A Chinese telecommunications firm is being barred from the United States due to suspicions that such companies are platforms for the communist regime’s spy services.
“Granting China Mobile’s application would not be in the public interest,” Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Thursday after FCC commissioners voted unanimously to reject the application.
The vote against China Mobile, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, marks the first time a Chinese telecom has been blocked from the American market on national security grounds. It could inaugurate a broader effort to exclude Chinese companies from the U.S. market.
“China wants access to US telecom networks for purposes that would undermine our security,” Brendan Carr, one of three Republican appointees to the five-person commission, tweeted after the vote. He added that “we must go further. Our security agencies should look at revoking the authorizations of PRC-owned carriers already operating here.”
Carr called for investigations into two companies, China Telecom and China Unicom, that already have American operations. “Security threats have evolved since those companies were granted interconnection rights to U.S. networks in the early 2000s,” Evan Swarztrauber, one of Carr’s policy advisers, said.
The FCC, under Pai’s leadership, has discouraged U.S. phone companies from using Chinese-supplied equipment, to avoid the risk of “hidden ‘back doors’ to our networks.” That domestic effort parallels Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s months-long campaign to persuade U.S. allies to cut ties with companies such as Huawei, one of the pioneers of next-generation wireless technology, given the risk that the firms will be required to surrender sensitive data to Chinese intelligence agencies.
“Why would anyone grant such power to a regime that has already grossly violated cyberspace?” Pompeo said Wednesday in the United Kingdom. “What can her majesty’s government do to make sure sensitive technologies don’t become open doors for Beijing’s spymasters?”
British officials are poised to allow Huawei to provide at least some equipment for next-generation networks, but the FCC’s position on China Mobile — developed through “a lengthy review of the application, discussions with the applicant, and consultation with the U.S. intelligence community” last year — is that half-measures won’t work.
“[D]ue to several factors related to China Mobile USA’s ownership and control by the Chinese government, grant of the application would raise substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks that cannot be addressed through a mitigation agreement between China Mobile and the federal government,” the FCC explained in the bulletin announcing the vote.
