Part five of a series. Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series.TL;DR: The FCC's Covered List just got significantly larger. On July 28th it swallowed robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers, and power inverters in the same announcement. The router queue meanwhile has more than a dozen approvals and TP-Link still has zero. ASUS, Google, Linksys, D-Link, Belkin — also still zero. The mechanism that started with a router ban is now eating your living room floor and your solar panels. Same playbook. Faster pace.While I was replacing NixOS2's failing hardware, covering Evil vs. Evil, Nvidia, Apple, and more — the FCC kept busy.We need to talk about your robot vacuum.On July 28th, the FCC added "foreign-produced advanced robotic devices" to the Covered List. Same mechanism as the router ban. Same no-vote, no-public-debate process. Same "national security determination from an interagency body" with no elaboration. New models can no longer receive FCC equipment authorization — meaning they can't legally be imported, marketed, or sold in the United States.The announcement focused on humanoid robots and those four-legged nightmare dogs from Black Mirror. But the FCC confirmed in supplementary guidance that the definition is broad enough to include robot vacuums and autonomous lawnmowers — basically anything that has a radio frequency component, moves around on the ground, and navigates obstacles.So. Your Roborock. Your Roomba. Your Samsung Jet Bot. New models — banned. Existing authorized models — fine, keep using them. Same distinction as the routers.The national security risk posed by a robot vacuum is that it could be exploited to collect sensitive data, enable surveillance, or create cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Which — fair, actually. The home mapping privacy problem with robot vacuums isn't new — these things build detailed floor plans of your home and that data goes somewhere. That's its own post. For now the FCC apparently agrees they're a security concern, even if the framing is a bit rich coming from the agency that just approved your ISP's router with zero questions asked.But also. It's a vacuum. That bumps into furniture. I'm going to need a moment with that one.Okay. Moving on.The Actually Serious OneOn the same day — same announcement, same Public Notice DA 26-786 — the FCC also added foreign-produced power inverters to the Covered List.This one isn't funny. This one has real household financial implications for a lot of people.The definition was narrowed on August 20th to cover specifically "utility-interactive inverters" — devices that connect to and interact with the actual electrical grid. Standalone battery banks, portable power stations, off-grid systems that don't grid-tie — explicitly excluded. Your Anker, your Jackery, your standalone home battery that doesn't feed back to the utility — fine.What's covered:Rooftop solar with grid-tie — if your solar system feeds excess power back to the utility through a connected inverter, that inverter is exactly what the definition targets. Enphase microinverters. SolarEdge string inverters. Sungrow. Growatt. The inverter market for residential solar is dominated by Chinese manufacturers. That's the target.Bidirectional EV charging — the newer V2G (vehicle-to-grid) units that can push power back to the utility are utility-interactive and in scope. This is where it gets interesting for EV owners.Remember eighteen months ago when your EV salesperson was telling you that you could power your house during an outage? The F-150 Lightning's Intelligent Backup Power. The GM Energy system for the Silverado EV. The Hyundai and Kia V2L/V2G home integration setups. The home gateway hardware that sits between the car and your house panel and manages the grid interaction — that specific box is almost certainly in scope. The car itself is excluded. The inverter hardware managing the utility interaction is not.The feature they sold you. The hardware that makes it work. On the Covered List.Same conditional approval pathway exists. Same firmware updates extended to January 1, 2029, already baked in this time — they learned that lesson. Same "does not pose risks to national security" boilerplate presumably forthcoming for whoever gets approved first.The national security justification here is actually more credible than the router one — a foreign government that can remotely disable grid-tied inverters across tens of thousands of homes simultaneously has a real infrastructure attack vector. Salt Typhoon demonstrated that foreign actors are absolutely targeting US energy infrastructure. This isn't entirely theater.But the mechanism is still the same. No public debate. No rulemaking. No criteria disclosed. One interagency determination, one Public Notice, one addition to the Covered List.Back to the Router QueueWhile all of this was happening, the router approval queue kept moving. Quietly. Consistently.Here's who has conditional approval now: Netgear, Amazon eero, Adtran, Nokia, Calix, Sagemcom, Arcadyan, Hitron, Vantiva, Gemtek, Miri Technologies, Alpha Networks, Gryphon Safety Online, Sercomm — and several more ISP equipment suppliers most consumers have never heard of.Notice anything about that list?The vast majority are ISP equipment suppliers. The boxes your cable company ships you and charges you to rent every month. Sagemcom, Arcadyan, Hitron, Vantiva — these are brands on the router your ISP forces on you. They got quietly waved through, one by one, with the same boilerplate and zero manufacturing commitments. Your ISP's router — almost certainly made overseas, almost certainly now approved, no explanation required.The consumer brands people actually choose at Best Buy are a different story.Not approved. Radio silence: ASUS, D-Link, Google Nest WiFi, Linksys, Belkin, MSI, Synology, Acer. When Consumer Reports contacted all eleven major router brands back in March, most of them didn't even respond. ASUS said they were "confident in the integrity of their supply chain." Acer, D-Link, Google, Linksys, MSI, and Synology said nothing at all.Those brands can still sell existing authorized stock. They cannot launch new models in the US market. ASUS — one of the most popular enthusiast router brands on the market. Synology — a staple of the homelab and self-hosting community. Both stuck. No new models. No approval. No explanation for why the ISP brands got waved through and they didn't.TP-Link: Still zero. Still arguing it's a US company headquartered in Irvine, California. Still the only top-tier consumer brand with no path forward in sight. In June the Pentagon added China-based TP-Link Technologies to its list of Chinese military companies. In September they announced Wi-Fi 8 routers with preorders opening in select regions and no US launch date. Their next generation hardware exists. It launches everywhere except the country that was their second-largest market.That's not a ban anymore. That's an exit.The Shape of the Thing NowStep back and look at the full Covered List as it stands today: Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision — original entries, years old Foreign drones and components — December 2025 Foreign consumer routers — March 2026 Foreign power inverters — July 28, 2026 Foreign advanced robotic devices — July 28, 2026 That's drones, routers, vacuums, lawnmowers, solar inverters, EV grid-integration hardware — all under the same mechanism, all added in eight months, all with the same no-vote no-public-debate no-stated-criteria process.The router ban was the pilot episode. It's a franchise now.In part one I said watch the thread. In part four I said watch what the testing lab proposal looks like after the comment period — because that one affects everything in your house, your car, and your pocket.The comment period closed. The testing lab rule is still pending final adoption. When it drops it'll affect the certification process for roughly 75% of all electronics sold in the US. Every device with a radio frequency component tested in a Chinese facility — which is most of them.That post is coming. This series isn't done.All this has happened before. It's still happening. Faster now.Update 09/09/2026: Apparently I also forgot to mention electric gloves and robot dogs. The vacuum just felt more relatable. The four-legged nightmare machines from Boston Dynamics and their Chinese equivalents are exactly what the FCC had in mind when they wrote "advanced robotic devices" — the Roborock scooting around going "EXTERMINATE!!!!" is just a bonus.Find me on Mastodon at @ppb1701@ppb.social