TP-Link begins router firmware lockdown due to FCC proposed regulation

It does make a good excuse for them, though, I guess.

If the FCC wasn't planning to stomp on router manufacturers, they wouldn't be doing this. Make no mistake, it is the government killing innovation here.

What? Sure they do; there's nothing in the constitution that forbids congress from making a law delegating its authority to the executive (the idea that all of administrative law is unconstitutional isn't supported by anyone in the legal community to my knowledge). Agencies can't just make up rules that say whatever they want, though; they're limited to being able to regulate the things Congress has empowered them to regulate, and they have to say what their authorizing legislation is in the text of the rule.

In general, this is what we want. Congress should be deciding what gets regulated, and experts in the subject area should be deciding the specifics of the regulation. Example: Congress decides that not every quack snakeoil salesman should be able to put whatever he wants in a bottle and sell it as medicine, so medications should be regulated. But members of Congress, by and large, are not doctors or otherwise medical experts, so they should defer the business of deciding which medicines should be allowed, how they should safely be produced, etc., to experts. Hence, the FDA.

In the case of the FCC, Congress decided that, spectrum being a precious commodity, somebody needed to regulate how it should be parceled out so there was enough to go around and people didn't step on each other's toes. But again: they're not radio engineers, so they're not equipped to decide what the right power levels are, which parts of the spectrum should be used for what, and what the best enforcement mechanisms are to make sure people play by the rules. Hence, the FCC. In this case, they proposed a rule requiring manufacturers to put software safeguards in place that prevented end users from being able to make otherwise-compliant equipment exceed its legally-allowed broadcast power levels. You can think that's a bad idea (I do, too), but it's pretty clearly within their regulatory purview.

That's almost exactly the opposite of the point of the legislative branch, since the other branches have very little power not explicitly granted by the legislature, and the legislative branch principally acts by defining and granting functions to the executive and judicial branches.

> Theoretically the legislative branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies

More to the point, federal agencies only exist because they are created by Congress, and only have powers because they are given them by Congress.

Its not a theoretical power that Congress has over them, but a practical one whose exercise is the only reasons the agencies exist and have any power at all.

If Congress doesn't take action that you think it should against a federal agency, that's because a sufficiently large portion of Congress doesn't want to take that action, not because Congress has only a theoretical but not practical power over the agency.

> but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them.

Congress doesn't make rulings, that's the judicial branch. Congress has substantially restricted the powers of commissions and even abolished them. (A notable example being the one that served as a structural model for pretty much all other "independent" regulatory agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose powers were stripped in a series of deregulation movements culminating in the abolition of the Commission in 1995.)