Europe is going to kill free software Have you contacted your state's rep?

Which is already the status quo for 90% of all wifi hardware.

Presumably they will require cryptographic signatures on the firmware. This is also not infallible, but it is substantially more inconvenient (and in many cases it might as well be unbreakable) for people who like free software.

And yes, you should blame EU for even considering it. Just because other people kill doesn't mean that we shouldn't blame people who also kill.

What they want to solve?

Radio is a shared medium and everybody has to follow the rules. Especially there are parts of the spectrum used by so-called first user like weather radar, military use, and alike. Originally radio was seen and considered as an somehow unlimited resource like IPv4 addresses. But then this this unlimited resource became very limited like IPv4 addresses. So now, we have many radio frequencies used twice by so-called secondary users. The secondary user can use the spectrum as long as the first user do not use it. This is e.g. in the 5G with Wifi.

This legislation is to (hopefully) assure that everybody plays by the rules. This realized by certifications. But the problematic nature of SDR is, that software controls the behavior and software can be replaced easily. For that reason none of those people, which govern the radio usage, like SDR. They want to lock down the device, so that they are sure that every body plays by the rules.

Many articles about firmware lockdown

You can always build your own router, though.

But the FCC rulings might also apply to drivers for radios. Right now you can get any ath-9k hardware and do almost anything you want to it with a Linux kernel since all the driver infrastructure is open. With ath-10k, newer Broadcom parts, and all Intel parts they include proprietary firmware blobs to restrict what you can do now, though.

It is likely these rulings will push the OEMs of radios to start moving more functionality into blob payloads, which will include future iterations of the raspi.

This is why these kinds of decisions are incredibly ignorant and stupid on the part of the FCC. They cannot retroactively lock down all existing radio technology. Hell, they cannot reasonably expect to ever stop someone who wants to use a radio to congest the RF bands of someone else from doing so - it is trivial to assemble your own scrambler. This is simply an emotional response to criticisms about the relatively open state of routers and radios in recent years and how some bad actors have been taking advantage of that open access to more easily harm networks.

  Manufacturers must implement security features ... so 
  that third parties are not able to reprogram the device 
  to operate outside the parameters for which the device 
  was certified.

The headline has Europe in it because they are now making similar rules as those that FCC made.