, the Chinese government will take out "special management shares" that give the government positions on the board with unique power to direct management within a company and direct management decisions. It's not like the West where companies have theit own management that might disagree with the government and battle in court. In China, the government can simply become the management of a company.
We can ban DJI all we want, but our military or the US itself is declining nonetheless if we don't solve our manufacturing problem like we still produce those lame suicidal drones rogue1 that has inferior spec to DJI Mavic 3 yet charges fucking $94K a pop, like the cost of making a canon shell is 10X more than Russian even though Russia is known to be one of the most corrupted country in the world, like we don't have a prosperous manufacturing industry to rely on so the cost of a specialized screw could be hundreds times more than what what China produces.
I mean, we can have the best service industry in the world, but eventually we have to produce good things, no? Or in the worst case, if there's war, what do we depend on? Traders and programmers and lawyers and waiters? Are we sure we could out produce the Axis 20:1, like building a warship every 3 days (or a week?)?
It pains me to see the US decline just like the Roman Empire did.
I'm not going to miss drones. Too many drone operators abused them to violate peoples expectation of quiet or privacy, or to harass animals, and were ignored or outright supported by other users. Laws restricting specific areas or behavior are extremely hard to enforce compared to an outright ban.
The most common defense was violating your privacy wasn't technically illegal. Well, now that it is going to become illegal, don't expect my support. This should serve as a reminder to people with niche hobbies not to make everyone hate you.
The competition is literally an arm of the state of China, which is able to subsidize the business and send prices through the floor. Why would any entrepreneur choose to compete with a state-backed enterprise? And by the way, have you heard of tariffs? We literally "ban" all kinds of products with very high tariffs.
Banning foreign drones just gives domestic drone companies even less incentive to compete on quality. If the foreign drone company is benefiting unfairly from subsidies, then the way to beat them is to subsidise US drone companies, creating fair competition.
Sad to see the US fall further into nationalism and protectionism when it comes to better Chinese products rather than promoting competition in the US markets.
I worry that this all removes the ability to have a sensible and legitimate conversation about DJI.
Elise Stefanik can go fuck herself for all the reasons listed elsewhere, lets get that on the table.
BUT we should be thoughtful, if not worried, about DJI. Here's a couple of reasons:
1) When the original Mavic Pro was released I showed mine to someone who had worked in US intelligence. His jaw dropped and said that based on other stuff he'd heard in his circles and now marrying it up with the product in his hands, it was clear IP that had been stolen from US DOD contractors and the government itself was in this device.
2) We know that the CCP has influence over all Chinese companies. I worked for Uber when we were operating in China and saw first hand the influence and access Chinese government had over operations and data. ANYONE who claims otherwise hasn't had first hand experience or is a shill (there's a lot of those around - there's more Chinese intelligence activity in Silicon Valley than in DC. I encountered that at Uber too.)
3) The amount of tracking that DJI can do and send home to China is concerning. Sensors, GPS and of course camera footage. When we worry about companies like Huawei intruding into our infrastructure, it's still at the data layer. DJI represents exposure into the kinetic layer which opens up all kinds of further vectors of concern.
4) These are being used for war, for now for the most part "on our side" (Ukraine) but DJI is already trying to disable some of that and is picking sides. Next time it might not be our side that wins the advantage.
5) You can't legislate "for the bad stuff" that could happen, which a few other commenters have suggested. The "bad stuff" would be happening on Chinese servers in China. It's out of jurisdiction. You buy a Chinese product like this, you're agreeing to the terms of engagement occurring outside of your friendly US/European jurisdictions. When this happens the only thing a country can do is ban the import, and here we are...
I have not bought the more recent versions of the DJI drones as I'm very conflicted on using DJI products based on what I know and what I can see up the road. I would love to pay 20-50% more for similar products from a US/Western company. I'm fine with them being manufactured in China but I want the company and the servers and the software operated in friendly countries (just like Apple).
(also, the voting on this comment is fascinating - lots of upvote and then suddenly a ton of downvotes. There's either lot of pro-Chinese brigading here or something else going on. If you disagree with my points please reply instead)
Re: 2/3, why not just legislate on what data can be sent abroad, thereby rendering DJI ineligible to operate in the US market, rather than adding them to a ban list? And preferably go one further and enact more stringent data privacy protections _no matter the drone manufacturer_.
I think it's really telling that Congress has no appetite to tackle part of the root issue (that US data privacy laws don't go far enough because it might "hurt" domestic companies who indiscriminately vacuum up user data) and instead just takes the easy route. There have been too many hacks and leaks in recent years to trust even "friendly" companies.
"free market". Unless there's something better than what our own companies can do (Bombardier C-Series jets, DJI drones, BYD Electric Vehicles), then protectionism.
Also, I have to say that I find it very weird that random unrelated legislation can be in the same "act".
When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison.
As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote.
The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's a whole other can of worms. It's become a i'll vote for your thing if you give me this thing, for every single vote and that's toxic and gross.
If the US unfree market for automobiles (hello 2008) can't compete with Chinese state sponsored EVs, should we not do state subsidized EV and battery development here? Isn't electric transport that important?
If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?
My conspiracy theory would be that the US government doesn't want the citizen to have effective drones for surveillance and recon in the event of civil conflict. They want a Killswitch. (Totally crackpot but it sounds believable).
It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now they’re winning. Such a narrative couldn’t sit well with the US that poses as the poster child of laissez-faire capitalism (though often with heavy government interference of its own)
I agree that it’s protectionism, 100%. DJI seems to have been remarkably clean from what I understand with no reason to warrant a ban other than it’s Chinese.
That being said, they have an insane lead in the market (rightfully earned). I don’t think US companies could ever hope to seriously compete without some form of unfair advantage, and the US has no reason to not grant it, especially given China’s tactics with EVs
The thing about EVs that I don't get with this argument is US auto has been bailed out, subsidized, protected and otherwise coddled for it's entire life. If that doesn't grant it an unfair advantage what will?
The reality is that US protectionism has instead created a market where they didn't need to compete. Where they could build ever bigger cars with only Califonia even attempting to try nudge them in the direction of the rest of the world.
China showing up and eating their lunch isn't because of subsidies, it's due to gross negligence on the behalf of legacy auto.
Has everyone already forgotten the endless hit pieces on Tesla? The almost weekly espousing that "EVs will never work?". I haven't.
This was entirely self-inflicted and just like the first round of protectionism that was designed to ward off Japanese auto industry it will probably end the same way.
There is no such thing as "Free Market" when trading with China. Pretty every non-trivial trade with China is in fact a trade with their government, which is anything but a reflection of freedom in any shape of form.
But this isn't simply protectionism. In terms of dollar value and jobs lost, the drone trade is minuscule. It's about military technology and spying - and this is not paranoia, I guess I can't prove it to you, but I can at least say it.
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway.
It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional election year virtue signaling designed to get some headlines and then be quietly negotiated away during 'reconciliation', yet congressional processes are so dysfunctional there's always a risk it accidentally becomes law.
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage).
Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.
Whatever else you may think of the move ( I dislike it, because I dislike adding equivalent of riders to big bills like these ), it is surprisingly consistent with current wave of government actions ( recent placement of DeepCool on US sanctions list ). Things are happening and reading the political tea leaves makes one recognize current unmistakable trend as a the drums of war.
It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc.
It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech.
If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed.
While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requirement makes it uncontrollable by the consumer, so I do understand that some consumers or, the possible more security aware US, will not trust it. But for the same reason China and other countries might not trust Apple or similar.
Trust is something that needs to be earned and which has to go both ways, if a company doesn't trust their users, and prevents people using their bought products however they like, then why should their users trust the company and let their uncontrollable software record their private lives and possible report back to them?
While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem. My experience is that American brands are much, much more aggressive about making you connect to the internet, install our apps, create an account, subscribe to our newsletter etc.
Look at the difference between iRobot and Chinese robot vacuums on Amazon - the difference is night and day.
> direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work
Unfortunately this is required by regulators in many countries. In Thailand you can't fly a drone without a license. You need to obtain the license before activating the drone and provide your information and the license number at time of activation (which is tied to drone serial number).
I would like to see a requirement that any drone sold in (or imported to) the US (or EU) has to be flashable - without having to desolder components, or any other such nonsense. Press some buttons and load new software.
An accompanying requirement would be to document interfaces to hardware subsystems (chip spec sheets would suffice).
With drones, the potential for mischief is too great to let malware be smuggled in.
Is this a politically and technically realistic goal ? Or am I talkin' thru my hat ?
Back before the war it was possible to obtain hacked DJI ROMs from the Russians that disabled all of these connections and restrictions including no-fly zones.
i agree, but we shouldn't require all firmware to be open-source and user-replaceable on only chinese devices; we should require it for everything, perhaps with narrow exceptions for things like pos terminals and certain kinds of industrial equipment
Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the increase in lumber prices had a much larger negative impact on the U.S. economy as a whole due to higher costs of building materials impacting pretty much everyone.
That's a large part of the issue, though. The narrative 10 years ago was that we were preventing Chinese from dumping low-cost crap on the U.S. market. Okay, fair enough, keep the crap out. But recent U.S. protectionism has been targeting very high-quality, best-in-class Chinese manufacturers that honestly outcompete anything their U.S. competitors bring to market. Without that competition, there's no incentive for U.S. makers to raise their technological game, and the sector just stagnates and falls behind the rest of the world.
North America has the benefit of two oceans for national defense, but the risk associated with that is one of insularity and stagnation. Ask an indigenous person (if you can find one) how well being a couple hundred years behind European technological development worked out once hostile colonists are on your shores.
Protectionism, like industry subsidies, is a double-edged sword.
- On the one hand, as SE Asia is intimately familiar with, it can create space to create globally competitive industries.
- On the other hand, it can also remove the incentive for local industries to invest and become technically competitive.
IMHO, what I'd like to see would be a stricter link between protection measures and R&D investment.
If an industry is protected, then it is required to prove it's improving itself + limit returns to shareholders.
E.g. steadily increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards, requirements to demonstrate decreasing costs of production (lumber and/or steel), etc.
Too often, protection measures are implemented, the excess benefits are skimmed and go directly to shareholders, and the company doesn't increase its global competitiveness (e.g. US Steel).
Indeed, and we never seem to learn. Lumber prices in the US during Covid were eye-watering and wreaked havoc through the whole economy that is still being felt today, and it was almost entirely due to US protectionism of lumber.
>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis:
In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.
Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.
That someone can buy new DJI drones in europe is right, but only the latest releases. You cannot use any of the drones you might have purchased over the last years anymore in europe because of the new regulations.
It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement.
They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.
It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.
Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
I've heard offhand here that the ease of starting a business in general is easier in the US and that funding for tech startups is more available in the US due to policy.
> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech
The US is embracing protectionism because we lost the manufacturing advantage. We lost the advantage because we outsourced our manufacturing to China with the pipe dream that we could keep the "higher end" of the value chain. It's as if we can magically have senior engineers without training junior ones in factories. It's as if the equally ambitious and talented Chinese fellows wouldn't want to climb up the value chain. As a result, we have lost talent. We have lost know-how. We have lost the supply chain. We have lost the intuition of how to optimize or scale manufacturing.
It's definitely economic protectionism but it's mostly protectionism for national security reasons. I assume the US is going to start manufacturing drones for war in large numbers in the near term and they need to be made at home (or at least by allies).
This seems likely. For those that haven't been following the war in Ukraine, now that all the Cold War munitions have been mostly used up, drones are now the primary weapon of both sides due to literal "bang per buck". It seems clear that drones are the 21st century weapon of choice.
If this were the case I'd expect it to be related to all drones from China though. It also doesn't seem needed given the contracts can just state the requirement without extra hoopla.
I don't understand your argument: what has DJI - a manufacturer of personal use drones - with the US military wanting to build weaponized drones in the US?
Yeah the thing is that the US always, always justified everything by using the "national security" excuse/narrative. When another country does it to the US and its corporations, which has by far the longest modern history of getting involved in other nations national security, then it suddenly becomes an attack on free trade and pure protectionism.
All Xi has to do is stop barreling towards an invasion of Taiwan.
The U.S., Europe, and Japan need to create and enhance a drone industrial base before China invades Taiwan. By the time it has invaded, creating the industrial base will be too late.
Also, China has created DJI through government-sponsored industrial policy, not via open markets.
the roots of silicon valley are in the decades of military contracts, initially, i.e. in the "government-sponsored industrial policy" https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=3546
You use protectionism like it's a bad thing, but I'm sure the folks in the military industrial complex see what's going on in Ukraine and realise it wouldn't be a bad thing if the US had some domestic small drone manufacturing capabilities.
Banning DJI could both encourage some of that manufacturing, while also stemming the flow of data to China.
We used to spend ludicrous amounts of money to fly spy planes to map hostile countries - now a hostile country has a access to a huge number of drones providing live camera data. These drones are hard to track so the government doesn't always know if they've been flown near sensitive areas. It would be negligent of the government to not try to do something about it.
The risk of relying on China for anything military related is too high. They have an aggressive, expansionary mindset and threaten war over Taiwan all the time.
Other than waiting to see where things shake out with the Senate, perhaps Sony? I can't speak to manufacturer support, and not sure Sony will stay in the drone game in the long term where it would feel like a sound investment.
I've been looking at other commercial-esque options (mainly photogrammetry) and came across Sony's"bring your own DSLR" drone.
> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech
Is it? I suspect China has zero regrets in embracing protectionism for social media. The American drone consumer will get squeezed for a few years, until the US develops decent home-grown suppliers in a strategic industry. Hard to think of a better limited use of protectionism tbh.
Yep. That's basically what's happening. It's China success envy syndrome. And instead of competing in healthy ways, political concerns roll out crushing policies that harm both investing opportunities and the ability of consumers to choose freely.
I disagree with the EU on a lot of things, but when it comes to tech and privacy in particular, they're the gold standard in putting individual people first. As someone deeply involved in my company's compliance with GDPR, it can't be overstated how important it is.
> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech.
Worth noting that this is a different kind of protectionism than that sometimes practiced by developing nations to build up their local infrastructure and industry. In both cases you end up with higher domestic prices and lower quality of goods (at least at first) but at least in the case of the developing nation you do actually build up some domestic infrastructure and industry in the meantime. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to do so.)
That's not what's happening here as there is no build-up for us to do. This is just the US government acting on behalf of US companies to shield them from competition so they can soak the domestic market for every cent without interference. There's no way any of this is going to reverse or even slow down the trend of enshittification - in fact, it's going to accelerate it.
Okay, but what will happen if US goes to war with China?
This can happen much quicker and easier than you think. Some Chinese delusional leader is going to attack Taiwan and voila, all the import from China will immediately stop at that exact moment.
> Okay, but what will happen if US goes to war with China?
Actual armed conflict? Total annihilation. Neither side wants this. Its why China will not invade Taiwan, and why the US won't put its boot on the neck of the China.
So I guess the new viable business strategy in the US is:
1. Find a sector which a foreign companies dominates
2. Enter this sector even with a bad product
3. Go to congress and get the other ones banned because they are "insert reason here".
Every country does it from time to time. We are going to see the end of globalisation as we have known it for the last 30+ years. The Russians and the Chinese made everyone realise that it is better to make stuff at home.
The effect is that the US loses its competitive edge in international markets. Is another country going to buy Tesla or BYD? Are they going to buy a DJI or an overpriced US drone? It might protect companies locally but for how long?
And what happens when you taking dumping to the logical extreme? You wind up with nobody domestically that can do any advanced work at all, because everyone gets put out of business. Then we have nothing to export and no skill or capability gradient to climb.
BYD exists because of Chinese economic protectionism. China carved out a space for its domestic products to grow. We should do the same.
Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists? If you look at what's happening in Ukraine It's pretty much a given that the US defense sector is looking at ways to improve the US small drone manufacturing capabilites, and have less potentially hostile drones flying over their own territory.
There are a lot of coincidences[1] and since congress can legally insider trade it would not surprise me if some involved have stock in some of these companies.
It's interesting to see how the reactions differ between here and the articles on the ban on TikTok. And some even thought that the users who wrote to their government representatives were bots! Whenever the US bans or sanctions something, that impacts people, whether it's drone nerds or teens looking at silly videos. It just so happens that most people here seem to be outside of the TikTok target demographic, so we can't sympathize with a group that will be forcefully deprived of a perfectly functional product, but we can with the other.
>I didn't expect Hacker news users to not understand the DJI ban, and that China and all its companies are driven by a dictator that is actively supporting a war on free world.
For someone who claims to be aware of geopolitics it's funny that you are basically just repeating a state department talking point. China has not infringed on other countries' sovereignty to even a fraction of the extent that the "free world" has. And it seems you don't believe that China has the right to govern it's own affairs using a system different from your own.
In my opinion, they understood it perfectly and reacted as they could, even by sending emails to their representatives to try and stop the ban on TikTok.
HN users are understanding it as well: it's just a move by the US govt to try and keep an extremely valid, but not US-controlled, product out of people's hands. It seems to me that the only ones who don't understand the ban are those trying to justify it as anything other than what it is.
Why do you expect only the teenage users of TikTok to not understand? I would say the vast majority of all TikTok users wouldn't/couldn't understand. If not that, they've definitely consumed enough content specifically swaying them in the other direction that they would be defensive about it without even knowing they've been swayed
These types of comments confuse me, because it would be faster to Google it and get an answer in 10 seconds than to post a comment and wait for a response.
Besides, from reading the article, context alone should tell you that DJI is a Chinese drone brand.
God I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm working on getting a newsletter up and running and I'm so focused on best writing practices and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
> and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
DJI is not an acronym, it's the name of a company. And DJI is the most famous drone company; asking to "define DJI", on an article for a site about drones like that one, would be like asking to "define Boeing" on an article for a site about airplanes.
But if you could control the DJI drone with some other transmitter, perhaps running OpenTX, and also replaced the video downlink, then there'd be no DJI hardware using those frequencies.
US is spiralling down and I feel like I am in a Truman Show with egregious presidential behaviours, dragging the world into wars which it doesn't need, banning chips, even sanctioning open source (RISC) software.
And this is further making the rest of the world enraged, china more so. Today they released Open source Deep Seek which beats GPT 4o in coding problems.
The train has left the station and the US is stuck. On the wrong platform. With no ticket.
Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.
As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All their links to the starter kit are dead and only options is to contact sales for enterprise deals.
There's nothing.
Skydio exited the consumer market. Their drones had good autonomy and flight characteristics. However, they struggled with wireless link quality due to the use of consumer WiFi, and had much older, inferior camera sensors compared to even contemporary DJI drones. They were also ridiculously loud and inefficient. Their enterprise drones are comically expensive and loaded with nickel-and-dime cloud features.
Parrot drones struggle with the same issues as Skydio (Skydio actually used a Parrot remote controller for their consumer drones), plus their autonomy isn't nearly as good as even Skydio's, the overall drone behavior is "clunky" (slow boot times, slow connection times, non-responsive flight controls), and even basic flight is more challenging.
The main issues plaguing US consumer drones are imaging sensors and wireless link. LTE and other well-suited long range wireless technologies capable of handling speed differential between the station and access point are locked in a vault of patents. Imaging sensors are legendarily impossible to acquire in low to moderate quantities and image sensor parameters are carefully locked behind a billion levels of NDA (thus why even the Raspberry Pi camera is full of DRM).
I assume one of the goals of this is to change that by making it feasible for US companies to compete at least on the domestic market.
Ukraine has shown that having domestic at-scale consumer drone production is a critical military capability. I bet part of the motivation behind this is protectionism to make sure this capability can be built up. Otherwise any war against China starts with China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day, likely with mostly or entirely domestic supply chains, without even going to a war economy, while the US cannot manufacture the same class of weapon at any comparable scale.
>China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day
The US might be able to stop an invasion of Taiwan with just naval and air assets. My guess is that battery-powered drones don't have enough range to be a significant threat against naval assets (even for recon) and don't have enough speed to be relevant against air assets that are not themselves battery-powered drones.
It's scary to think about what China could do with the $100 million-$150 million the US spends on a single F-35.
I was on a project that was subject to the cleared UAS list you linked, and I cannot recommend either Parrot (incredibly long boot times, underpowered motors meant it was slow and had poor station keeping in high winds) or Skydio (bad heat management/low thermal cutoffs to the point that during the California high desert summer our unit wouldn't even start due to reporting that it was overheated) at all. So maybe its not too bad that they're no longer for sale.
Autel Nano or Lite+.
Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all.
Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting
> Some Autel drone are made in the USA
You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.
I'll build a drone for you with open source components if you are shopping for one, it will cost more than a DJI but less than these other options.
Any guides or pointers on how to do this myself? Looking into pixhawk seems like most of the options are still pretty obscure. I own a 3D printer and am not afraid of a soldering iron :)
Will it be as good. I mean control, video recording and signal. Compatible with some HD goggles? I really doubt, but if you can explain...
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If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.
The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.
That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason.
Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.
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> Right now they can't compete.
Why? Because they aren't good enough, and if they have no competition they'll have to actually do something?
DJI's response (a bit dated)
https://dronedj.com/2024/03/02/dji-response-drone-ban-us/
The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom.
“DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperature and heart rate.”
DJI's response Technically, DJI suggests using drones for body temperature checks is unfeasible.
https://www.thedronegirl.com/2020/05/06/dji-coronavirus-dron...
US politicians have totally lost their minds to even propose something like this.
Allowing a company that repeatedly violates basic app store rules and exports data to a country with adversarial interests unrestricted access to our infrastructure via drones is highly problematic.
This problematic situation extends in many ways to critical sectors of our economy, including agriculture, energy, defense, etc.
The data collected by these drones is extensive and sensitive. Crop data alone is crucial, and if this information cannot be controlled, it should not be exported.
This stance is not anti-China, but no country should permit unrestricted access to its airspace for surveillance.
Data is the new oil as well, especially with AI. These drone derived datasets are becoming critical path information.
How else can you control the information besides a ban? I LOVE DJI and have several of these drones. But I don’t know how I feel about this because of the problematic data issues. It’s complex and the situation is very difficult.
Its funny because app store rules aren't laws. If we were really concerned about privacy, we'd have our own strong GDPR that mandated privacy and control measures and controls. Banning things doesn't work because the base foundational protections aren't there.
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Unconvincing tbh. Research papers have shown that heartrate can be tracked from cameras with well under 4k resolution. Doing it with DJI's excellent camera tech should be quite easy.
As far as US infrastructure, google street view and bing maps seem to be a bigger information disclosure threat but I guess they do blur out faces.
Google street view isn't going to be driving around sensitive government facilites or electrical infrastructure though - and you really can't guarantee no curious citizens will try to fly their dji drone over said facilities. So all DJI needs to do is put in an if(location == government_facility) and sit back and wait for the camera feed from some idiot american.
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"Thermal imaging from the air has never been as easy as it is with the DJI Zenmuse XT."
https://www.dji.com/zenmuse-xt
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In 2016, Tesla released the Model 3. When Chinese consumers wanted the most advanced electric vehicles, the Chinese government communicated with Tesla in 2017 about building a factory in Shanghai to produce China-made Teslas. Currently, Tesla is the highest-selling pure electric vehicle brand in China ( Model Y sales in China in December last year were 60,055 volumes ) The intense competition in the electric vehicle market has fostered the development of high-quality Chinese EV brands such as NIO, Li Auto, XPeng, BYD, Zeekr, Xiaomi, Aion... ... In contrast, in the free and democratic America market, the response to competition in the drone market has been to ban DJI, and the response to competition in the short video market has been to ban tiktok. Let’s see in ten years which market environment will foster advanced productivity.
A more accurate following of the Chinese model would be for the US to insist that DJI builds its drones for the US market in the US, insist on a partnership with a US company who would then siphon off the knowhow and IP to start building competing products.
The key is to stop rent seeking. Musk pilots the most competitive companies on earth, so of course he isn't scared of China or anyone else, because a truly powerful company takes many dimensions of superiority, not just a few patents.
It's a classic move from corporate America, foreign cars banned if less than 25 years old, high taxes on motorcycles for decades to protect Harley etc...
When you cannot compete, then the only option left is removing competitor. Isn't that simple?
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What is DJI, why is it being banned, and why should the general public care about this?
(In all seriousness, nothing I've read about "DJI" even explains the basics of the issue.)
DJI arguably makes the best consumer camera drones on the market. Why ban them? Because they're Chinese probably.
https://www.dji.com/camera-drones
Probably yes. The industry can fight with quality or price against Chinese bad products and non Chinese good products, but products that are both Chinese and top notch quality are going to dominate the market because of comparatively lower costs. Now, that law can indeed have some basis, in theory, but tailoring it to a single brand won't achieve much as the Chinese industry can rebrand products at a cost and in times that are a fraction of a fraction of what it takes to any western democratic country to adjust the law against another brand. On the other hand, they can't make a generic law against say suspicious code running on consumer devices that could be used to exfiltrate personal data, as it would potentially hit every connected device out there, including western branded ones. My impression is that they (the law makers) are almost facing the wall where they should admit that closed proprietary devices are generally unsafe and bad, but can't because it would hurt the same industry that contributed to their campaigns, so they direct all weapons against the external enemy. "We're good, they're bad", and end of the story.
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If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war. The US wants to encourage domestic drone manufacturing by eliminating the largest Chinese manufacturer as an option.
They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.
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Ah yes, $10k drones made in a different country's sweatshops. Not to worry, MURICA BRAND.
> If you want to know why the US would have interest in limiting the growth of DJI look no further then Ukraine and the impact drones have on the war.
How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine?
Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future?
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Drones are national security issues for two reasons -- one is that they could be used for surveillance domestically (similar problem with tik tok) and secondarily drones are now core warfare technology and the US has offshored so much of it's manufacturing capacity (not just for drones, but for all electronics) that the US is at real risk of losing any conflict with china because our supply chains will be absolutely wrecked if China cuts us off, so the US is trying to encourage more domestic production. I think China cutting off exports to the US would be way more devastating to the US economy than the US cutting Russia off from the world banking system was to Russia.
The consumer market has had it too good for too long.
Yeah, they have to suffer and pay through the nose. That'll teach them right
> What is DJI
One of the largest drone manufacturers globally and backed by the Chinese government [0] and several Red Families [1]
> why is it being banned
It is very closely connected with Chinese government stakeholders, with worries around privacy and data retention [2].
There is also some lobbying by Skydio and Andruil [3][4].
They are also breaking sanctions against Russia with Russian forces using their drones [5][6] (though the Ukrainians are using them as well), as well as sanctions around Xinjiang [7].
> why should the general public care about this
They are a popular low cost drone option. It might also spark a rise in domestic drone vendors - especially in the industrial and defense space [8].
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Also, can we please have another source. DroneDJ is a DJI specific blog and as such is biased in favor of DJI.
Here's some reporting from AP - https://apnews.com/buyline-shopping/article/dji-drone-ban-in...
And the bill itself - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864
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[0] - https://ipvm.com/reports/dji-prc
[1] - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/dji/__-YU3B-qveVWiE0QN_8HPp2m...
[2] - https://info.publicintelligence.net/ICE-DJI-China.pdf
[3] - https://www.auvsi.org/policy-proposals
[4] - https://www.auvsi.org/member-organizations-list/all
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/business/russia-china-dro...
[6] - https://djirussia.ru/
[7] - https://ipvm.com/discussions/dji-xinjiang-human-rights-abuse...
[8] - https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
I don't trust DJI.
I was looking to replace my GoPro with the DJI Action, but their app was not on the Play-store. It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
> It can only be side-loaded on Android, because their app breaks a number of policies on privacy and data gathering.
I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store, especially because their home market (China) doesn't even use the Play Store.
The iOS version of their app is Apple-approved and present in the App Store.
I do research in this space.
Their consumer apps are loaded to the gills with product-manager telemetry (tap/action tracing, etc., think Firebase/Flurry/whatever), and until recently they had a "sync flight logs" feature that would do what it said: give your detailed flight logs to DJI. It was opt-in, but it was easy to do by accident and many years ago there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.
They just removed this feature from US apps this week (too little too late, and too attached to reality and not attached enough to political pandering).
DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front, but sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware (this applies to US-based companies and US intelligence, too, of course).
However, their apps run on their own controllers are generally alright, and their enterprise apps run on their enterprise controllers in Local Data Mode are legitimately clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.
I fly DJI drones all the time using DJI RCs with network credentials forgotten, and I wouldn't hesitate to use one of these for consumer use. For the truly paranoid, use a burner email and a VPN to activate the drone.
I also wouldn't worry about using DJI Enterprise drones with the pro controllers in Local Data Mode for even moderately sensitive applications (infrastructure, law enforcement, etc.).
Of course I wouldn't use one for US military applications, insofar as it would be foolish to use any non-allied electronic device in this way.
ps - note that the analysis in the sibling comments are of older apps, DJI Go 4 and Pilot 1, not the newer flagship apps DJI Fly and DJI Pilot 2. The general theme (tons of dirty analytics platforms) remains the same, but the newer apps use more American platforms (Firebase, AWS-hosted proprietary stuff) rather than Chinese, and the "disable telemetry" and "disable data sync" options generally have fewer bugs now.
> I don't think this is the reason, I think it's more that they're just too lazy to jump through the approval and maintenance hoops that come with an app store
If that was the case, then why jump through all the hoops of extensive code obfuscation for the Android app? [0]
> DJI also have a terrible track record with data security, with their entire AWS account getting ripped in 2017.
Leaving the door propped open for everyone is also plausible deniability for doing bad things.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438842
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> there were bugs in the opt-in toggle.
> clean, barring a few versions with small bugs.
Juniper also had a “small bug” in their implementation of the NSA-mandated Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator algorithm that just so happened to leak the exact number of state bits onto the wire required to hack any VPN connection.
I don’t know if you’re an optimist or just a kind soul, but the rest of us are jaded for good reasons.
A drone company has ZERO business collecting flight log information, in the same way my car manufacturer has no business knowing where I drive.
That their “finger slipped” and they “accidentally” made opting out harder should tell you something.
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I feel like you're underestimating the average large state actor's ability to employ subtlety when they really care about a long-term foreign intelligence operation.
For example, it doesn't have to be the case that DJI has ever been told to collect data for the CCP. That would be a big OPSEC violation — as soon as anyone in the foreign media learned of it, DJI would be as dead as Huawei or Tiktok.
Instead, it could just as well be that the CCP have left DJI themselves untouched, but have instead manipulated market conditions around them: arranging it so that DJI "just seems to never be able to" hire any security experts; and so that DJI (and everyone else) hire product managers from a pool trained on CCP-sponsored university programs and industry media sources, that have those product managers parroting "useful" beliefs like "more analytics is always better."
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Your post convinced me of the opposite of what you were going for; after reading it, I get even more of a feeling that DJI does shady things.
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>I don't think they're explicitly a CCP data-collection front
In China you cannot not be explicitly a CCP data-collection front.
China doesn't bring evidence to a judge in order to get a subpoena for data. They just go to DJI an get it. DJI has zero legal recourse if the CCP wants access to all DJI's stored data. Doesn't matter where that data is stored. Same thing for tiktok and why legislators are killing that too. You're a Chinese company? You ultimately work for the state. No discussion.
China is not the US. People need to stop fitting the way things work in the US to the way things work in China.
Edit: For the whataboutists: Yes, everyone is aware that american three letter agencies have backdoor access to every computer, broken RSA and AES, and control the USA's puppet government. Thanks.
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Aw yes, a $15B company that is “lazy”
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I haven't used a DJI drone since I got my Spark, so this is a few years out of date, but when I set that up the procedure was incredibly locked down and invasive. You had to install the app, which had to have full access to everything, and which had to have an active internet connection to update the drone firmware. So at the least, it was extorting your physical location, details of any wifi network, access to phone photos, and iirc a bunch of other stuff (like I said it was a few years). The whole way through the app took a very authoritative tone ("do X, do Y, you must do Z") as well. I used a dedicated second hand phone with no SIM card (after initial setup) but it was still uncomfortable and there's no way in hell I'd have allowed the app on my main phone. No idea what it's like now but I'd be amazed if it's more free or respectful of privacy.
I don't think they're a CCP front, and their actual core product engineering is amazing, but my understanding is that like any sufficiently large organisation in China (or any country, I guess) they must comply with government instructions.
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> sufficient product telemetry is indistinguishable from surveillance malware
Isn't this mandatory given the restrictions required of them to disallow flying in banned areas?
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What I heard (third hand knowledge) is that the DJI Android software stack can't handle AABs and for some reason it's easier for them to just get people to sideload instead of fixing their toolchain.
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What about consumer apps in Local Data Mode?
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This is a naive take Im wondering if its intentional disinfo.
Long ago I bought a DJI mavic. I generally don't use apps for any stuff.
I couldn't fly it with the joystick controller that came with it. It said "see app" or something on the controller. It was really annoying but I sent it back. A cursory web search said it was sending all kinds of location/flight information/etc back to dji continuously.
I thought there would be outrage, but not much.
I think it is sort of annoying that they are going after DJI specifically.
I think congress should be going after device/app privacy itself for all devices/apps in a more fundamental way.
For those looking for more info:
https://blog.grimm-co.com/2020/07/dji-privacy-analysis-valid...
https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/dji-pilot-android-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/dji-drones-se...
And also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39438842
Do we know the official reasons they can't be on Play? All I can find are people speculating, but it would be really nice to know exactly what Google rejected them for.
Edit: Thank you sibling comment posted at same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40709374
I don't think "being in the Play store" means something is trustable, it just means you trust Google Play Services and Google with all of your data, and by extension, the US government.
Being located in the US, I am arguably far more concerned about the US government tracking me than the Chinese government. The US government has jurisdiction over me, the Chinese government does not.
> Being located in the US, I am arguably far more concerned about the US government tracking me than the Chinese government.
I read this BS so often that it feels manufactured.
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This is an incredibly naive view.
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> I believe I saw a site that decompiled their app and found a number of worrisome things.
Every Android in America is sold with a rootkit called Google Play Services and it can do absolutely anything on your phone. There is no limit to what Google Play Services can do on your phone unattended or clandestinely.
Well, their app is on the iOS app store, so unless you imply they do something special for their Android app...
This whole thing is about the trade war with China.
Attacking successful Chinese companies with pretenses.
I don't know why even anyone on HN thinks its something else than exactly that
A few things to note here.
1.) DJI offers many drones related to infrastructure mapping and maintenance, as well as agricultural tasks. From a national security perspective, it is a non-trivial threat vector for a Chinese company to not only have intimate knowledge of US infrastructure by being their drone supplier, but also by becoming a dependency of US infrastructure. In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
2.) When it comes to protectionism, I'm generally against it, but I have different thoughts when it comes to China. They have banned Uber, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc, and just make their own versions of it. Then they have absolutely no respect for international laws when it comes to IP. They don't compete economically according to the same rules as everyone else, and don't deserve to be treated the same way.
3.) I have 2 DJI drones. The fact that there is no mention of compensation in this legislature is absurd. Fortunately, I don't rely on these for my business, but imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business. Not only are you grounding the tools that they've already come to depend on, but there isn't an existing viable alternative on the market for many of these tasks.
> In the event of a war, all of the drones could be grounded or used for nefarious purposes.
That's only an issue if the drone somehow depends on an external Internet-based server, instead of just a plain radio link between the drone and its controller. The law should target that unnecessary dependency, if it exists, instead of banning even standalone drones.
Kudos to you for being able to make the first 2 points fairly despite being personally affected by this. Rare that you'd see that. Most people would start with the 3rd point and try to minimise anything that contradicts.
All good points, and it's painful to see you flagged likely by some political operation.
> imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business.
Unfortunately I suspect this group is already quite small due to the existing heavy-handed regulation of drones for anything other than recreational use. Or they're at least "under the table."
You need a drone pilot's license to legally fly a drone for anything other than recreational use. This has already decimated a lot of the most direct and interesting use cases for us.
In this thread, people not understanding that we've literally watched in the past year as consumer drones with IEDs attached to them have made the $10 million M1 Abrams tanks obsolete and what that means for war and its downstream implications for manufacturing bases.
Although it should be noted that it's not DJI drones doing that damage. They seem to be used for spotting, while more DIY-style FPV drones are the ones blowing up tanks.
Of course, those parts likely also come from sources in China. However, the software is more along the lines of FOSS like ArduPilot or PX4.
Addendum: for anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/26/1247403968/ukraine-pulls-abra...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/26/ukraine-wi...
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-abrams-tanks-1...
For people wonder how this got there, the blame goes to Rep. Elise Stefanik:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864
That bill was tacked onto a big "must pass" defense authorization and may not have survived on its own.
Here's an article with some speculation on why Stefanik introduced this bill: https://dronexl.co/2024/06/06/drone-industry-outrage-stefani...
What a shocker. One of the most worthless partisan blowhards in congressional history.
She's Dick Cheney to MTG/Boeberts Dubya Bush.
The sicker thing to me is how she (like many) was actually relatively moderate until she completely hitched her wagon onto the Trump train. Another Profile in Cowardice. An overview: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/women-rule/2023/01/06/t...
All of these politicians who have these completely transactional relationships, I just find utterly gross. I mean, do they have any actual friends? For example, Trump completely disparaged Ted Cruz's wife and father in 2016, Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar" back then, only to do a total 180 and turn into another boot licker.
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I'd rather blame everyone who voted on this, actually. Every one in Congress is an adult and were free to decide how to vote on this, afaik.
And if you need a backgrounder on Stefanik, she got elected before Trump, decided she preferred staying in DC to her hometown, sold out her previously-stated principles almost immediately when she saw a chance to gain power, and is now doing as much damage to civil liberties as Nixon and McCarthy ever managed:
https://theracket.news/p/stop-going-stefanik-committee-fools
She doesn't care about whether the bill does something valid or even whether it survives legal challenges, as long she can use it to score political points. It's a real shame. Congresspeople are supposed to be servants beholden to the public good, not power-hungry sycophants who can't be bothered with the details of governance.
I'll add more as a NY21 local:
I've never seen her. I've never heard from her locally. You can't fucking find Elise. It's all events in the past. There's never been a townhall up in this portion of her region.
Bonus: Her husband is a lobbyist for a leading gun industry trade group. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Stefanik-s-husband-K...
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Doesn't this seem at odds with the facts?
China isn't militarily supporting Russia or Ukraine. Ukraine's drone army is built from cheap Chinese drones. China is neutral. The argument that it hasn't sanctioned Russia means it is a party to the war on Russia's side is an argument of the form "if you aren't with us, you are against us." But then, you'd think the US would levy the same kind of vitriol at e.g. India.
China is led by a General Secretary of the Communist Party's central committee. Taiwan and China are recognized by the United States by international treaty as one country.
China is "attacking" the US? The US and China are in economic warfare (an economic war started by the United States under the Trump Administration). The reason for this is the US sees China's economic rise as a threat to its global position.
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It is like you don't know American history at all.
I'm curious if Anzu Robotics would be permitted under the ban. For those unfamiliar, they use DJI Mavic 3 hardware manufactured in Malaysia with US-written software: https://www.therobotreport.com/anzu-robotics-launches-u-s-ba...
They shouldn't be; they use DJI basebands, so banning DJI and their affiliates using the FCC Covered List should also prevent Anzu from getting new FCC equipment approvals. It's unclear whether the FCC would revoke existing approvals, although it certainly seems like what Congress wants. And if they do, it's unclear if they'd go to the effort to hunt down Anzu and Cogito, but on paper, they certainly should.
By the way, there's no US-written software on Anzu drones. They're just green Mavic 3 Enterprises with a phone app that integrates the DJI SDK. Flying a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise and an Anzu Raptor using Aloft Air Control will produce exactly identical results in terms of American-ness and data transfer.
DJI owns Hasselblad. It will be interesting to see if Hasselblad get hit by this as well. Not that I want to see it, just curious if there may be collateral damage.
Fingers crossed it doesn't, would hate to see it go down.
So the amendment/act [0] makes a change to "47 U.S. Code § 1601 - Determination of communications equipment or services posing national security risks" [1] to add DJI. Although the direct inclusion of an entity in US code is odd, it does follow from the 2019 NDAA (Sec. 889. Prohibition on certain telecommunications and video surveillance services or equipment. "...Huawei Technologies Company or ZTE Corporation...") which included based on that bill's text.
0. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/hr2864/text
1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1601
This protectionism is just getting ridiculous now. You can't ship most manufacturing jobs overseas and expect china not to out compete eventually. Yes they are stealing ip, who cares, japan did the same thing. Trying to stop in now is just going to cause another depression.
Claiming DJI stole IP though is ridiculous. They have been so far ahead for so long anything they might have stolen ~15 years ago is surely obsolete.
Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
If DJI is doing nasty things, prohibit the nasty things DJI doing in the law, not the brand. Then condemn DJI if needed. How do this law protect from any DJi competitor doing the same stuff (or even a spinoff company through a complex scheme)?
I wonder, though, could this be considered an unconstitutional bill of attainder? That's an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, without a trial. Article I, Section 9, iii: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed".
That's one of the arguments being made by TikTok in their challenge against the "TikTok ban" bill.
That’s been my thought since the TikTok ban as well. It was meant for people, but this for sure seems to meet the spirit of the prohibition. Does it actually violate it? We’ll have to see once the cases work their way through.
If they ban nasty things as such they can't do them themselves anymore without breaking the law.
Not that they care.
Maybe Elise Stefanik was just really upset that she had to side-load the sketchy DJI APK on her Android device?
I assume because the US doesn't care about the potential data collection of drones flying around as long as they have the data, they just don't like it when China has it.
> Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills?
People who want to move this country even further in the direction of Rule By Law, as opposed to Rule Of Law.
This sort of thing works out well for the already-connected and corrupt, and it's not like anyone in 2024 is deluded that we make principled decisions on anything.
Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
Yes this is a strange one.
There is no viable competitor to DJI for consumers when it comes to the software side especially -- DJI software is miles ahead of the other drone producers (on-drone and their mobile apps).
When I try to download DJI fly app from the Play Store it always crashes.
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Worked with Huawei. Look at the smartphone market pre and post Huawei ban, immediate crater.
Huawei didn't have the best phones by far. DJI is miles ahead of anything else one can buy.
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The Huawei ban's impact on smartphones was mostly a side effect. The real target was wireless infrastructure. Any time spent analyzing the phone stuff is a waste, that was all mostly collateral damage as we tried to prevent Huawei from dominating our domestic 5G (and related) networks.
I'm sorry, but what exactly happen after Huawei ban?
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> Seems a bit pointless banning the market leader?
I guess that depends on what the goal is? If a foreign company is the market leader, banning it allows US companies to take over the domestic market without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
Which US companies are going to have a $500 competent consumer drone with a great camera, solid reliability, and top of the line ease of use to sell me the day this ban goes into effect, or even 5 years down the road? The answer is none.
There are no US companies capable of serving this market. None can produce the product DJI did and consumers will abandon the market before they'll transition to a product that costs twice as much for half the value.
This is not like smartphones or laptops or televisions or any of that, it's not needed, it's a total luxury and hobby for 95% of buyers. They will walk before adopting a shitty US-based alternative and the market will shrivel and die.
So, this is a fine policy if hurting US consumers by destroying an entire field of hobby to thumb our noses at China is the goal. It's a broken policy of stimulating a US alternative is the goal. To accomplish the latter, subsidies and reasonable tariffs are the right approach, not bans.
> without having to actually figure out how to be competitive with the market leader.
This assumes end users will accept an inferior product. Without some additional pressure - subsidies or hell even nationalism - a ban alone won’t magically create on par US companies.
China has been doing this for decades so we don’t need to guess here. They seem to always bring much broader societal, financial and other support not just restrict access
We should ban Creality and Bambu Lab too. Imagine if we also strangled consumer 3D printing for dumb reasons. You should only be allowed to print on $100k+ Stratasys for natsec reasons, of course.
Creality/Bambu killed more small companies (and Reprap) than it bothered Stratasys IMHO.
But yes...there very well may be a security concern there too. Bambu sends/receives info from the companies servers. At least once this has allowed a supposed firmware update to cause a large number of printers to start printing uncommanded. This is a major safety and security risk and it was largely ignored by the consumer community due to Bambu "making things easier".
So yeah...perhaps we should start looking into these companies...and exactly where their subsidies do/may come from.
DJI isn't just a drone company. They've been actively moving into audio/video production very rapidly. If this ban sticks, they will lose their FCC license, and your Pocket 3 camera (or any DJI device) will no longer be able to connect to your phone.
Maybe I never got to the part of an economics education that covers exceptions having stopped at intro econ, but don't trade wars almost always lead to bad times?
The theory is that it leads to worse outcomes for the weaker partner and less-bad outcomes for the stronger one.
- People used to think Japan was going to overtake the USA, until a short trade war in the 80's sent Japan on a downward spiral.
- The trade war against Russia hurt the West a lot with higher energy and food prices, but it whacked the Russian economy very much harder.
- The same thing can be said for the West vs USSR - it hurt the West, but bankrupted the USSR
Isn’t the US the weaker partner here?
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Wider implications beyond just the consumer drone market. My company and several of our clients (who are all much larger companies than us) have $100,000s - $X,000,000s of DJI enterprise drones, batteries, and payloads (Matrice 300, 350, zenmuse p1 camera, etc)
I know the bill still has to go through the senate, but this is going to be a sore subject for a lot of American companies who use DJI equipment.
No reason for the Senate to not vote it into law. There are no lobbyists telling them to do otherwise. In an election year, they desperately need to show that they can get something, anything passed.
This is the best present ever to everyone else in the world who is buying DJI drones by the thousands right now.
I wish there was a way for the public to vote on all of these bills! We need to be able to give feedback to these senators about what the public wants. And to me the public wants DJI.
Yes, if only there was some kind of democratic process in this country, where citizens could influence the laws that are passed...
Is this some kind of sarcastic joke? Anti-China legislation is popular with both parties. So who do you vote for in a two-party system?
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So what recourse would the public have to get compensation from the government for their now-useless consumer drones?
I have no need for a drone right now, but looks like I'm now in the market for DJI drones, one or two.
That's how banned book sales work in China: the books don't sell well until the government bans them, and then everyone wants them after that (and can easily get them since China's black market is pretty open).
So what's America's plan to survive?
Ban almost everything they used to buy? (i.e. goods manufactured in China)
Which Made in the Good Ol' US of A consumer drones are people supposed to purchase instead of a DJI Mini?
We make so much in China, I don’t get what the deal is, here. Just that a US billionaire isn’t making the money?
Once DJI gets banned, a new consumer company will come around and will happily import all the parts from China then slap on a substantial markup. I'm placing bets that DJI will somehow whitelabel the drones.
It's funny the lengths the US public and political machine will go to avoid blaming the business sector that outsourced all of everything to China over the last few decades. Chinese manufacturing got the tools and know-how to build these devices and have done a great job iterating on that knowledge across many different sectors and product categories.
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Oh yes someone who calls out US stupidity must be earning 50 cents.
Funny how you forgot the (effective) ban on Chinese EVs (sorry "100% tariff only") too. Let's not even get into the ban of other manufacturers such as Huawei. So, more $100,000 Elon Cybertrucks are going to save the planet from the climate crisis we are facing?
I stand by my question: what is the big plan here? Try to be somehow competitive by piece by piece banning the place you literally built up with your excessive imports?
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Related:
DJI Seems to Believe That It Is Possible Its Drones Will Be Banned - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?
Nothing, they could even buy it in US... the ban is on Chinese company using Federal Communications Commission frequencies and they have all the good ones or even all of them.
I can't imagine what it would take for them to enforce the ban, so people would highly likely continue using and buying DJI products.
>what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada?
Because if you choose to do this, and it's against the law, you open yourself up to sanctions and punishment?
Since the control apps tap into GPS so they know when you're in a restricted zone, the gov't could simply make them mark all of the US as a restricted zone and the drone will never fly. I have one, I'm not happy about this.
I'm going back to the first gen mavic here in memory, but...
Didn't they run Android, and you could root them to remove the no fly zones?
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This is the correct answer. DJI will happily geofence any area in America to be able to keep selling their project here.
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This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were. GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone.
The drone would look it up through a connected cell phone using a web service like this:
https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr_map_ims/html/
I think (hope) it would be a hard sell to send different data from faa.gov to DJI drone lookups versus other brands, but on the other hand this complete brand ban is apparently politically possible.
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> what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada
Canada has significant regulations around purchasing and operation of drones [0]
[0] - https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p1/2017/2017-07-15/html/reg2...
The US doesn't care if Americans buy them from Canada. The point of the law is to encourage US made drone manufacturing, because we'll need it during a war.
They don't care if a drone here or there slips thought, it's irrelevant to the point of the law.
Because Canada will follow every stupid decisions from its main partner.
Nothing.
But Canada is a long long distance for many Americans. America is pretty big and Canadian cities are sparse along the border.
Slightly off-topic, but it reminds me of the Tesla restriction around governmental buildings in China last year, citing the same set of reasons (data collection, national security, etc.). It seems that the restriction was lifted recently [1].
[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/china-lifts-tesla-restrictions-pa...
Is this going eventually impact TV companies like LG , Samsung and such? I bet there are more Chinese made devices already spread worldwide because of reasons….
LG & Samsung are South Korean companies, not Chinese, so they aren't a target (yet).
This is an interesting experiment in economic protectionism. Depending how far is the US drone industry in a few year we'll see this measure repeated
Oof, perhaps time to stock up if you rely on this equipment.
> Oof, perhaps time to stock up if you rely on this equipment.
(I didn't read the bill, but based on the article alone...)
Looks like it's a tentative ban on usage, not sale nor ownership.
And currently with no "pre-ban" grandfathering-in, nor compensation for US people who'd be affected by the ban (e.g., investments in equipment, operations disrupted, migration costs).
One measure that would be interesting: a buyback of banned DJI gear, issuing vouchers that can be spent with non-disapproved drone brands.
That might help make DJI owners whole, and consistent with some of the presumed goals behind banning use of DJI. Though it's spending taxpayer money.
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Bad governing, and it only continues to get worse here. My decision to retire in a 2nd or 3rd world country is becoming clearer every election cycle.
The reason the US doesn't have a real domestic drone industry is partly due to the FAA cracking down hard on the drone community.
Once again the US government dances around the broader issue of data privacy.
I understand it’s easier to get people to vote against Chinese products in the US on data privacy concerns but it’s irritating that Congress isn’t working on legislating rules for products that are not Chinese as well.
Keep seeing DJI drones at local police dept open houses. They even have a "drone unit" that specializes in SAR, hazardous recon type scenarios. Given extensive existing use throughout US local law enforcement, fire depts etc, not sure if this will actually happen.
Or maybe they all mass-migrate to Anduril solutions?
I know a state police drone pilot. There are 6 people on the team.
They use Mavic 2A and 3 drones for thermal. Mostly surveillance.
They use DJI Avata for whipping through a house faster than people can. They use this for hostage and other possibly dangerous scenarios.
I know for a fact they are often breaking the FAA laws on lights and line of sight. They don’t care because they’re “good guys”.
It's going to be a disaster for SAR, policing, firefighting, and all kinds of public good. The whole thing is an incredibly shortsighted move that will literally cost lives.
The goal, I think, is that these organizations will migrate to Skydio or BRINC (as they have the only reasonably viable drones for most of these use cases IMHO).
The reality is that they'll buy Autel (just as Chinese as DJI) or just keep using DJI and hoping the FCC Radio Police don't show up, which is probably a safe bet. Anduril don't really sell into this space.
In five years the US will have a prolific consumer drone industry and will have hardly skipped a beat. This is a good move for the US from a long-term security and economic standpoint. There are some short term pains but long-term this is good.
Did you get paid 50 cents to write all these posts?
There’s no reason for the US to allow any business with a nation that not only has named the US as an enemy state multiple times, but also regularly breaks international law against friendly countries, for example, in the south China sea. The US and European Union should formally sanction China.
Does this just ban importing DJI products (bad enough) or does it also ban owning and/or flying a DJI drone you already own? (really bad if that's the case, but also would be difficult to enforce)
It adds DJI to the FCC Covered List, meaning they can't get new FCC approvals. The FCC could choose whether or not to revoke existing FCC Equipment Authorizations for existing DJI drones.
If they do revoke the existing Equipment Authorizations, then the drones become illegal RF transmitters and wouldn't be legal to fly, although enforcement would border on impossible.
The text specifically calls out that software and "services" are to be banned: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864...
Since the software phones home it most likely won't work anymore once the ban is in effect.
I cannot see how this will pass legal challenge. Banning a Drone Manufacturer simply because the manufacturer is Chinese?
There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there?
> There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there?
From a practical perspective, it could be at any time. China hasn't embraced the free market the same way the west does, and doesn't give private companies the same degree of autonomy you're used to seeing elsewhere. Broadly speaking, if the Chinese government needs a company within their jurisdiction to cooperate with them, they can enforce cooperation.
As an example, even with publicly held companies, the Chinese government will take out "special management shares" that give the government positions on the board with unique power to direct management within a company and direct management decisions. It's not like the West where companies have theit own management that might disagree with the government and battle in court. In China, the government can simply become the management of a company.
That would be an after the fact justification, which could be used to justify banning any company that operates in China.
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We can ban DJI all we want, but our military or the US itself is declining nonetheless if we don't solve our manufacturing problem like we still produce those lame suicidal drones rogue1 that has inferior spec to DJI Mavic 3 yet charges fucking $94K a pop, like the cost of making a canon shell is 10X more than Russian even though Russia is known to be one of the most corrupted country in the world, like we don't have a prosperous manufacturing industry to rely on so the cost of a specialized screw could be hundreds times more than what what China produces.
I mean, we can have the best service industry in the world, but eventually we have to produce good things, no? Or in the worst case, if there's war, what do we depend on? Traders and programmers and lawyers and waiters? Are we sure we could out produce the Axis 20:1, like building a warship every 3 days (or a week?)?
It pains me to see the US decline just like the Roman Empire did.
It's a bit odd. Isn't DJI selling lots of drones to Ukraine and Russia?
(possibly through middlemen so they have trouble preventing it, but still)
I'm not going to miss drones. Too many drone operators abused them to violate peoples expectation of quiet or privacy, or to harass animals, and were ignored or outright supported by other users. Laws restricting specific areas or behavior are extremely hard to enforce compared to an outright ban.
The most common defense was violating your privacy wasn't technically illegal. Well, now that it is going to become illegal, don't expect my support. This should serve as a reminder to people with niche hobbies not to make everyone hate you.
I just had some drone photos taken of damage on the roof of my house, and it's way easier than trying to get up 4 storeys with a ladder
No doubt.
I tried to find a non-Chinese router last week.
They don't exist.
Draytek.
Everyone in the comments seems to be against this: why? Let's build up a great domestic drone company here in the US.
Surely this is possible without just banning competitors, no?
The competition is literally an arm of the state of China, which is able to subsidize the business and send prices through the floor. Why would any entrepreneur choose to compete with a state-backed enterprise? And by the way, have you heard of tariffs? We literally "ban" all kinds of products with very high tariffs.
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Banning foreign drones just gives domestic drone companies even less incentive to compete on quality. If the foreign drone company is benefiting unfairly from subsidies, then the way to beat them is to subsidise US drone companies, creating fair competition.
GoPro should enter the drone market.
I vaguely remember GoPro having a drone model at one point. But it didn't do well?
Their line of thinking maybe that firmware updates can basically do anything
so usa congress admits chinese drones are better ?
but maybe (or now)
usa senate must admit that they can keep up with china in drone manufacturing speed !?
this is in adition to tiktok, but then I wonder how much of what amazon sales is made in china
I've put off picking up a drone. Should I hurry up and get one now?
Is there anything competitive thats even remotely close to DJI?
Interesting knock-on effect to RID of this goes through.
Dji is like samsung; great hardware ruined by owner-hostile software. I will never buy either unless I can load standard open source software on them.
I can't wait for right to repair and similar laws force these delusional companies to actually hand over control of products to their rightful owners.
What will be good alternatives to DJI then?
Sad to see the US fall further into nationalism and protectionism when it comes to better Chinese products rather than promoting competition in the US markets.
"The bill as it stands does not provide any compensation to those that could be affected by this ban, if it is retroactive."
This is frustrating.
Nothing is going to save the failing empire and this is just another signpost on the road to it's demise.
populist shot on the foot
I worry that this all removes the ability to have a sensible and legitimate conversation about DJI.
Elise Stefanik can go fuck herself for all the reasons listed elsewhere, lets get that on the table.
BUT we should be thoughtful, if not worried, about DJI. Here's a couple of reasons:
1) When the original Mavic Pro was released I showed mine to someone who had worked in US intelligence. His jaw dropped and said that based on other stuff he'd heard in his circles and now marrying it up with the product in his hands, it was clear IP that had been stolen from US DOD contractors and the government itself was in this device.
2) We know that the CCP has influence over all Chinese companies. I worked for Uber when we were operating in China and saw first hand the influence and access Chinese government had over operations and data. ANYONE who claims otherwise hasn't had first hand experience or is a shill (there's a lot of those around - there's more Chinese intelligence activity in Silicon Valley than in DC. I encountered that at Uber too.)
3) The amount of tracking that DJI can do and send home to China is concerning. Sensors, GPS and of course camera footage. When we worry about companies like Huawei intruding into our infrastructure, it's still at the data layer. DJI represents exposure into the kinetic layer which opens up all kinds of further vectors of concern.
4) These are being used for war, for now for the most part "on our side" (Ukraine) but DJI is already trying to disable some of that and is picking sides. Next time it might not be our side that wins the advantage.
5) You can't legislate "for the bad stuff" that could happen, which a few other commenters have suggested. The "bad stuff" would be happening on Chinese servers in China. It's out of jurisdiction. You buy a Chinese product like this, you're agreeing to the terms of engagement occurring outside of your friendly US/European jurisdictions. When this happens the only thing a country can do is ban the import, and here we are...
I have not bought the more recent versions of the DJI drones as I'm very conflicted on using DJI products based on what I know and what I can see up the road. I would love to pay 20-50% more for similar products from a US/Western company. I'm fine with them being manufactured in China but I want the company and the servers and the software operated in friendly countries (just like Apple).
(also, the voting on this comment is fascinating - lots of upvote and then suddenly a ton of downvotes. There's either lot of pro-Chinese brigading here or something else going on. If you disagree with my points please reply instead)
Re: 2/3, why not just legislate on what data can be sent abroad, thereby rendering DJI ineligible to operate in the US market, rather than adding them to a ban list? And preferably go one further and enact more stringent data privacy protections _no matter the drone manufacturer_.
I think it's really telling that Congress has no appetite to tackle part of the root issue (that US data privacy laws don't go far enough because it might "hurt" domestic companies who indiscriminately vacuum up user data) and instead just takes the easy route. There have been too many hacks and leaks in recent years to trust even "friendly" companies.
So Skydio?
Great for pro-use but they don't have hobby level products to compete with the DJI Mavic and Mini
"free market". Unless there's something better than what our own companies can do (Bombardier C-Series jets, DJI drones, BYD Electric Vehicles), then protectionism.
Also, I have to say that I find it very weird that random unrelated legislation can be in the same "act".
When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison.
As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote.
The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's a whole other can of worms. It's become a i'll vote for your thing if you give me this thing, for every single vote and that's toxic and gross.
If the US unfree market for automobiles (hello 2008) can't compete with Chinese state sponsored EVs, should we not do state subsidized EV and battery development here? Isn't electric transport that important?
If the problem is privacy, why don't we legislate privacy instead of banning apps and banning items?
My conspiracy theory would be that the US government doesn't want the citizen to have effective drones for surveillance and recon in the event of civil conflict. They want a Killswitch. (Totally crackpot but it sounds believable).
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It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now they’re winning. Such a narrative couldn’t sit well with the US that poses as the poster child of laissez-faire capitalism (though often with heavy government interference of its own)
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I agree that it’s protectionism, 100%. DJI seems to have been remarkably clean from what I understand with no reason to warrant a ban other than it’s Chinese.
That being said, they have an insane lead in the market (rightfully earned). I don’t think US companies could ever hope to seriously compete without some form of unfair advantage, and the US has no reason to not grant it, especially given China’s tactics with EVs
The thing about EVs that I don't get with this argument is US auto has been bailed out, subsidized, protected and otherwise coddled for it's entire life. If that doesn't grant it an unfair advantage what will?
The reality is that US protectionism has instead created a market where they didn't need to compete. Where they could build ever bigger cars with only Califonia even attempting to try nudge them in the direction of the rest of the world.
China showing up and eating their lunch isn't because of subsidies, it's due to gross negligence on the behalf of legacy auto.
Has everyone already forgotten the endless hit pieces on Tesla? The almost weekly espousing that "EVs will never work?". I haven't.
This was entirely self-inflicted and just like the first round of protectionism that was designed to ward off Japanese auto industry it will probably end the same way.
There is no such thing as "Free Market" when trading with China. Pretty every non-trivial trade with China is in fact a trade with their government, which is anything but a reflection of freedom in any shape of form.
But this isn't simply protectionism. In terms of dollar value and jobs lost, the drone trade is minuscule. It's about military technology and spying - and this is not paranoia, I guess I can't prove it to you, but I can at least say it.
C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government.
And I'm not sure you want to get into a discussion about China and protectionism, to say nothing of national security concerns.
> C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government
Just like Boeing gets billions in tax breaks, various aids and in theory extremely profitable if they weren't so damn incompetent military contracts?
And no, it's better because it's more efficient. Over the lifetime of a plane it's purchase price is a tiny part of the total costs.
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“It’s complicated”.
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway.
It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional election year virtue signaling designed to get some headlines and then be quietly negotiated away during 'reconciliation', yet congressional processes are so dysfunctional there's always a risk it accidentally becomes law.
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage).
Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
Would turning drones into arms not make them more, rather than less, protected in the US?
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Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.
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We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
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The bans are inevitable. It's only a matter of time before somebody tries to drop a pipe bomb on a politician.
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Just need to attach a trigger to the drone and then it can kill as many people as it wants without being regulated.
Everyone knew that they would be easy to convert into very effective weapons since the very start, no?
grenades are sold separately though.
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Whatever else you may think of the move ( I dislike it, because I dislike adding equivalent of riders to big bills like these ), it is surprisingly consistent with current wave of government actions ( recent placement of DeepCool on US sanctions list ). Things are happening and reading the political tea leaves makes one recognize current unmistakable trend as a the drums of war.
Why would ou think it's "dumb", when we've already had TikTok ban, tariff on Chinese EV, and chip ban on China?
It's very clear that China is an enemy that has to be dealt with by US
I already said why it's dumb
> "the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends."
It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
Since corporations are people (in the minds of US jurists) wouldn't that make it an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder?
DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc.
It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed.
While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requirement makes it uncontrollable by the consumer, so I do understand that some consumers or, the possible more security aware US, will not trust it. But for the same reason China and other countries might not trust Apple or similar.
Trust is something that needs to be earned and which has to go both ways, if a company doesn't trust their users, and prevents people using their bought products however they like, then why should their users trust the company and let their uncontrollable software record their private lives and possible report back to them?
While I agree with you, I doubt banning Chinese tech will remedy this problem. My experience is that American brands are much, much more aggressive about making you connect to the internet, install our apps, create an account, subscribe to our newsletter etc.
Look at the difference between iRobot and Chinese robot vacuums on Amazon - the difference is night and day.
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> direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work
Unfortunately this is required by regulators in many countries. In Thailand you can't fly a drone without a license. You need to obtain the license before activating the drone and provide your information and the license number at time of activation (which is tied to drone serial number).
It sucks but it's the law here.
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I would like to see a requirement that any drone sold in (or imported to) the US (or EU) has to be flashable - without having to desolder components, or any other such nonsense. Press some buttons and load new software.
An accompanying requirement would be to document interfaces to hardware subsystems (chip spec sheets would suffice).
With drones, the potential for mischief is too great to let malware be smuggled in.
Is this a politically and technically realistic goal ? Or am I talkin' thru my hat ?
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Back before the war it was possible to obtain hacked DJI ROMs from the Russians that disabled all of these connections and restrictions including no-fly zones.
i agree, but we shouldn't require all firmware to be open-source and user-replaceable on only chinese devices; we should require it for everything, perhaps with narrow exceptions for things like pos terminals and certain kinds of industrial equipment
Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the increase in lumber prices had a much larger negative impact on the U.S. economy as a whole due to higher costs of building materials impacting pretty much everyone.
That's a large part of the issue, though. The narrative 10 years ago was that we were preventing Chinese from dumping low-cost crap on the U.S. market. Okay, fair enough, keep the crap out. But recent U.S. protectionism has been targeting very high-quality, best-in-class Chinese manufacturers that honestly outcompete anything their U.S. competitors bring to market. Without that competition, there's no incentive for U.S. makers to raise their technological game, and the sector just stagnates and falls behind the rest of the world.
North America has the benefit of two oceans for national defense, but the risk associated with that is one of insularity and stagnation. Ask an indigenous person (if you can find one) how well being a couple hundred years behind European technological development worked out once hostile colonists are on your shores.
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Protectionism, like industry subsidies, is a double-edged sword.
- On the one hand, as SE Asia is intimately familiar with, it can create space to create globally competitive industries.
- On the other hand, it can also remove the incentive for local industries to invest and become technically competitive.
IMHO, what I'd like to see would be a stricter link between protection measures and R&D investment.
If an industry is protected, then it is required to prove it's improving itself + limit returns to shareholders.
E.g. steadily increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards, requirements to demonstrate decreasing costs of production (lumber and/or steel), etc.
Too often, protection measures are implemented, the excess benefits are skimmed and go directly to shareholders, and the company doesn't increase its global competitiveness (e.g. US Steel).
Indeed, and we never seem to learn. Lumber prices in the US during Covid were eye-watering and wreaked havoc through the whole economy that is still being felt today, and it was almost entirely due to US protectionism of lumber.
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The US is the most protected "free trade" economy in the world, by far.
A la "chicken tax" (A 25% tariff on light trucks)
>If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...
I can still buy a DJI drone here in Europe. What stifling are you referring to?
I think the situation is far more nuanced than what will be debateable here, but I've had friends that tried to do tech startups in Europe and ended up moving to the US and doing it here. This is surely not a representative sample so take with a grain of salt, but generally speaking this is their (paraphrased) analysis:
In Europe it just takes a lot more capital investment to get started. You can't do it as a side-gig with a hope/dream working nights and weekends like you can in the US. The process to MVP is just way more complicated because there's a ton of compliance/legal stuff that has to be there at launch. The actual product might take 60 hours of work to build, but then there's another 200 hours of compliance to do which doesn't add any product value at all. You also typically have to hire an expert to help at least consult, because trying to do it all yourself just requires you to have a ton of expertise that no single person ever has. Hiring is also a mixed bag. Market salaries in Europe are a lot less which helps, but firing a bad fit is also way harder so there's big risk. You also can't offer stock-based comp as much in Europe as you can in the US, which all serves to make it harder to get launched.
Once you reach a certain scale, Europe can be just as friendly or more-so than the US, but that scale acts as a great filter for people that don't already have the deep pockets to fund things on their own to get to that point, and most investors won't take that kind of risk without validating product-market fit. The European culture of more longevity also makes it easier in some ways to keep a young company stable because people aren't constantly leaving and you aren't constantly in bidding wars for talent. Overall it's just a mixed bag, but that early filter is why you don't see as many working-class people doing a tech startup in Europe and making it big. On the flip side, when companies make it through that filter, they tend to be a lot healthier and more viable, and quality tends to be higher. Again these are generalities.
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I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.
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That someone can buy new DJI drones in europe is right, but only the latest releases. You cannot use any of the drones you might have purchased over the last years anymore in europe because of the new regulations.
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It's a meme on Twitter, essentially libertarians are pushing the idea that EU killed its tech industry through heavy reagulation and by tech they mean online advertisement.
They keep posting graphs of market capitalisation claiming that Europe must be failing because doesn't have speculative public trading stocks. There's also the top-list theme, making list of top-10 companies by market cap, claiming that if your country doesn't have monopolistic speculative giant public companies you must be failing.
It's very annoying because its very repetitive, I guess they are trying the Goebbles' propaganda technique of keep repeating something until people believe in it.
Someone really really wants to turn the European economy into this short term high growth long term who cares casino that the US has become.
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I've heard offhand here that the ease of starting a business in general is easier in the US and that funding for tech startups is more available in the US due to policy.
Totally hearsay from me.
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Off the top of my head as a non-European: GDPR, 2-year warranties and other consumer protection laws
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> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech
The US is embracing protectionism because we lost the manufacturing advantage. We lost the advantage because we outsourced our manufacturing to China with the pipe dream that we could keep the "higher end" of the value chain. It's as if we can magically have senior engineers without training junior ones in factories. It's as if the equally ambitious and talented Chinese fellows wouldn't want to climb up the value chain. As a result, we have lost talent. We have lost know-how. We have lost the supply chain. We have lost the intuition of how to optimize or scale manufacturing.
What a shame.
It's definitely economic protectionism but it's mostly protectionism for national security reasons. I assume the US is going to start manufacturing drones for war in large numbers in the near term and they need to be made at home (or at least by allies).
This seems likely. For those that haven't been following the war in Ukraine, now that all the Cold War munitions have been mostly used up, drones are now the primary weapon of both sides due to literal "bang per buck". It seems clear that drones are the 21st century weapon of choice.
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If this were the case I'd expect it to be related to all drones from China though. It also doesn't seem needed given the contracts can just state the requirement without extra hoopla.
I don't understand your argument: what has DJI - a manufacturer of personal use drones - with the US military wanting to build weaponized drones in the US?
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Yeah the thing is that the US always, always justified everything by using the "national security" excuse/narrative. When another country does it to the US and its corporations, which has by far the longest modern history of getting involved in other nations national security, then it suddenly becomes an attack on free trade and pure protectionism.
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Those drones will be built for war, how are they competing with DJI who refuses to let their drones be used for war?
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All Xi has to do is stop barreling towards an invasion of Taiwan.
The U.S., Europe, and Japan need to create and enhance a drone industrial base before China invades Taiwan. By the time it has invaded, creating the industrial base will be too late.
Also, China has created DJI through government-sponsored industrial policy, not via open markets.
> China has created DJI through government-sponsored industrial policy, not via open markets.
So like Boeing, Intel, Lockheed-Martin, GE, IBM, etc..
That's nothing new, just 50-100 years behind the west...
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the roots of silicon valley are in the decades of military contracts, initially, i.e. in the "government-sponsored industrial policy" https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?t=3546
You use protectionism like it's a bad thing, but I'm sure the folks in the military industrial complex see what's going on in Ukraine and realise it wouldn't be a bad thing if the US had some domestic small drone manufacturing capabilities. Banning DJI could both encourage some of that manufacturing, while also stemming the flow of data to China.
We used to spend ludicrous amounts of money to fly spy planes to map hostile countries - now a hostile country has a access to a huge number of drones providing live camera data. These drones are hard to track so the government doesn't always know if they've been flown near sensitive areas. It would be negligent of the government to not try to do something about it.
The risk of relying on China for anything military related is too high. They have an aggressive, expansionary mindset and threaten war over Taiwan all the time.
Repeat of Harley Davidson situation?
How can it be protectionism when the US has no consumer drone industry to protect?
I’ve just been considering getting into drone photography. Do you have any opinions or resources to share?
Other than waiting to see where things shake out with the Senate, perhaps Sony? I can't speak to manufacturer support, and not sure Sony will stay in the drone game in the long term where it would feel like a sound investment.
I've been looking at other commercial-esque options (mainly photogrammetry) and came across Sony's"bring your own DSLR" drone.
https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/professional-drones/ars-s1
> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech
Is it? I suspect China has zero regrets in embracing protectionism for social media. The American drone consumer will get squeezed for a few years, until the US develops decent home-grown suppliers in a strategic industry. Hard to think of a better limited use of protectionism tbh.
Exactly! The Chinese leadership is smarter than America’s leadership: just look at what they do. They embrace protectionism when it makes sense.
Yep. That's basically what's happening. It's China success envy syndrome. And instead of competing in healthy ways, political concerns roll out crushing policies that harm both investing opportunities and the ability of consumers to choose freely.
I disagree with the EU on a lot of things, but when it comes to tech and privacy in particular, they're the gold standard in putting individual people first. As someone deeply involved in my company's compliance with GDPR, it can't be overstated how important it is.
> It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech.
Worth noting that this is a different kind of protectionism than that sometimes practiced by developing nations to build up their local infrastructure and industry. In both cases you end up with higher domestic prices and lower quality of goods (at least at first) but at least in the case of the developing nation you do actually build up some domestic infrastructure and industry in the meantime. (Or, at least, you have the opportunity to do so.)
That's not what's happening here as there is no build-up for us to do. This is just the US government acting on behalf of US companies to shield them from competition so they can soak the domestic market for every cent without interference. There's no way any of this is going to reverse or even slow down the trend of enshittification - in fact, it's going to accelerate it.
Okay, but what will happen if US goes to war with China?
This can happen much quicker and easier than you think. Some Chinese delusional leader is going to attack Taiwan and voila, all the import from China will immediately stop at that exact moment.
> Okay, but what will happen if US goes to war with China?
Actual armed conflict? Total annihilation. Neither side wants this. Its why China will not invade Taiwan, and why the US won't put its boot on the neck of the China.
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none of this insight will help america compete with china. at first blush it seems like instead we're cutting ourselves off at the ankle.
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So I guess the new viable business strategy in the US is:
Every country does it from time to time. We are going to see the end of globalisation as we have known it for the last 30+ years. The Russians and the Chinese made everyone realise that it is better to make stuff at home.
The effect is that the US loses its competitive edge in international markets. Is another country going to buy Tesla or BYD? Are they going to buy a DJI or an overpriced US drone? It might protect companies locally but for how long?
And what happens when you taking dumping to the logical extreme? You wind up with nobody domestically that can do any advanced work at all, because everyone gets put out of business. Then we have nothing to export and no skill or capability gradient to climb.
BYD exists because of Chinese economic protectionism. China carved out a space for its domestic products to grow. We should do the same.
Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists? If you look at what's happening in Ukraine It's pretty much a given that the US defense sector is looking at ways to improve the US small drone manufacturing capabilites, and have less potentially hostile drones flying over their own territory.
> Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists?
I work in the drone industry, and this is so very obvious that I don't know where I would start describing it.
Yes, it was pushed by lobbyists. Every single US drone company has been pushing for a DJI ban for years.
There are a lot of coincidences[1] and since congress can legally insider trade it would not surprise me if some involved have stock in some of these companies.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cb-Zv783yQ
The mercantilist impulse will live forever.
That's how tech works with all over-reaching governments. (China, Russia, Korea, Japan and the US, etc.)
Welcome to the real world
Wait what lol
It's interesting to see how the reactions differ between here and the articles on the ban on TikTok. And some even thought that the users who wrote to their government representatives were bots! Whenever the US bans or sanctions something, that impacts people, whether it's drone nerds or teens looking at silly videos. It just so happens that most people here seem to be outside of the TikTok target demographic, so we can't sympathize with a group that will be forcefully deprived of a perfectly functional product, but we can with the other.
What this thread and the tiktok thread really showed me is how many Chinese bots there are on HN.
Not everyone with an opinion you dislike is a bot.
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>I didn't expect Hacker news users to not understand the DJI ban, and that China and all its companies are driven by a dictator that is actively supporting a war on free world.
For someone who claims to be aware of geopolitics it's funny that you are basically just repeating a state department talking point. China has not infringed on other countries' sovereignty to even a fraction of the extent that the "free world" has. And it seems you don't believe that China has the right to govern it's own affairs using a system different from your own.
In my opinion, they understood it perfectly and reacted as they could, even by sending emails to their representatives to try and stop the ban on TikTok. HN users are understanding it as well: it's just a move by the US govt to try and keep an extremely valid, but not US-controlled, product out of people's hands. It seems to me that the only ones who don't understand the ban are those trying to justify it as anything other than what it is.
Why do you expect only the teenage users of TikTok to not understand? I would say the vast majority of all TikTok users wouldn't/couldn't understand. If not that, they've definitely consumed enough content specifically swaying them in the other direction that they would be defensive about it without even knowing they've been swayed
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So, anyone know what DJI is without googling first? Cuz this article doesn't say.
It's the worlds premier consumer drone manufactor.
Founded in 2006, worth over $15 billion.
It's not quite as widely known as say Apple, Google, or Disney.
But it has more brand awareness than most other modern brands.
I'd recon it beats Alibaba, Figma, Webflow, etc...
These types of comments confuse me, because it would be faster to Google it and get an answer in 10 seconds than to post a comment and wait for a response.
Besides, from reading the article, context alone should tell you that DJI is a Chinese drone brand.
God I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm working on getting a newsletter up and running and I'm so focused on best writing practices and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
> and these guys can't even remember to define their acronyms first?
DJI is not an acronym, it's the name of a company. And DJI is the most famous drone company; asking to "define DJI", on an article for a site about drones like that one, would be like asking to "define Boeing" on an article for a site about airplanes.
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Ever seen the videos of ... thing being dropped on people from a drone in the last two something years? That drone is usually DJI Mavic
"Within that bill is a small section that bans DJI from using the FCC frequencies"
So DJI drones as a whole aren't banned, just the parts that transmit?
I imagine it prevents any remote control from working if it prohibits "FCC frequencies".
But if you could control the DJI drone with some other transmitter, perhaps running OpenTX, and also replaced the video downlink, then there'd be no DJI hardware using those frequencies.
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US is spiralling down and I feel like I am in a Truman Show with egregious presidential behaviours, dragging the world into wars which it doesn't need, banning chips, even sanctioning open source (RISC) software.
And this is further making the rest of the world enraged, china more so. Today they released Open source Deep Seek which beats GPT 4o in coding problems.
The train has left the station and the US is stuck. On the wrong platform. With no ticket.
Haha sure.
Let me guess, the train is to a third tier Chinese city no one is interesting in going to, on tracks that the local government can't afford to pay the construction financing on, let alone future maintenance.
I'm sure you're right that third tier Chinese cities are awful.
But major Chinese cities are very far ahead of America in terms of infrastructure. Similarly DJI is very far ahead of any of its competitors.
Banning Chinese things because of politics is one thing. But pretending it's because they're inferior is just ridiculous.
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Which is an ironic comment to make, considering the difference in high-speed rail development in China vs in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_... (TL;DR: China's high speed rail network is the longest and most used in the world, as well as cheaper than the US's)
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