A trade commission judge has recommended shutting ASUS and Plume Wi-Fi equipment out of the United States, and the commission now wants to know who would supply the market instead
Every Wi-Fi router ASUS sells into the United States sits inside the relief an administrative law judge has now recommended.
No violation has been found, and the notice the commission filed on Friday is careful to say so in every paragraph. What the judge has done is tell the commission what to order if it does find one: a limited exclusion order covering Wi-Fi routers, Wi-Fi devices, mesh Wi-Fi network devices and components imported, sold for importation, or sold after importation by ASUStek Computer Inc of Taipei City, ASUS Computer International of Fremont, California, and Plume Design Inc of Palo Alto. Cease and desist orders would go to the two American entities, Plume Design and ASUS Computer International.
Those two forms of relief do different work. An exclusion order stops goods at the border. A cease and desist order reaches inventory that is already inside it.
The question the commission is actually asking
The extension moves the deadline for public interest submissions to the close of business on 18 September, and the commission lists five things it wants addressed. Two of them are the substance. It asks commenters to identify like or directly competitive articles that the complainant, its licensees, or third parties make in the United States which could replace the subject articles if they were excluded. Then it asks whether the complainant, its licensees or third-party suppliers have the capacity to replace that volume within a commercially reasonable time.
The complainant is not named in Friday's notice. It is named in the institution notice from June 2025: Estelgia, LLC of Dover, Delaware, which filed on 16 May that year asserting six patents and alleging that a domestic industry exists.
Submissions are capped at five pages including attachments.
One document, two dates
The notice gives the date of the recommended determination on public interest twice and gives two different dates. Its summary says the presiding judge issued it on 19 August. Its body asks for comment in light of the recommended determination on remedy and bonding issued on 6 August and the recommended determination on public interest issued on 1 August. Both sentences are in the same four-page document, and it is not obvious from the face of it which one is the typing error.
The earlier deadline being extended was set in a notice dated 11 August, which falls between the two candidate dates and settles nothing.
