Huawei, Failing to Crack U.S. Market, Signals a Change in Tactics

> the deep ties between Google, Amazon, Facebook, PayPal and the US military-industrial complex

False equivalence. Google et al exist in a system where private actors can challenge the government. ZTE and Huawei are arms of a government which recently devolved into a dictatorship. One can be trusted to, most of the time, follow commercial logic; the other, geopolitical logic.

Indeed it would and in fact largely is, especially in the case of China. For a long time Google was banned and Facebook remains so. Only with massive efforts has Google been able to somewhat operate there.

As much as its fashionable to hate on China and its government, it's important to understand that Foreign government social manipulation of citizen and instigate chaos is real and it's not limited to US or western countries or only through the internet. As someone who owns and runs an ISP, I see governments in many countries, through my peers in the industry, (including developed, developing and poor countries), go through great lengths to tighten the screws on the internet in their respective countries. While very few countries do it as intrusively as China - most countries do it at some intrusive degrees, with laws and regulations.

Political destabilizing through the internet is a real thing and has been for many years and as more companies rely heavily on the internet for their business - stability of the internet infrastructure is very much tied to individual countries economic health and faith.

Does China go too far in regulating their internet? Most probably yes.

Is China's internet policy completely unreasonable on unfounded security grounds? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

The problem is no one really knows what the middle ground between the openness of the internet and policing it just the right amount. So we end up with an extreme case like China.

If competition with Chinese companies were the reason, Amazon, Apple, Bing and so on wouldn't be available in China either.

The difference between those and and the sites that are blocked (not just Facebook and Google, but also international newspapers) is that they cooperate with the Chinese government by censoring their websites, and the others do not.

Economically, Chinese social media isn't very relevant to the government. Since they are not exporting anything, protectionism in that sector doesn't really pay off. But being able to control what the populace can see and hear about the world is very important to them.

So the major reason for the internet blocks is security. It's the security of the state against its own citizens, but security nonetheless.

> Apple had a "backdoor" to access data on its own phones via installing a build that disabled password attempt throttling. The FBI simply asked Apple to use its backdoor on the FBI's behalf, not to create a new backdoor that the FBI could use on its own.

Source? My understanding is the exact opposite. Apple had not backdoor, but the FBI wanted it to create one like the one you described for it.

> NSLs can only be used to get non-content data, like whom an email was sent from and to. China intercepts and filters the actual content of all communication. https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/960948/what-happens-when....

There's also the fact that the NSA has been archiving all data. Even if the law says the government can't do something with that data, or that NSLs can only be used to get non-content data, laws can change on a whim, while Facebook's dominance of a market cannot be easily removed. How effective do you think China suing the US for breaking or changing a law would be, if the whole point of the law is to leverage power against a nation? The possibility exists for potential antagonistic use if the data is stored in the US or owned by a US company, as everything in the US is under US jurisdiction.

If I have a gun pointed at your head and you tell me your current laws say that you will not use the gun against me if I give it to you, why would I believe you? Once I give you the gun, you have the power and will no longer need to follow your own laws.

> Apple had a "backdoor" to access data on its own phones via installing a build that disabled password attempt throttling. The FBI simply asked Apple to use its backdoor on the FBI's behalf, not to create a new backdoor that the FBI could use on its own. In China, Apple acceded to the government's demands to block any VPN service that prevents front door access by the government. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/07/30/apple....

This is not true. Please provide a source (I was unable to locate one).

> Chinese versions popped up and they are not missing anything.

They're missing the censored content that the CCP wants to suppress.

It'd be easier to compromise an engineer with data they have already gathered than to force Apple to comply with such an order from the top down.

Anarchy is in Apple's DNA, and I have to believe there are still a few of the old guard hanging around that word would get out in such an event.

You may not care who knows, but I bet you would not put up with the slowness of the device because of the spyware feeding everything to the other side of the planet.

And when China starts doing something with your credit card info, I bet you drop your Chinese devices.

>China's a big country with a lot of companies

owned and controlled directly or indirectly by their government, an authoritarian dictatorship. It’s disingenuous to pretend Chiba is just another market of competing private companies.

Samsung tablets.

Modern Western culture says buy the cheapest now and don’t bother to think about the long term consequences. Including chucking into a landfill and buying a new one a year later.

On every level, be hollowing out our economies, pollution, loss of national autonomy, Western citizens have dug their - our - own graves.

I had a worse phone years ago and it had OTG and the camera was great. Why 7 years later Huawei phones don't have OTG?

Maybe consumers can ignore it, but governments won’t. Whether or not there are valid security threats, the US can use this to their benefit in the same way that China has used media control to their benefit.

I see a bifurcation if two non-comadible but competing political systems which will include different hardware, operating systems and applications. It will be interesting to see which system has the ultimate Darwinian advantage.

Here in New Zealand, two of our major mobile carriers use Huawei gear. One uses Huawei for the entire mobile network (from UMTS/LTE base stations to the core network) while another is migrating from Alactel-Lucent (which mostly powers their legacy 3G gear and I suspect their core network still) to Huawei (their entire 4G network as well as 3G at some of the new base station sites). The latter carrier apparently pitted Alactel-Lucent and Huawei 4G gear at a difficult rural test site to decide whether they'd go with AL (whose UMTS/3G gear had been fairly unreliable) or try their luck with Huawei. I presume Huawei must have beat out Alactel-Lucent to win the contract to deploy 4G—a decision that has proved to be successful so far. One major landline telco uses Huawei gear. Many RSPs (ISPs) deploy Huawei DSL/Fibre CPE routers—with some getting good reviews for Gigabit Fibre (which many other branded routers struggle with). Many cheap phones sold by the various mobile carriers (either own-brand or Huawei brand) is Huawei.

While I can understand the distrust for Huawei, I can't deny they have done well when given the opportunity to do so. Alactel-Lucent (an US/EU company) in particular dropped the ball when one of our major telco had a major outage and it turned out they had a maintenance contract (so was AL themselves, not the telco responsible for maintenance of the network). Still took Alactel-Lucent's own experts a full week to restore telco services to a big chuck of our country. Severely dented our telcos' trust in US companies and thus encouraged the telcos to try Huawei instead. So far no major outages attributed to Huawai incompetence which has been a good plus so far.