Hikvision Asks D.C. Circuit to Order FCC Action on Device Certification Requests
Hikvision laid out its case for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to order the FCC to start processing the Chinese company’s authorization requests for gear it wants to sell in the U.S. The FCC last month asked the court not to take that step (see 2502110040). Hikvision and Dahua won a partial victory last year (see 2404020068) when the D.C. Circuit found that the FCC’s definition of critical infrastructure in a 2022 order was “overly broad.”
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Seventeen pages into its latest brief, “the Commission finally concedes the reality of the current situation: there is a ‘freeze on Hikvision’s applications’ that ‘prevents Hikvision from submitting any applications for equipment authorization,’” Hikvision said in a Monday brief with the court. Hikvision and the FCC agree the company “cannot even seek Commission approval -- and thus cannot obtain a reviewable determination -- as to any product, even those that no one would claim are ‘telecommunications equipment’ or ‘video surveillance equipment,’” the brief said.
Hikvision can't ask the FCC to approve “a vacuum cleaner that has no connectivity of any kind,” the brief said: “And while denying that this freeze is ‘indefinite,’ the Commission admits that it will not so much as lay eyes on a Hikvision application until the agency defines ‘critical infrastructure’ -- which it ‘may ... prefer to explicate … in a notice-and-comment rulemaking’ many years in the future.” The FCC's actions are “inconsistent with this Court’s decision, and the Court certainly need not tolerate that inconsistency for years before correcting it,” Hikvision said.