Chairman Pai warns about China's 'leverage' over NBA: Imagine what Beijing can do with 5G networks

Amid the NBA-China controversy, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that the situation is a “disturbing lesson” on Chinese government leverage. “If the Chinese government has such leverage over NBA stars and the league itself, that raises the question, how else can they can export their censorship, their anti-Democratic values, and ultimately their control when it comes to even more important things like our 5G networks, the wireless networks of the future?” Chairman Pai said. He also mentioned China pressuring Apple to remove the Taiwanese flag from its iPhone emoji list in Hong Kong. “Just imagine if we have 5G networks that power all of our industries that work for our military. What kind of leverage the Chinese government could exert over the operators here in the United States if they want information about how we’re doing business, how we live our lives,” Chairman Pai said. “That is a threat that I don’t think the American people are willing to live with and I am certainly not either as the head of the FCC,” he added.