There is no way in hades that the FCC would dare to do this deliberately; and Louis Rossmann should have known that. Instead he gets clickbait for after they're revoked. /s

Correct. This is what happens when people who are actively hostile to governance are elected to government. Turns out the derp state was load bearing.

78 employees have left out of ~1500 https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-trims-staff-and-spendin...

>Any other admin and Apple would sue them

Examples of this happening in the past?

> Any other admin and Apple would sue them

I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.

> Apple would sue them.

Apple fears the tariffs.

I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.

For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that.

Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.

I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is).

However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.

The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.

Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.

Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.

They all know how to design a phone already, and don't have access to the proprietary Apple chipsets. Everything else is just industry standard electronic engineering. What would they gain? The specifics of how some power supply is connected?