The FCC unanimously concludes China Mobile can’t be trusted

The Federal Communications Commission was never going to let China Mobile set up in the US market and now it’s official.

Last month FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made it clear he was against China Mobile USA’s application to provide telecommunications services between the United States and other countries and that he hoped his fellow commissioners agreed. Often there is dissent among the five commissioners, usually along partisan political lines, but this time nobody dared stick up for China Mobile.

“After an extensive review of the record in this proceeding, the Commission finds that due 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,” said the FCC announcement.

The long and short of it is that the US state doesn’t trust the Chinese state and therefore doesn’t trust anything owned by it. This is pretty similar to the Huawei argument, with the difference that in this case they seem to see even closer ties with the state. At time of writing the commissioners had yet to publish their statements on the matter, but one of them apparently wants the FCC to take another look at China Telecom and China Unicom too.