Google reportedly arguing cutting Huawei off from Android threatens US security

Blackberry in mobile OS share had it for a while, though I'm sure you'd argue that it doesn't exist anymore, but you had asked about ever, not just right now. Video game consoles are another example, with the Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation.

In just about every market there exists two natural economic leaders - the quantity (a.k.a. cost) and the quality leaders. There are market leaders other than the natural two who can arise through other means, such as ecosystem lock-in, tech patents, brand exclusivity, or some other method.

Same was true for micro computers all throughout the 80s and up to mid 90s.

Games consoles, cars, TVs, laptop OEMs, enterprise cloud hosting providers, etc.

So plenty of counter examples.

Here's a partial list of major server operating system vendors over the years: IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft ...

Everyone one of those has existed since at least the 1990s and it's rare for the largest individual vendor to have more than 30% share at any given time.

The key to maintaining this is common interfaces. You write against POSIX or Qt or Java and it runs on most systems even though they're all different vendors.

But all of that stuff comes from the little guys. All the Unix vendors got together to create POSIX because then developers get access to more users by targeting POSIX than Win32, even though Windows at the time had more market share than any individual Unix. Sun creating Java allowed developers with mostly Windows customers to write their Windows applications in Java, which then gave them Mac and a dozen other platforms for free, including Sun Solaris, which the developer probably wouldn't have targeted on its own.

The phone hardware vendors could take a page out of that book and create their own modern POSIX for mobile to replace the Google-specific APIs on Android. Heck, they would only need one implementation of it, the same as all the old Unix vendors have largely standardized on Linux today.

If the US is so concerned, can't they just ban them from 5G infrastructure? Why is it necessary to fork Android?

The US dropped its steel tariffs against Canada and imports ~$325 billion in goods from Canada (equal to ~19% of their economy). Canadian steel represents <2% of that.

Meanwhile the US is going to allow Infineon to buy Cypress, an important US semiconductor company.

The US will have roughly a $21.x trillion economy at the end of 2019. The scale of non-China tariffs is entirely trivial, meaningless. So far there has been very little in the way of actual hits and targeting from tariffs - on the grounds of national security or otherwise - outside of the trade conflict with China.

All these mechanics are still there, those agencies are still running. I can’t imagine taking rose colored glasses and think the US and China are that different when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

After all we've learned about NSA spying, I find it amazing when Americans go on about Chinese spying, especially given that Huawei, as yet, has not been caught spying on its customers.

I would love to be a fly on the wall where the actual trade negotiation strategies are being considered. There is a very popular and simplistic notion that this trade war is nothing more than uninformed and random actions on behalf of the whims of a delusional, unintelligent President, that there are no "adults" involved whatsoever. I suspect the reality is very much different than that.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/22/china-japan-lighth...

As China figures out how to deal with Robert Lighthizer, US President Donald Trump’s top trade negotiator, Beijing has turned to an unexpected rival for advice – Japan.

A diplomatic source who has dealt with Lighthizer said Chinese officials and academics have reached out in recent months to foreign diplomats and former officials of American trading partners for wisdom on handling the US trade representative.

The irony of China looking to its neighbor and rival Japan for insight has been brought about by the pivotal role Lighthizer played in the US-Japan trade battles of more than three decades ago, with severe consequences for Japan.

“Lighthizer is tough and relentless in negotiations,” the source said. “Some Chinese officials and experts are looking for advice on how to deal with [him].”

As former US President Ronald Reagan’s deputy trade chief in the 1980s, Lighthizer negotiated two dozen trade agreements with foreign nations on a range of commodities, from steel to farm products.

When Japan’s trade surplus with the US was sparking a confrontation between the two countries, the former international trade lawyer pressured Japan to reduce steel and auto exports to the US by restricting its shipments of electronic and agricultural products with punitive tariffs and quotas.

Washington also launched a series of trade investigations against Japan, leading to the US dollar’s depreciation against the Japanese yen.

Japan’s economy went into a decade-long decline after an attempt to boost domestic consumption through the lowering of interest rates triggered a bubble economy built on inflated real estate and stock market prices that ultimately collapsed.

"the Services are provided by Google Ireland Limited (“Google”), a company incorporated and operating under the laws of Ireland"

to quote the terms of service. Providing any of my data to USA secret service would appear to be espionage, probably treason, and against EU law. I'll bet NSA have access to everything Google know (internally) about me.

The Chinese government probably have all details of my interactions with baidu or Ali Express too.

They look the same to me in this respect, only the Chinese aren't telling my government who they're allowed to do business with.

Huawei's drivers, which is what led GCHQ to probe into Huawei's code and write a rather uncharitable report on what their coding practices look like [1], are not. Admittedly, as members of the public we can only take their word for it that they found shoddy code by any reasonable standard. But if the latter is true and any indicator of how they'll maintain their own fork of Android, it's doesn't inspire much confidence.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversi...

That's pretty straight forward, someone from the US exchanges information with someone who has a Huawei phone who is outside the US, someone who has imported a Huawei phone, or someone who is travelling / working in the US and has one. Which given that it's the number 1/2 phone maker in the world, is pretty likely