On April 30, 2026, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-0 to advance a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Protecting Against National Security Threats in Domestic Telecommunications Service (WC Docket No. 26-82), that would do something the United States has never done at the physical layer of the internet: bar China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom from operating data centers and Points of Presence (PoPs) on US soil, and forbid any US carrier from interconnecting with entities on the agency's national-security "Covered List." The draft, released April 9, extends the bar to affiliates of listed firms and, in its most expansive reading, to carriers that route traffic over Huawei or ZTE equipment.
This is the most consequential expansion of the Covered List regime since the list was created in 2019. It converts cross-border data interconnection — until now a commercial arrangement governed by peering agreements and Section 214 authorizations — into something closer to a national-security permit.
The case the FCC is making
The strongest version of the government's argument is not paranoid, and it deserves to be stated plainly. State-owned Chinese carriers sit under China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which obliges firms to assist state intelligence work. The FCC has already found, in its orders revoking China Telecom Americas' Section 214 authority in 2021 and China Unicom Americas' in 2022, that these carriers were "subject to exploitation, influence, and control" by Beijing and could "access, monitor, store, disrupt, and/or misroute" US communications. A PoP or data center is not a passive cable; it is a place where traffic is groomed, mirrored, and routed. If you accept that a state-controlled carrier inside your interconnection fabric is a standing espionage risk, closing the physical foothold is the logical next step. That is a coherent position, and regulators are not wrong to treat the interconnection layer as infrastructure rather than commerce.
Where proportionality breaks down
The problem is not the goal but the instrument. Three features of the NPRM make it broader than the threat it names.
First, the interconnection bar reaches third parties. As drafted, the rule sweeps in carriers that merely use Huawei or ZTE equipment, not just the three Chinese state carriers themselves. A regional US or foreign ISP that bought ZTE optical gear a decade ago could find itself on the wrong side of an interconnection prohibition it never bargained for. The Covered List was designed to name specific bad actors; bolting an equipment-based contagion test onto it turns a targeted blacklist into a transitive one, where untrustworthiness propagates through the supply chain.
Second, the affiliate extension lacks a limiting principle. Listing Pacific Networks and ComNet as China Telecom affiliates is defensible — they were named in the original revocation. But "affiliate" in telecom can mean a minority stake, a shared parent, or a reseller relationship. Without a bright-line ownership threshold, the rule invites case-by-case adjudication that markets cannot price and lawyers cannot predict.
Third, the rule substitutes a categorical ban for the conduct-based remedies already on the books. The FCC revoked China Telecom's and China Unicom's operating authority through individualized proceedings with records, findings, and judicial review — China Telecom's challenge went to the D.C. Circuit. Those orders worked. A prospective, list-based exclusion from "blanket domestic Section 214 authority" skips the record-building and asks the market to treat membership on a list as conclusive.
The cross-border cost
Defenders will say the affected footprint is small, and today it is: by 2026 Chinese carriers hold only a modest US presence through wholesale routing, IXP PoPs, and limited enterprise data-center operations. But the precedent is the export. The United States is simultaneously projecting this logic abroad. In February 2026, the State Department revoked the visas of three Chilean officials for merely assessing a $500-million China Mobile proposal to land a Valparaíso–Hong Kong subsea cable, as Rest of World reported. The message to every government weighing a Chinese interconnection partner is that evaluation itself now carries a penalty.
That is the strategic risk in converting interconnection into a security gate. The open internet's value comes from permissionless connection; the more the US models data interconnection as something each counterparty must be pre-cleared to perform, the more it legitimizes the same move by governments whose "national-security" lists will target American firms. Beijing already runs precisely such a regime. A world of mutually exclusionary interconnection lists is a fragmented internet, and the US firms that depend on global reach lose most.
A narrower path
None of this requires giving state-controlled carriers a pass. A proportionate rule would: tie any data-center or PoP bar to the three named state carriers and adjudicated affiliates, not to equipment-use contagion; set an explicit ownership-percentage threshold for "affiliate"; preserve a conduct-based licensing path so a non-state carrier can rebut the presumption; and sunset the equipment provisions as Covered List vendors are physically removed from networks under existing rip-and-replace programs. The comment period — open under WC Docket No. 26-82 — is the place to build that record.
The FCC is right that the interconnection layer is infrastructure. It does not follow that every cross-border link should require Washington's prior permission. Security that is purchased by importing the architecture of the splinternet is not, in the end, a bargain.