FedEx Sues Commerce Dept. Over Export Rules

FedEx has filed suit in the District of Columbia, claiming it should not be expected to enforce rules restricting exports to China, and can not reasonably be held liable for shipping products that it doesn’t not know about. In the filing it characterizes the situation as one in which the Commerce Dept. “essentially deputize FedEx to police the contents of the millions of packages it ships daily even though doing so is a virtually impossible task, logistically, economically, and in many cases, legally.” The suit was filed after FedEx ran afoul of the Chinese because a package containing a Huawei phone sent to the U.S. was returned to its sender in Britain, in what FedEx called an operational error. According to technology news outlet PCMag, its writer in Britain had attempted to send a Huawei P30 handset to a colleague in the United States. FedEx returned the phone and told the sender that it could not deliver the package because of a “U.S. government issue” with Huawei and the Chinese government. A U.S. Commerce Department spokesman responded to the suit by saying the department looked forward to defending its role in protecting U.S. national security.