Britain knows it’s selling out its national security to Huawei
foreignpolicy.com
foreignpolicy.com
US and Five Eyes countries following US are banning Huawei for strategic reasons, not for technical reasons. Telecom infrastructure is strategic industry and US want's to prevent Chinese getting ahead. US can't compete directly because US is out from 4G/LTE/5G game and US based companies are only component providers (Qualcomm and others).
>but nevertheless permitted it to compete for up to 35 percent market share in the country’s access network—that is, its antennae and similar equipment.
There is magical thinking involved if someone thinks that base stations alone completely break national security. Mobile networks involve huge number of components. The components and the software in the mobile core network and services pose more risk than base stations. Interfaces are standardized and you can buy different components from different vendors.
European network operators (especially if they have government contracts) have silently limited what they buy from Huawei. Base stations and most hardware is OK. Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others. Many EU countries just "happen" to have one or two carriers with strategically shielded core networks without formally banning Huawei.
Despite the current president's personal crusades, this is not about US protectionism. Companies in the US wouldn't benefit from a ban on Huawei equipment anyway, it would be Finland and Sweden who do.
Supply chain trust has always been a primary concern of any kind of critical resource/infrastructure defensive strategy. Every time a country relies on another for a critical ongoing need, it introduces an inherent power imbalance that the supplying country can use as a leverage. This kind of stuff is centuries-old geopolitical strategy, and it's still in the news every day when we're talking about energy, food, minerals, etc. (e.g. Russian pipelines) Why is communications infrastructure any different? It's not.
Why are you limiting US strategic interests to protectionism of private companies? It is in the American Interest (both private and public spheres) if "Made in China 2025" were to fail: Huawei is a just one front in that war. In this light, minimizing Huawei's market access with (even in the absence of domestic competitors) makes strategic sense: less experience in the market, less revenue, less R&D). Technological expertise tends to bleed into military applications
"They have assembled a small army of suppliers to build a virtualized network built on x86 hardware. ... Rakuten has no dedicated hardware except in its antennas, ensuring the upgrade to 5G will be straightforward. ... Chief Architecture Officer Tareq Amin said the network has "virtualized everything," including radio access, core, transport, IP, billing and operational support systems."
I'm not sure who this army of suppliers is though.
The hardware is the easier part to account for, it’s both physical and a constant.
Europe needs to gain in tech and this is one easy way to do it, by supporting their own players, their own ecosystem. And it's a self-interest freebie at that: the US and EU interests are mostly aligned, there will be no push-back for supporting Ericsson & Co. The US would rather everyone use Ericcson than Huawei.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113289/european-union-e...
So, is it worth it to sacrifice VW and BMW in order to help Nokia and Ericsson?
Sure, but are you saying the tradeoff is worth it? It's fairly simple: if Europe begins taking protectionist measures that harm Chinese companies, then China will respond in kind.
Regardless of whether using Huawei tech makes you vulnerable to spying or not, it still means you are bound to Huawei products and infrastructure through vendor lock in. Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.
We should be actively trying to separate from China, and it's unfortunate many seem eager to do the opposite.
>Maintenance may involve Huawei technicians, etc.
Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
Vendor lock-in is not the issue. If we get into conflict with China and it takes, say, 6 months to swap out all the now-compromised Huawei hardware (which is obviously insanely optimistic), that’s a problem. Wars have been won and lost with much less than 6 months of technological/infrastructural head start.
Do you think a nation-state like China will have great difficulty compromising non-Huawei hardware? This seems overblown because Huawei components will be a small fraction of the attack surface in very connected environment. The best defence would be vendor-agnostic, which might be what the UK government is planning on.
Also, it would afford them the additional political benefit of deniability in their attack.
There technically isn't, but 3GPP standardized interfaces leave enough room for there to be a smoother deployment and operational efficiencies gained from a single vendor deploying RAN and Core together. Few suppliers can do this -- Huawei is one of them.
>>Who are not Chinese nationals. Working for foreign company subsidiary does not change your national allegiance.
Maybe this is region specific, but I believe most (all?) initial Huawei deployments are performed by Chinese nationals working directly for Huawei. To your point, maintenance (i.e. post-deployment, live production) can be a mix of foreign company employees and Chinese nationals.
On a long enough timeline, authoritarianism always wins.
You can buy components from different vendors, except that the overhead of working with thousands of different suppliers for your network is a non-starter, hence network operators around the world have moved to a model where they prefer large domain players to provide packages (e.g. 5G Access, 5G Core, 4G RAN, 4G EPC, etc.) to streamline purchasing, coordination, responsiveness and costs.
>>Operating services, network control, visitor and location registers, mobile switching centers, network monitoring, and rest of the software that deals with the core network can be bought from others.
Such extra components can be bought from others, except it should be noted that Huawei seems to provide very attractive prices for their "good enough" offerings in these other categories.
One thing that base stations need, by their nature, is total surveillance of location and unique identification of devices. It seems to me that these together are a major threat to national security, ignoring all the other things base stations have access to.
To cut it short. No, those databases are not stored in base stations, not even close. They are part of core network.
In LTE your handset talks to base transceiver station who talks to eNB who talks to MME who talks to HSS where the data is physically located. MME (Mobility Management Entity) is already part of the evolved Core Huawei has no access to that. Even MME keeps data just temporarily. This all happens in control plane.
If Huawei supplies transceiver stations or eNB's it's nowhere near the point where it could store and distribute user information or track them and not be noticed immediately.
I don't know why y'all are lacking imagination all of a sudden on this one matter, but I hope you come around.
But governments intrinsically see surveillance as an unquestioned good and likely wouldn't even approve such protocols for overt telecom use, never mind helping to develop them. The public has already been pwnt by design - this whole topic is just squabbling over who gets the proceeds.
Phone billing records seem a lot jucier for that.
What they have done is take all three offerings and limit what percentage of the market they can have - effectively having the country 5G networks provided by a three supplies all having an equal amount of kit in the field.
They are also taking the approach of presuming it is potential bad-actor and proactively planning around that.
So a bit like putting an IDS/Firewall in place before you realise you need one, you could say.
Is it ideal - nope, but the lack of local offering make that impossible anyhow. So plan for the worst and hope for the best, is not a bad plan of action in this instance.
Wait, you think the Swedish secret service is going to coerce Ericsson into installing backdoors that let them spy in the UK?
I mean, sure, possible, but a bit further fetched than China doing exactly that, no?
Fortinet is American.
I used to work in telecoms myself about 20 years ago, and at least at the time, much of infrastructure was insanely insecure -- I could have backdoored much of the internet's backbone as a lone programmer had I wanted to: our software was used by most big telcos. Not once was our code audited (at least openly). I very much hope that security is taken more seriously now.
[1] V. Prevelakis, D. Spinellis, The Athens Affair. https://web.archive.org/web/20070704193410/http://www.spectr... The pdf is also available through Spinellis' Google Scholar page.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...
I've got some bad news ...
>If the British government was truly concerned about market failures, it would not reward Huawei, which profits from unfair support by Chinese state capitalism, giving it advantages over its competitors from market economies.
Is this not outrageous? That we're so intolerant of other kinds of economies that we must try and band and block so that people don't realise the disadvantages of our own system? If your system is so superior, let it compete on its own merits.
Is this a criticism of the West or China? Because China does this currently with multiple Western companies.
Any country with any sort of economic system can toss money (or labor at least) around. If you want to dominate the tire industry for some reason, you can just give them money, favorable government contracts, or whatever else.
That doesn't prove your system is superior, just that you can tax people and write checks.
What are you arguing? Would you want to live in an economic system similar to Chinas? Many economists believe there is a genuine merit to China's economic system, but that doesn't mean it's something we in the West should support. There is a social cost to China's state intervention. The largest being that it leads to corruption. Do you think Huawei can ever take a stance against the Chinese government? Of course not. China's economic system is basically just corrupt capitalism. It's not about who's got the best economic system, it's about who has the right values.
As for being able to mitigate a “man in the vendor”, whether the “man” is acting according to the vendor or whether the vendor themselves have been coercively controlled or infiltrated matters very little. Mobile operators generally don't even run their own networks today, they outsource the management of the critical platforms to the vendors themselves who often finance the deal too.
UK dropped the ball on this, but it dropped it 10-20 years ago, and now this kind of problem is going to keep coming up again and again.
Some of you might enjoy this examination I made of the topic and the context for all this. https://blog.eutopian.io/huawei-5g/
The cap at 35% ensures the UK will not become nationally dependent on a high risk vendor while retaining competition in the market and allowing operators to continue to use two Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors.
In other words, the limit isn’t there to mitigate the risk of Huawei being malign (there are other mitigations in place for that risk, such as keeping them away from sensitive network functions). The limit is there to prevent the operator from becoming entirely beholden to Huawei.
Problems of course come when suppliers merge. I have contracts with 8 different supplier for my business, one goes bust, or jacks up prices, and I simply increase supplies of the other 7.
Then those 8 companies start merging, and before long you're left with a single supplier, or at best a cartel.
I'm only half joking. History teaches us that any technological shortfall can be remedied fairly quickly if you have a clear priority and the audacity to steal.
5G doesn't require imploding plutonium.
Reading HN, I was under the impression that we didn't need 5G anyway (except for people streaming videos in stadium, which I haven't really understood why yet).
I can stream at 25 Mbps just fine on 4G+/LTE too. At off-peak times. I’ve even seen it hit 70, 80, 90 Mbps occasionally.
The problem happens at peak times, usually starting around 6pm, when the network slows to a crawl and I can’t stream things reliably despite having 5/5 signal strength, because my carrier (Three UK) has sold too many cheap unlimited data plans and their 4G network is highly congested.
5G is needed because it greatly improves the data carrying capacity of given blocks of spectrum, meaning more users and higher speeds in areas that currently suffer capacity constraints.
And honestly, 5G’s 200 Mbit+ speeds would just be nice to have to speed up things like downloading multi-GB OS updates and the like.
If it's the former, 5G helps you. If it's the latter, 5G makes zero difference to you.
If I monitor my router’s status page I can see it start to bounce between several different Cell IDs when the congestion hits, and the SINR drops to low single digits (from 16-20dB when it’s fastest).
In any case, as I understand it, backhaul upgrades will be a part of 3’s 5G rollout anyway.
Unless your server sits right beside the cell tower, you will never see that promised 1gb/s
I am excluding future usage though (biggest I could see is "That smartphone is your only mean of connection to the net, either via the device or when acting as a modem.").
China is not the enemy, we should work with them to build a healthy middle class existence for all the world's citizens. Having one a country mono-culture doing the lions share of the advanced manufacturing is just asking for another dark age when that society suffers a catastrophe.
The reality here is this quickly leads to a discussion about regulations some people would be furious at the even the thought of re-examining.
The US (and other countries) lost much of its electronics supply chain (and manufacturing in general) due to political priorities, and it can regain it by shifting those priorities and enacting new policy. This idea of "it's gone and never coming back" is false and a result of an over-attachment to certain ideas and certain policies.
that would require a fundamental rethinking of economics and trade away from free-marketeering towards an understanding more similar to the Chinese who put these questions into the context of national (security) interest, and that is very unlikely to happen, in particular in the US in which private interest groups wield significant power over a largely weak and incoherent government. In Europe, it may be possible if France would have more of a say but countries like Germany or the Netherlands would be significantly hurt by the inevitable retaliation so it's probably a nonstarter here too.
This is a feeling shared by both the left and right in the populist portions of both parties.
People are looking for ways to get more solid middle class jobs back into the USA, and protectionist trade policy is an obvious place to start for many.
Prior to Bretton Woods there had never been a system of free trade between (nearly) all countries enforced by a singular superpower.
There's nothing fundamental saying that America won't swerve away from providing the service of protecting and enforcing global trade. If that ever happens, it will have many serious consequences, but the US could still decide it is in its best interest.
AFAIK, those interest groups don't actually wield very much power, but they've been very effective at promoting the fatalistic attitude that their favored polices are inevitable and permanent.
For proof, look at the current president who started a major tariff war that was very much against a major leg of free-market policy. What paused it wasn't those interest groups, it was political uncertainty caused by retaliation that targeted farm states by the other party in that war.
For simpler components (resistors, capacitors) special types still have some manufacturers in the west (e.g. high-precision, especially robust variations, ...). Cheap mass-production not so much.
I remember trying to find out if you can get EU-made LEDs, and the result was that maybe some high-power ones by OSRAM would fit the bill, but it wasn't clear what was made where.
Most Intel chips are still being made in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...
If you add non-Hauwei kit, you not only have to buy the more expensive gear but you also have to buy a more expensive licence for the protocol on the Huawei kit.
Source: adding SMSCs, GMLCs, SMLCs, etc to HW networks.
It's really not about owning.
> After Brexit, London sees itself as dependent on Beijing’s goodwill.
The author agrees with you:
“The U.K., for example, could force providers to work with open coding standards (“OpenRAN”) that would ensure interoperability between providers, thus lowering market entry barriers to future market entrants and disadvantaging Huawei, which has heavily bet on closed proprietary solutions.”
It is guaranteed the CCP will wage information warfare against the UK in the future. If there's a global war, China is the most powerful country based on current politics that will be the UK's adversary. Ability to limit or interfere with public communicarion infrasructure is an invaluable war-time advantage.
For those that say this is just edge gear, I say that makes it even worse. Redundancy and access control is easier at the core than at the edge which lives in the field and direcrly interfaces with possibly hostile end devices. Even just a dumb antenna can be built in a way that makes it easier tl cripple or help with jamming/DOS.
China and Russia (with many smaller countries who are growing more resentful of the advantage we get having the dollar as the world reserve currency) are actively trying to undermine the dollar (let’s hope they fail, or that it takes a long time!) but they probably view the U.K. as a trading partner and as much as possible be cordial with.
England is done with being the world mono polar superpower so they don’t show up strategically as a real adversary.
For financial and ego reasons, the USA is trying to hold on to its status (although by over using tariffs and sanctions, we are being incredibly clumsy - we need to get our act together!)
China does not care for the west as a trading partner much more than as a stepping stone to reach elsewhere. The west uses economic advantages to arm twist domestic Chinese policy. If they have their grip on Africa, Asia and S. America who cares about the fading west?
And the USA right now is vital for continued world peace and stability as a superpower. There many many nations that owe their geopolitical stability right now to the US being the sole super power.
China has sheer volume but being maybe a third at most their population size the US dominates many things still. Technologically they're still behind in military appllications. The US woud squash China in a heartbeat in both conventional and Nuke warfare. And you have to undetstand how much SK and Japan (both important UK allies btw) are important to the US. Their loss too China will happen only after losing WW3. These are one ot many reasons why both China and Russia are working hard to dismantle the US and UK from the inside out as well as sow discord between them. UK fought with US in both Iraq and Afghanistan!!! Many brits died in America's wars already.
>Yet Europe is home to two of the world’s leading vendors, Ericsson and Nokia; Samsung offers yet another alternative from a trustworthy democracy.
It is rare to see a cutting-edge sector without the US.
So it's also about price. Huawei is just cheaper than Nokia and Ericsson. I don't know how the technology of the different providers compare but it probably won't be that much of a difference. It probably also depends on your existing 4G infrastructure since 5G can sometimes be rolled out as a software upgrade using existing antennas. So if your existing infrastructure uses Huawei you don't want to switch.
Some rumors say that Huawei has 4,000 software engineers that they can throw at a problem, like their current goal to replace Google services.
If an average software engineer in China makes $10,000 USD, vs. an average software engineer at Google making $160,000 USD. Then Huawei will spend $40 million USD, vs. Google spending $640 million USD.
That’s a pretty significant difference. Huawei’s operating cost is 6% of Google’s.
Huawei can afford to throw a lot of human brain power at solving an engineering problem. And especially when a lot of Chinese companies are operating in start-up mode and working 60+ hours a week.
Average software engineer at Google makes well over $200K USD.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/28/admission-colos...
Were any of the war criminals that lied us into Iraq prosecuted? Nope. Did the NSA modify Cisco routers and tap the phones of its EU allies? Yes.
Is Guantanamo Bay still open? Did the U.S. just commit an international crime by assassinating a top Iranian diplomat?
Am asking all these questions, because while the U.S. is still better domestically, (be it with huge cracks, even on that front), I'd say that internationally it isn't as clear cut as I'd once have agreed with you it is.
I do not support China, but neither do I 'support' the U.S. That's a false choice.
I have a bit more nuanced view of things. For example I do not support the government of Iran, but I also think the U.S. does not have any right to vilify it 24/7 like it does, as long as they're so closely buddy, buddy with Saudi Arabia, since Iran is, for all its faults, more democratic than KSA is.
So if anything, I'd support the EU becoming more independent of U.S. influence and providing a proper counter-balance on the international stage to both the U.S. and China.
This false equivalence between the USA and China is really obnoxious. It's not even close.
Internationally however, and since I don't live in China more relevant to me, it's not so clear cut.
I'm not saying China is more moral than the U.S., I am simply saying that when it comes to international behavior the case for the U.S. being clearly more moral isn't as clear.
Personally, I'd prefer the EU to assert itself more independently from the U.S. so there's some counterbalance to it from democratic countries as well.
As for specifically Huawei, I don't want the NSA to have my data, but I know they already do, per Snowden. The case for Huawei having them is a lot less clear.
I know for some people it's 'obvious' that they do, but I'd like to work with cold, hard evidence.
Now, the U.S. is known for its outrageous overreach far, far outside its borders, just look at the Kim Dotcom raid, so the NSA having all the data has been demonstrated to have extremely negative implications.
The case against Huawei has not been made so convincingly and no, I do not trust the NSA/FBI to make the case.
General trust is more important here than finding something or not finding something now. Dictatorships are just not trustworthy, and they wont change into non dictatorships with continued support.
The "we didn't find backdoors bs" is a pseudo argument, in reality it's fear of economic retailiation against other industries that sell there.
America has planted backdoors. We have evidence of this. American equipment cannot be trusted. America cannot be trusted.
Perhaps China's government has planted a well-hidden backdoor or perhaps it will order one planted in the future. We don't know. What we do know is that America has definitely done it.
It's a choice between a 0% chance of equipment without backdoors and some nonzero chance of equipment without backdoors. The nonzero chance is clearly better.
I don't see buying Chinese networking equipment as a choice about society. I see it as a choice about which device best serves my needs. So long as China isn't morally bankrupt (which I do not believe to be the case), I give zero weight to their societal model.
Even if I were weighing models of society against each other, America is only barely ahead of China in my mind. China may do some messed up things like their detention camps but America is no bastion of morality either. America fabricates evidence to invade its enemies, causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the process, holds people without trial or due process, tortures people, commits war crimes through assassination, arbitrarily pulls out of international deals, to the detriment of all, and refuses to respect international law to the point where it has declared it will invade one of its allies should one of its people be tried for war crimes.
Maybe China is morally worse, I'm not sure if I believe that at the moment. Whatever the case, I see America as far more dangerous.
Feels like there's a niche market for a UK, French, German, Australian, etc, line of equipment.
One key difference: China is an adversary to the US and UK. The US is not an adversary to the UK. This strategic relativism is tired and indefensible in any version of reality.
Not generally, but there are cases where they are. Ask Assange, for example. Surely the UK has information they would rather not share with the US in some cases.
To act otherwise - or to act like China ought to enjoy a similar relationship - is downright dangerous in the face of escalating geopolitical tensions.
However, if you really want an answer, there are two reasons that the UK ought to align itself with the US (and vice versa). Those two reasons are Russia and China. We are fortunate to be living in an era of widespread peace, but that is not guaranteed indefinitely. Should, god forbid, widespread warfare break out once again (as it has since tribal days up until the last 80 years or so), any westerner with a modicum of understanding of Putin’s or Xi’s ideal world ought to be on the side of the US/UK.
The UK conducts extensive trade with both the US and China, so the potential for trade disputes with either country is there. At the moment, I think it's fair to say that a major trade dispute with the US is more likely than a trade dispute with China.
> Should, god forbid, widespread warfare break out once again (as it has since tribal days up until the last 80 years or so), any westerner with a modicum of understanding of Putin’s or Xi’s ideal world ought to be on the side of the US/UK.
Whatever you think of China, you can't claim that it's been more belligerent than the US in the past several decades. Blindly backing the US and giving in to its demands (backed by sanctions against its own allies, as in the case of Germany) to cut off ties with China and Russia might not be the best way to promote global peace.
Becoming technologically dependent upon China puts the western world at strategic risk, which we have every reason to believe China will eventually cash in on when the time is right. When they cash in on it, it will not be for the advancement of liberal democracy or basic human dignity. As reckless and shameful as American policy has been of late, it continues to be the most powerful benefactor of liberal democracy the world over. I do not believe that China is belligerent. I know that it is ideologically opposed to liberal democracy. It’s apparently hard for many westerners to believe that there are those who truly do not believe in democratic ideals, but there are and they are growing in power and ambition.
It is naive to believe that our current state of affairs is guaranteed and one need only worry about maximizing the economic prosperity of a society that they see as guaranteed to be democratic. Do you think that millions of people died in WW2 in the name of trade regimes? Or was there a more substantial threat that was being addressed? Is that threat wholly eradicated, and will it always be so?
I don't see any evidence of that.
> I know that it is ideologically opposed to liberal democracy.
The Chinese government doesn't care about the existence or nonexistence of liberal democracy in the UK, US, or really anywhere other than in China itself. They're not out to destroy democracy in the UK. They care about their interests, which in regards to the UK are mostly economic.
> Do you think that millions of people died in WW2 in the name of trade regimes?
The CCP fought on the same side as the US and UK in WWII.
> Is that threat wholly eradicated, and will it always be so?
It was largely eradicated for a long time, though the far right is making a comeback in many countries. The major threat I see now, however, is the increasing conflict between the US and China, and the extreme recklessness of American foreign policy.
I do not even want the UK to use 100% US gear, never mind think they strategically should use 100% US gear. My argument is only that becoming reliant (whether defined as a critical 1% of the network or the entire 100% of the network) upon the US is not analogous to the same level of reliance upon the CCP - at least from the perspective of the UK.
5G RAN (access) is very different.
I'd agree that 5G Core not be that different at the most abstract levels compared to 4G LTE packet core, but the reality on the ground is that they are still sufficiently different enough that network operators are using 5G as a strong reason to re-evaluate suppliers and put major network components up for tender.
If only Britan could join together with others perhaps in a supra-national group of nations so that collectively they'd have more strength to resist large economies like China's.
This Twitter thread discussed that point of a view a few days ago:https://twitter.com/mikebutcher/status/1221842546881679360?s...
* Before they took this decision, the govt consulted with the UK's Cyber Security Centre (these guys are not meek civil servants...GCHQ end up owning every Home Secretary, they are powerful).
* The distinction they made was between allowing Huawei into the "core" part of the UK's networks.
* Because Huawei won't provide "core" infrastructure, there is no risk.
Tbh, I am not an expert but this sounded very wrong to me. 5G is going to require building out a dense blanket of receivers...if you let them do this, then they are in...it doesn't matter.
The suggestion was that sensitive data is only carried through certain infrastructure...I don't really buy this because it doesn't really protect 5G which is obviously a component of the network anyway, and I don't really believe that there is some kind of parallel internet out there for GCHQ only...but I don't know.
To me, this sounded a lot like cheapness. The issue with lack of competition was brought up in the Parliamentary debate...that is a problem that exists but the way to solve that is not to buy equipment from unsafe providers (the Foreign Secretary seemed to accept btw, that Huawei was controlled by the Chinese govt).
* Can governments not inspect the hardware themselves to see if there are physical backdoors?
* Could they not, as a precondition for any provider, demand to see the source code of the radios?
* If the ISPs tunnel the backbone traffic combined with more/most Internet traffic being secured anyway,
wouldn't that minimize data leaks?
* If you admit that the previous point isn't valid because of metadata concerns, doesn't that invalidate the US
national security establishment's position on metadata towards the public?
They have previously scoffed at such concerns ("It's only a phone number") but now it matters.
* Wouldn't rogue equipment exfiltrating data be rather obvious?...it is not possible to be confident that the source code examined by HCSEC is precisely that used to build the binaries running in the UK networks.
-- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
this is false.
Agree?
Edit: This isn’t intended as a rude or rhetorical question. I’m really interested in your answer.
(Comment edited to (hopefully) clarify tone.)
The Huawei furore is akin to saying "public WiFi is not secure so why are you using it?".
Huawei is “owned” by a labor union that is controlled by the party. They are in effect an arm of government.
There’s a difference in how AT&T operates vs how your state DMV operates. Control matters.
That's a pretty thin argument. The employees' shares are managed through the union, because of laws that make it impossible for a privately-owned (i.e., not publicly traded) company to issue shares to large numbers of individuals. That union is a member of the national confederation of unions. It's a big leap to argue that that means the government runs Huawei. The connection is highly tenuous and indirect.
What is certain is that Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the company, has veto power over all major decisions of the company. If you were to try to identify the person in control of the company, he'd be it.
- hard cap on the market share (35%)
- no Huawei parts in core part of network
- no Huawei in sensitive locations (military, energy)
- Huawei declared as the only provider that poses national security to the UK
It's not a complete ban but it sure is a blow to Huawei who has been expanding globally unopposed in the past decade.
Eg With the liberals being just a minority, the majority of the Canadian parliament got together and recently passed legislation for and subsequently set up a committee to review Canada-China relations, on the backdrop of China holding our citizens hostage and extraordinary Chinese intervention into Canadian governments (federal, provincial and municipal).
But realistically I know better than to bet against a Trudeau selling out Canada.