Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency Act

This act tells the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to post a public list of companies that hold FCC licenses and have owners or controllers from certain foreign countries viewed as adversaries. The list includes companies where those foreign entities own a reportable share or where national security officials say they can control the company, even without owning stock. The FCC must update the list at least once a year. The covered countries are China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, including their governments and subsidiaries of entities from those countries.

The FCC must post an initial list within 120 days for license holders in two areas: spectrum licenses awarded by auction and submarine cable landing licenses. For all other FCC license or authorization holders, the FCC has up to 18 months to set up rules to collect ownership information, and then one more year to add those entities to the public list. The act also lets the FCC gather this information without the usual federal paperwork hurdles to speed things up.

• Who is affected: Companies with FCC licenses or authorizations, including spectrum auction licensees and submarine cable landing licensees.
• What changes: The FCC will run a public, annually updated list showing which licensed companies have ownership or control ties to the covered countries .
• When: Initial list due in 120 days for certain licenses; rules to collect broader ownership data due in 18 months; the broader list updated within 1 year after those rules; annual updates after that.