Telecommunications networks are now considered to be crucial for national security, and there is growing awareness of how foreign adversaries could target such networks for their own gain. In recent years, the American government has subjected the telecom sector to increasing restrictions on exports and imports, usually justified by concerns over threats to national security when equipment is bought from, or sold to, suspicious foreign firms. As this article will argue, such governmental restrictions are typically the outcome of non-transparent agency decision-making procedures, with ramifications for citizen oversight of government operations and the health of the American telecommunications network. 

The U.S. Department of Commerce maintains a document called the Entity List for foreign firms that American manufacturers are not permitted to export products and services to. This type of restriction has been common since the 1990s, but in more recent years the restrictions have been applied in the other direction as well. In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning Americans from buying supplies from foreign telecommunications firms that have been deemed threats to national security. This added the Federal Communications Commission to the process, as that commission now maintains a document called the Covered List for foreign firms that Americans are not permitted to import from. 

Journalists, government watchdogs, and even America’s allies suspect that these export/import restrictions are politically motivated and based on poorly defined threats to national security, which is itself a poorly defined term. This turns relatively straightforward economic regulatory processes into a political drama that may lead to short-term rhetorical victories but long-term damage to the American telecom marketplace. 

The next section of this article describes the history of national security-oriented export restrictions in telecommunications, and the following section does the same for more recent import restrictions. Section three of the article deviates temporarily from legal and policy research into an analysis of the framing strategies used by politicians and the media to mold American public opinion of international economic competition, and how these viewpoints have found their way into trade policy. The fourth section analyzes the effects of opaque government agency processes, combined with poorly defined justifications, on the ability of interested citizens and companies to determine why the export/import restrictions were enacted. This is followed by an examination of how non-transparent restrictions may negatively affect the American telecom marketplace. The article concludes with a discussion of why more transparency is needed during this process, with recommendations for better methods of addressing suspicious foreign companies that do not require banning them from the American market and disrupting the development and operation of networks for consumers at home.