I'm certain you said quite clearly that the Bill in question would affect "recreational and hobbyist" owners of DJI products... clearly inferring that the legislation would directly impact grass-roots Americans who don't wear a uniform or have a sticky mitt held out for a Federal grant. So, how, exactly would Homer from the Bayou be affected when he wants to use his Mavic to drop catfish bait? You are absolutely correct about there being a grand total of one domestic American manufacturer that could produce a drone that is more-or-less on a par with the millions of DJI models currently whizzing about through the skies, but they have kicked the commercial market out of bed and set their sights to exclusively cater for security and military sponsors, so no grass-roots drones for grass-roots punters there, Skydio.
I find it really funny that not one of the General Patton clones getting bent out of shape about hypothetical 'Chinese spy-tech' has raised a single word of complaint about Google Earth, which byte for byte offers a far more accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date photographic source of potentially compromising image data from 10,000 feet all the way down to street level. This attitude regarding China isn't anything new and I can recall at least a couple of occasions in the last three years where the Red-under-the-bed McCarthyistic rhetoric has been dragged out of Grandpa's campaign chest, dusted off and then trotted out... on both sides of the Atlantic - yes, we in the UK had to put up with tub-thumping panic-mongers as well - just before Huawei ended up being told to take a hike with their 5G network.
On either side of The Pond, I honestly think that those of us who own and use DJI (or Hubsan, or Autel, or Yuneec) drones have more to worry about with the alterations in Aviation Authority regulations, which will eventually freeze the vast majority of us (including those who pay the peppercorn annual license for 'recreational use') out of the airspace as and when the big commercial carriers get their ducks in a row and then start to insist that we are the single danger to their sub-400' airspace... the airspace that they will have paid Aviation Authorities obscenely large annual fees to license for commercial use.
After all: this isn't exactly without precedent - as anyone who operates ham radio will recall, when in the 1990's, Government departments sold off wide swathes of radio frequency bandwidths used by licensed amateur radio enthusiasts to mobile phone companies, leaving the license paying ham radio operators staring at the two thirds of their dial they couldn't legally use anymore.
