The U.S. is charging Huawei with racketeering
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We're a US-based startup that does about $100-200k in business annually with Futurewei (Huawei's R&D subsidiary). I've never dealt with Huawei proper. I can say they're genuinely investing in R&D, and trying to build a product unlike anything being offered right now. We're working with tech that's floating around the academic conferences, but no one else commercially will touch.
This in contrast to our experiences with established US companies which, a) don't want to deal with early-stage research, b) wouldn't work with us as a new, small company, and c) gave bad IP terms (ironically).
Not excusing other activities, but for us it's been above-board and beneficial. If they want to pump their profits into the US ecosystem, I see that as beneficial.
To see them as "good actor" because of a token $200k, while stealing literally tens of billions is missing the forest for the trees. Strategically, feels penny wise, pound foolish.
I get the concern, and fines and punishment is all fine. But I think they might also have got caught in the geopolitical crossfire. It's a messy world; Samsung and Apple are stealing eachother's billions everyday, Google and Facebook are spying on us, DOD is killing people. I don't know who it's morally permissible to do business with anymore, but we're trying to get by.
I think it's extremely naive to think that Huawei is just an innocent victim. Almost willfully so.
> I think the stealing instead of R&D thing is somewhat misled. These guys are definitely spending billions on research as well.
If you really think Huawei's R&D theft is blown out of proportion, there's a huge mountain of evidence that suggests the exact opposite. There's really not much wiggle room for ifs and buts. If anything, it's probably worse than reported.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Intellectu...
and you know, this indictment.
That being said, I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.
- lots of companies, like apple, are stealing from non US companies.
- US companies like Google and Facebook have much more personal data than huawai.
The whole privacy concern regarding Huawai is not well argumented. And its mostly an excuse by trump to attack China that is becoming a big world economy with manufacturing and technology skills rivalling USA.
Huawai is good competition in their field making products across the board cheaper. Competition is in the core of capitalism. May the strongest survive.
5G will be more expensive to rollout without them.
Ok, if they "copy" certain tech youre free to go to court. But a complete ban... thats just bad politics.
> Almost willfully so.
> I don't expect you to say anything bad about the hand that feeds you. Given Huawei's reputation, they're probably monitoring you as we speak.
I think your post would have been just fine making your point without these remarks. It's just someone sharing their experience, that's what I'm reading the comment threads for. We can all see it's a new throwaway account without you lashing out at them.
Literally the same situation happens, when FB employees post from an anonymous account and defend Facebook.
Reactions are quite a bit more reserved, if not always nice or believing. They will get pointy questions, but they are expected to be treated with respect. Sometimes HN mods even remind people of this.
I think it's actually pretty disgusting how forgiving a large part of the HN crowd is, when they do it for US companies. It's just the big X-word. Hostility against those who are even suspected of doing it for the US media enemy du jour.
Now of course FB is a finger of the hand that's feeding you the very idea that Huawei is doing it more than USFAANG. (who, coincidentally, also are monitoring you as you speak)
Is an excellent argument for more technological sharing (as is/was customary in china), and less IP ownership.
Because they're incapable?
At a national level, the R&D spending is actually important to build up your society's fundamental expertise in an area. You learn from your failures and mistakes. And in the meanwhile, you build up the expertise in your population, and those people, may later leave, and form other companies, which further advances your society.
However, if you can get the research results of your competitors, and learn that certain paths don't work, then you can save time and money, and not go down that same path. But, I still feel that you learn most from your failures, because you build in safeguards to prevent them from happening again in the future. So you end up with a technique, a system of systems, to build out your final product.
It's like Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
About 6 months Post acquisition one of our employees found that Huawei was selling a 100% complete rip-off of one of our products. JVco had access to some of our development resources, but Huawei was never supposed to see any of that per the agreements.
The box looked, acted, and functioned the same - all they did was localize the language, barely rebrand it, and repackage our weekly updates for their customers the day after we released them.
Legal from BiggerCo got involved, and it was all papered over as a ‘misunderstanding’ by the Joint Venture company. Haven’t trusted a thing with their name on it or any company that does business with them since...
That's medium term. Long term is Comac and Huawei drive down Boeing and Apple's market share until they're bit players in their industries (or go out of business altogether).
In these discussions decrying how terribly the Chinese treat foreign companies, I see very little acknowledgment of how much money foreign companies have earned both by selling to the Chinese market, and by exploiting cheap labor in China.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-17/boeing-se...
That culture may or may not be more pravalent in China than it is in the US, but this particular story doesn't claim either way.
Imo the only way it would work is if there was a separate law passed that addresses hiring workers who have Chinese citizenship specifically (with no US citizenship at the same time, obviously, as dual nationals are a thing), but that would never happen unless the situation escalated dramatically way beyond what it is now.
These American companies thought they could build their products for a fraction of the price in China and increase margins. They didn't stop to consider that by teaching China how to build their products they were creating a new low-cost competitor. And they've since lost their manufacturing ability. Oops.
It's hard to feel too sorry for these companies. It's not exactly a secret that this is how China operates and has operated for a very long time.
On topic though, Most of the pot-banging from Washington is at the behest of AT&T and other US carrier/handset/chip companies who are rightly livid that Huawei made it to market with 5G before they had a chance to monopolize it.
Yeah, many of these vendors do improve upon the original products quite a bit so even while initial versions can be shoddy knockoffs, later editions are often times improved compared to the original.
> Its hard not to see a lot of them as sort of a Robin Hood.
They're definitely profiting, and they're doing it partially through lower worker standards and looser laws on pollution. They are acting for profit, not to fix the flaws of Western capitalism.
You said it yourself: later editions are improved often times. Yes, some of this gain is due to lower worker standard, but I highly doubt ATT, VZ, etc. are really maximizing for worker standards, either.
They also “side-step” the capital and years of research required to come up with the products.
Why invest in R&D when you can invest in corporate espionage for a fraction of the cost?
And if your product is so weakly innovative that a picture of the circuity or some power point slides basically give away significant trade secrets, then your product probably sucks.
These charges sound like they're for non-innovation based trade secrets, whatever those may be.
They are commoditizing their compliments.
Nobody is claiming _all_ ideas business finds / works on should be immediately shared freely with the world. The benefactors of a business are naturally motivated to protect their know-how. But it should be the business' responsibility to protect its secrets, not HN commenters or governments'. If an idea can't be kept secret, then government issues patents, which should be time limited and regional.
It’s like how the music industry kept saying that people would no longer sing and make songs, because piracy would prevent them from doing so. As if there was no money to be made, and money was the only point of singing. As if piracy ever stopped people from singing for the past 10,000 years.
Well, artists do make money from songs, by having concerts. They are selling the service and the experience of of a live performance. This was the way that it had always been done throughout human history.
Or Apple for example, they don’t make money from selling software, but they make it from selling very expensive hardware, that they force to expire after a few years.
Getting billions invested in anything won't happen without a return. If a company is limited to a short window before everyone can copy means less funding and more valueless throwaway products.
So companies don’t do this, because there is no profit in it? Perhaps, that is the problem with late stage capitalism itself? Everyone wants to become a rent-seeking landlord.
What about a societal need? What about for the survival of the human race?
This is like arguing that humanity can’t muster up the ingenuity to solve something to save the human race, just because there’s no profit in it.
Necessity is the mother of all invention. If there are fewer antibiotics, then maybe this just means that it is not necessary.
Sorry folks! You’re just going to have to take your chances with the Grim Reaper! My bank account can’t be bothered to find a cure for you.
In many industries patents are an innovation blocker. Companies often spend more money fighting patents trolls than they gain form having patents. Patens are increasingly acquired for defensive purpose to defend against patent troll attacks rather than actually protecting any innovation.
I am not against intellectual property protection, but I think how things have developed in the US in particular is excessive and counterproductive.
And now, solar energy just crossed a milestone, at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with other energy sectors.
Everything is derivative.
Even the latest generation of CPU technology pushing faster clock rates and adding more cores. It’s still derivative of the initial idea of the transistor.
You build value by building a moat. You make your business more valuable by making it harder for others to get into, almost like a natural monopoly.
Like consumer automobiles, which require a huge investment in societal knowledge and capability. Only a few countries can mass produce cars at a commercial level. Or commercial airplanes, where only a few companies can really make a profit. Or even Tesla, by changing the paradigm, from internal combustion engines, to fully electric drivetrains.
My initial comment was only to rebut the idea that you can’t do anything without massive amounts of patents and copyrights. Which in itself, has gone too far.
Stealing IP does have an impact on capital allocation.
Yet I don't think the solution to this problem is to abandoned both systems completely. Rather copyright period should be shortened, and patents should cover less and last for a shorter time.
Right now the system is not setup to support innovation and creation but rather to act as cash cow for big corporations.
Put heavy encryption on it. Keep it off the internet. Keep your computers air-gapped.
If you don’t do this, then sorry, this is your fault.
However, if someone else wants to compete with you, then they can just reverse engineer what you did. Any engineer competent enough can figure out the process details, by just working backwards. They don’t even need to bother looking at your source code or blueprints.
Though as used, "innovation" really means "figuring out new things to make money on", which renders your question tautological - "in a world where it's harder to invent new tricks that make money, what incentive is there to invest in inventing new things that make money?".
Handset manufactures probably don't care since they're sourcing from others. Perhaps Samsung (Exynos) being the exception, but they're Korean. Apple bought Intel's 5G division.
The only chip company that I could imagine cares is Qualcomm.
This one sentence summarized everything.
The US doesn't actually have any vendor for most of this kind of equipment, the competitors here are either European or Chinese.
AT&T, like most carriers, is perfectly happy to get super cheap and gear from China, at a fraction of the price they'd pay otherwise.
In fact, carriers around the world are the one's pushing to use Huawei.
Second - the US doesn't really have any capabilities in the 5G space, for the most part. It's European companies: Erikson and Nokia that have capabilities. Cisco, Lucent etc. are not even on the radar on this issue.
Given that your position is completely at odds with the reality of the market, you'll have to provide some material evidence of your claim that the US is just up in a fuss over their lack of dominance of 5G, otherwise, they just don't seem true.
Once again, all of this narrative misleads us from the real underlying issue, which is that Huawei and others have been systematically and openly stealing property.
Issue for whom? Most people are perfectly happy with one company learning and mimicking products of another company, if they get cheaper and better versions. This is perfectly natural. If some rich guys feel like China got ahead of them too much too quickly, that's too bad - they should have protected their stuff, not teach Chinese to manufacture it.
The number of people here trying to downplay what's going on is astonishing, I can only imagine they themselves are not legit posters.
I don't know what _exactly_ has been going on with Huawei and other companies, but I understand that the publicized outrage about Huawei and other Chinese companies stealing from America isn't natural. Most people were fine with Chinese advancing and copying, since everybody benefited from cheap labor/products. Until the powerful in the West realized american economy is in bad shape, power balance in the world is shifting and it's time to do something about it. I guess shaping public opinion on China is part of that.
'State espionage' for issues of security is understandable and nobody is screaming about it.
"I understand that the publicized outrage about Huawei and other Chinese companies stealing from America isn't natural"
This is really not true. It's 100% natural to be concerned about the blatant theft of research and IP.
Literally Huawei was rewarding staffers for stuff they'd stolen.
In fact, I'd argue that it's 'unnatural' for people not to be concerned about it.
"Most people were fine with Chinese advancing and copying, since everybody benefited from cheap labor/products. "
No way - that was not 'China stealing IP' - that was China using their competitive advantage: labour, factories, supply chains to add value. This is a good thing and few were complaining other than those who lost jobs. Everyone else was winning.
"Until the powerful in the West realized american economy is in bad shape" ?
The US has the lowest unemployment in 25 years, the lowest unemployment ever for African Americans, stocks are at crazy all-time highs. While nobody will ever say it's rosy, and historical growth is a little low, the US is overall doing just fine.
This is all a distraction: China and Huawei stealing IP and other elements and it's blatantly illegal and a serious transgression of international norms of trade.
Why would any company in the world even allow Huawei staff anywhere near their workers or offices, knowing that they're literally trying to steal whatever they can? The consequences of this are real and will factor into how nations contemplate trading with China.
You mean every developing nation? Just look at U.S. industrial espionage in Europe during the 18th-19th century when it was developing.
Pretending this is somehow how China specifically operates is disingenuous.
All the vast majority of people in the "West" know about China is whatever happens to be propagated by mainstream propagandists for current purposes. Ignorance is much more common (and hence likely) than disingenuity.
Plus, whataboutism.
So? It's not like the US didn't know that it was breaking British laws back then. IP protectionism is nothing new, it is is fair to make comparisons to 18th/19th century events.
Yes
Are you saying it's okay because others did it before ? That it shouldn't be debated ?
What's the position ? What is the point of preventing people from saying China is playing the IP theft game hard at the moment ?
Yes and no - it depends entirely on whose perspective you are arguing from (upstart vs. establishment), and even that changes over time. For the US, it used to be okay, but no longer is. Also it's not "others" who did it before, but the very same nation-state that is now screaming blue murder.
> That it shouldn't be debated ?
Oh, it should absolutely be debated, but the US has no moral high ground when making its arguments. Turnabout is fair play
Well, this is the classic continuity problem: is the US from centuries ago the same US of today ?
> Oh, it should absolutely be debated, but the US has no moral high ground when making its arguments. Turnabout is fair play
I am from Europe. Anyway, I disagree. Moral stances aren't cancelled because past wrongdoings.
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
/s
But very good point.
I feel like military tech is another issue entirely tho. And concerns me with what I'm perceiving as an arms race with carriers and fighter jets over I presume China's ability to project power within their naval territory .
Invaded Chinese sovereign territory during the Korean war and got beat back into the current border of South Korea.
Supported a western friendly government during WW2 to take over China.
In International relations there are no rules.
Did you mean when the US saved China from being obliterated by nuclear weapons by the USSR in 1969? Or when the US saved China from continued genocide by the Empire of Japan by almost single-handedly defeating the Japanese military in the Pacific? Maybe you mean when the US funded the build-out of modern China through trade & commerce and not only allowed them into the WTO, but openly invited them in (we got rewarded nicely for that).
> Invaded Chinese sovereign territory during the Korean war and got beat back into the current border of South Korea.
When the US tried to save the people of North Korea - the Korean War was a UN military mission - from half a century of extreme poverty, genocide and misery that continues to this day (and with zero human rights). With China on the opposite side of that equation, supporting the outcome of genocide, dictatorship, zero human rights, extreme poverty. Meanwhile South Korea became an affluent, liberal democracy.
> Supported a western friendly government during WW2 to take over China.
When the US tried to spare China half a century of extreme poverty, genocide and misery. China could have developed much faster and with human rights, as with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan - and without the slaughter of tens of millions of people.
https://visitguilin.org/things-to-do/guilin-attractions/flyi...
And if you insist on applying 18th and 19th century situations to current IP theft, then logically you should also be willing to accept what the British did to America: burn the capital. Is Huawei's IP harvest worth the torching of Zhongnanhsi and the Renmin Datang?
Yes.
> I thought America was the aggressor in that war and Britain just retaliated.
It's more complicated than that. Britain tried to prohibit America from trading with France, as part of their war against Napoleon. America thought that was against international law. Britain also had a habit of seizing sailors off of American ships and forcing them into service in the Royal Navy, which the US regarded as extremely over the line. The British were also (pre-war, IIUC) arming Native Americans on the US western frontier.
Eventually, the US declared war. But I'm not sure that makes them the aggressor, at least not 100%...
I am pretty sure US did not invade Chinese territory during the Korean War. There are a few instances of US fighters straying into China but pretty sure it wouldn't count as 'invasion'.
"After the first two months of war, South Korean Army (ROKA) and the US forces rapidly dispatched to Korea were on the point of defeat. As a result, the ROKA and US troops retreated to a small area behind a defensive line known as the Pusan Perimeter. In September 1950, an amphibious UN counter-offensive was launched at Incheon, and cut off many KPA troops in South Korea. Those who escaped envelopment and capture were forced back north. UN forces invaded North Korea in October 1950 and moved rapidly towards the Yalu River—the border with China—but on 19 October 1950, Chinese forces of the People's Volunteer Army (PVA) crossed the Yalu and entered the war.[51] The surprise Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces back below the 38th Parallel by late December."
I can't find anything related to US/UN forces invading. But this is most likely a western view of the war. China looks like anything but just standing idly by during the war (did not realize that China was deeply involved in the Korean War before).
It was taught in first year of international business classes that outsourcing abroad was functionally equivalent to a transfer of technology — so you always had to factor in the time it took for your magic low-cost solution to fade out and become your competitor, essentially, but not just them: by then the whole market has access to that cost structure, so you have to keep finding new lower-cost solutions, and keep innovating on your technological part (HQ in Europe, USA, Japan, etc).
It's just international business 101, really, and has been for at least 20 years in my personal experience — but I'm pretty sure I read articles from the 1970s describing this process, because Japan was the first one to pull it off brilliantly.
People focus on China because somebody is waiving that name a lot and his voice carries a lot through the media; but this is definitely just how the world works, and has been forever — if you ask workers from the next village to come and help build stuff with your super tech, it won't take long before they replicate the process over there.
And that's called culture, knowledge, it lives and grows and moves like populations of viruses or molecules, it's been modeled for some time in anthropology at that macro-level.
To somehow equate the direct theft of IP and innovation as just 'shared culture and knowledge' completely avoids the material criminality at hand.
Huawei is charged with literally incentivizing their employees to steal knowledge and IP, and of directly copying designs, on a systematic and widespread scale. These activities are instituted far beyond just Huawei.
This is not a situation of the natural flow of industrial knowledge, it's direct theft.
You wouldn’t download a car. But I would. I don’t think it’s possible to steal information.
So did Turing.
> Pretending this is somehow how China specifically operates is disingenuous.
No one is pretending this is how China specifically operates. This IS how certain entities from China operate. Especially certain SOE that have the backing of the CCP.
Perhaps if those Yankees could have pointed at the Brits stealing tea trees, then the Brits would have been struck with a sense of self-realization of their own hypocrisy, and let the Yanks make off with those machine designs with no hassle?
I'm just pointing out that every other nation seems to have gone through a phase of "cheating" to get to where they are, to the point where I can't even say with 100% certainty that it's possible to become a technological superpower without doing it.
Once again the Chinese 'moral relativism' argument I think falls flat.
"Hey look, 500 years ago someone did something, so hey, it's ok"
What is 'disingenuous' is this kind of rhetoric that completely denies the material issues at hand. China (and not just Huawei) has been systematically stealing and cheating far beyond anyone else (by the way, probably anyone else in history not that it matters), and this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
These charges are well warranted, and they should be applied to any number of entities who've encroached on general principles of trade.
If China wants to play with such shenanigans, it's fine actually, it's their choice to use this strategy, but the response should be pretty forceful as well.
I see this as a win-win. These U.S. companies tried to take shortcuts by outsourcing to China and they got burned. China engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior in the process and will (hopefully) get burned.
Early on, the US companies cut their costs: good for them, and likely their customers. In the long term, China developed the expertise needed to contribute to the development of advanced technologies: good for them, and for humanity's aggregate progress.
There's a lot of acrimony over how to divide the surplus, but this shouldn't overshadow the technological and economic development happening before our very eyes.
Depends how China uses the technology. More censorship wouldn't be that good for humanity.
This is a recipe for tyranny, and the elites of the CCP have oppressed the good citizens of China by developing tech for suppression of speech, identification and targeting of dissent, etc. Even worse, they have begun exporting this technology to other autocracies.
I say this as somebody who has no illusions about the corrupt nature of the US government. However, the US government doesn't have nearly the power over its citizens that the CCP has. Just wanted to clarify that I'm not pretending I live in a perfect democracy. Just empathizing with the Chinese people, and wishing they had more say over their situation than they do now.
I wonder, of the 91% who aren’t party members, what percentage are non-members because they don’t want to join the party, versus what percentage wouldn’t be allowed to join even if they wanted to?
In another country, there's was no "I don’t want to join the party" when invited, just relatives with bad reputations as far as the party was concerned so no invitation. In that case, even if you were applied, you'd be refused. Think for a second, you not wanting to join the party? Granted, China in 2020 is different from Eastern Europe in the 1960-1980's but the idea is probably the same.
However, probably 95% join to enjoy the perks.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pap-casting-net-wide-...
I wonder how this form of representation is distributed. In a democracy, theoretically everyone is represented equally. In the CCP, how much say do the lowest members have? Are they yes men all the way up?
I have no reason to believe that this was necessary for progress.
> I have no reason to believe that this was necessary for progress.
What are the reason that you believe that this is not necessary for progress?
There doesn't exist a single example of technologically advanced country that did not jump start its technological development by using protectionist policies and/or knowledge transfer. Be that knowledge transfer legal or illegal.
I guess I dont buy the argument that China and Chinese citizens would not have benefitted from legal transfer of knowledge and providing a useful service to the world exporting mineral wealth, importing food, oil, and tech, creating supply chain expertise to be cooperative partners in worldwide manufacturing booms, and paying experts to relocate (above board!) to China to teach the next generation.
This is 95% of what they are doing anyway. Its the remaining 5% of theft and espionage that is fair game for prosecution.
I guess I dont understand the apologists who think we should eschew legal action against the 5% just because "everyone does it".
Moreover, the highest organ of the state is National People's Congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress), with elected representatives coming from all kinds of professions, including CCP and non-CCP members. The idea is exactly to give everyone representation in government.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002438/party-people-what-kin...
for the mentioned "Communist Youth League of China" thing, 95%+ of the suitable age group are members. you need to do something really naughty to avoid becoming one.
I don't think social credit and proof that democracy isn't necessary for profit is good for humanity's progress.
And America eventually eclipsed the British that they were stealing from, so don't expect China to be "punished" too much.
Yours really is another ironic comment.
The British at least tried to stop it by making it illegal to take the machines out of the country
The Americans sent the machines to China themselves to save a few bucks on labor.
Modern export restrictions are akin to making it illegal to take machines out of a country.
Even if it was somehow exactly the same thing happening, saying "you did this 200 years ago so I'm going to do the same thing now" isn't any kind of acceptable reasoning. Mauritania can't say that they are cool to have slaves because America had slaves 170 years ago. Or rather, they can say that, it just isn't very convincing.
It's just history repeating itself, delude yourself however you want that Amrrica holds some moral high ground by holding life improving knowledge to ransom.
I'm no China fan, but Inthis defending America is pathetic.
Can anyone really develop new technology, bring it to market, have it immediately brought by a competitor with zero R&D investment, and expect to compete? Is there something that is supposed to be magical about US technology that this scenario does not apply?
While I agree copying source code is bad, but doing so and maintaining someone else's code is a monumental task.
To quote you: "who figured out how to build them first."
In fact it's a standard open source business model to make money off the expertise on the open source code base.
I would not guess this to be true of China nor likely to become true for a very long time at least.
Because the Americans so helpfully moved all their manufacturing to China, they had to teach manufacturing and engineering to their Chinese workers to troubleshoot problems, and are now losing that ability themselves.
Turns out when you're designing a product it useful to have practical manufacturing experience, which the Americans have lost.
It what universe is it a 'shortcut' to manufacture in another country where there are tons of people looking for jobs, wherein, by the way, said jobs will fundamentally improve the lives of millions, and in most cases, manufacturing such products in the US would not be viable anyhow.
There is no 'win win' - China is blatantly cheating, and that's basically the story.
Perhaps a bit of an over generalization. Some were interested in licensing technology to Huawei as was the case with Akhan.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190204005211/en/AKH...
This case was especially alarming considering the dual-purpose potential of the IP.
> They didn't stop to consider that by teaching China how to build their products they were creating a new low-cost competitor.
This is pretty obvious and highly desirable. I think if all other countries adopt this chinese model they will be more competitive and earn more without engaging in wars and American companies will be forced to be lot more competitive.
Note that China is already making pretty big moves in other areas of Tech. Tiktok happens to be incredibly popular and I would expect DoJ to make more delinquent claims about Tiktok soon.
Hell as late as 1850 the US straight up didn't recognize copyright of non US citizens. I forget exactly when that changed.
But that doesn’t diminish my criticism for China and their culpability in egregious acts. Our greatest sin is ever working with any authoritarian country but their sin is they fundamentally deny what it means to be a human being.
Going out to plunder foreign countries for cheap labour and materials and then complaining when they begin to 'return the favour' so to speak, is just being woefully ignorant.
1) The 'rules' are agreed upon and mutual.
2) Providing 100's of millions of people with jobs is not 'plunder' it's a win for both sides.
"is just being woefully ignorant" - your comment.
There's two ways this can end:
1. China becomes the global #1, we all get social credit scores, etc
2. Something is done to stop the ascendancy of China
Our losses far exceed the companies' short-term gains.
Paying an American company—and such a subsidiary shell company, despite being purely a legal fiction, is still an American company—for its services, no matter who owns it, should not result in China being taught how to build your tech; and it's not the responsibility of other American corporations to ensure it is. If such bad things happen, that's the fault of the American government for allowing the business relationship between the foreign company and its American subsidiary to exist, in light of clear treaties (WIPO, for one) that require the American government to embargo trade with countries that don't comply with them.
By analogy: it's not your web browser's responsibility to protect its memory from other processes snooping on it. That's the OS's job. If another process can read your process's memory, it was a failure on the OS's part. The process shouldn't be expected to be spending resources securing its memory; it should be expected only to pay its dues to the OS (in e.g. context switches) such that this gets handled for it.
Or, after the fact, when the state realizes what is happening, they can dissolve the subsidiary's business license—just like with the DMCA, where the state can require local DNS resolvers to not resolve the domains of foreign companies found to be breaking local laws.
So I’m not sure what they have to complain about.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...
Also here's Huawei Technologies Chief Security Officer Andy Purdy talking to Maria Bartiromo:
As much as I assume that Huawei and co have backdoors in foreign electronics, I can't get over the racism and hatred for China shared by her and the comment section.
Are the comments real? Everyone is claiming that he's a traitor, a "Clinton friend", a liar, a commie, and that he should rot in hell. And the videos already got 80k views and a near perfect like/dislike ratio. Am I crazy for thinking this a bad interview, or does half the United States really feel this way?
Sometimes I wanted to get off this planet so I can get away from humans and all of those irrationality and hatred. But in retrospect I probably just need to get rid of the part of me that are engaging the same.
This company was paying as twice as you currenly earn, if you work at Cisco or Juniper. Just like that, as twice as, just ocme work with us.
One year went by, and it turned out that Toga Network is no other than Huawei.
So I do not know about stealing source code, but I know they looked after its IP which is in people's mind.
I think a general term for acquiring that IP is called employment.
Huawei bought Toga in 2016.
https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/07/huawei-reportedly-acquire...
[1] - http://toganetworks.com/
Hopefully this reflects a changing of the tides when it comes to enforcing IP laws in China rather than just an excuse to target a single company. I don't even like IP laws but if we are going to hold the rest of the industrialized world to the letter of the law then at some point China will have to be brought into the fold.
From what I've read, the level of IP enforcement has increased dramatically since about 2014, to the point where there are more IP cases heard in Chinese courts now than in any other country. Likewise, more patents are now filed in China each year than in any other country. It's also not as if local companies always win disputes - foreign companies apparently have a very good track record in Chinese courts.
There's a description of the changes in recent years here:
1. https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/05/07/rapid-changes-chinese-...
2. https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/chinas-progress-on-intellect...
Back when China was in the earlier stages of industrialization, it really didn't care much about IP. But things aren't the same any more: China spends about as much on R&D as the US, and it has its own IP to protect. IP law was not on their radar before, but it very much appears to be now. But you can imagine how difficult it is to set such a system up. They've had to create an entirely new legal system, train judges, etc. China has changed so rapidly that it's difficult for these sorts of systems to keep up.
But we have proof that the NSA steals and shares secrets with US companies so throwing rocks in a glass house maybe?
This whole thing looks just like AIIB a couple years ago where the U.S. made a huge stink about not joining the club and in the end everybody but Japan and Taiwan signed up.
I've never really understood how IP theft works. I've been a software engineer for a long time and I know that Reading and making sense of an existing million line code base is a hella of a lot harder than just writing new code from scratch. Why on earth would anyone want to steal source code from a competitor?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
But, That's different. We're not talking about rewriting an existing codebase that already exists and has a ton of legacy behavior that needs to be maintained.
They're supposedly writing new code with new functionality, and instead of writing it themselves, the implication is that they'd rather use someone else's smelly old legacy code, rather than write it themselves. I would love to have seen the look on those engineers faces when some spy dropped off the packet of code they were supposed to integrate. I just don't see that happening.
Reading existing code bases is hard enough. But then to go and try to integrate another company's codebase into your own, especially if it's millions of lines of code, I'd say thanks but no thanks.
Surely evidence would reveal that, but this DOJ press release doesn't appear to be concerned with that.
>As revealed by the government’s independent investigation and review of court filings, //
Mwah-ha-ha-ha! They know how to tell 'em.
>the new charges in this case relate to the alleged decades-long efforts by Huawei, and several of its subsidiaries, both in the U.S. and in the People’s Republic of China, to misappropriate intellectual property //
Aren't new charges a new case? Aren't these extending speculations rather leading for a case that is in process, shouldn't they make the allegations and present any evidence - if they wish - rather than make extended claims bracketed by "allegedly". I can't believe that this has been written as anything other than a chance to make unsubstantiated claims ... have the courts hear the charges and then expound at length about the conviction.
I thought these sorts of things from one of the main parties involved (the USA government) were strongly decried by courts as they tend to colour juries and judicial bodies; aren't the DOJ perverting the course of justice here with such a diatribe?
>"Huawei’s efforts to steal trade secrets and other sophisticated U.S. technology were successful. Through the methods of deception described above, the defendants obtained nonpublic intellectual property relating to internet router source code, cellular antenna technology and robotics. As a consequence of its campaign to steal this technology and intellectual property, Huawei was able to drastically cut its research and development costs and associated delays, giving the company a significant and unfair competitive advantage."
That may all be true, but if you're currently prosecuting a case and have to determine if it's true it would be nice, as a DOJ, to not making statements that -- despite legal ass covering -- is clearly intended to presuppose the guilt of the defendant.
When USA decided to go after Huawei to bolster their own telecoms companies, I wondered if they realised they'd end up stooping so low?
This does not presuppose guilt in a way that would represent a direct conflict of interest in the US Justice system.
The Department of Justice is an executive agency whose directive is to bring indictments like this to trial - like a District Attorney.
The US court system, or the judicial branch, have no obligation to agree with the Department of Justice's position and are actually often don't side with them on matters like this where they test the precedent and definition of the law.
Ironically, the Chinese court system on the other hand has the rule of 3 Supremes - in that the views of the Communist party takes precedent over written law in judgements. In China, if a similar charge levied by the executive branch, this actually means guilt is presupposed in those passing judgement due to their lack of separation.
https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/Integrated-5G-Chips-Unv...
And in particular, with its 5G modem:
http://www.hisilicon.com/en/Products/ProductList/Balong
Some news about this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-09/huawei-an...
And also for the base stations:
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/huawei-s-5g-ran-port...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Yvtfl3gp0M
iPhone 11 and Pixel 4 do seem better, but I would be careful declaring it "garbage". I just think they have reached parity- where each vendor could leapfrog the others for any particular feature for successive generations.
> Immediately upon receipt of the slide deck, each page of which was marked ‘Proprietary and Confidential’ by Company 6, HUAWEI distributed the slide deck to HUAWEI engineers, including engineers in the subsidiary that was working on technology that directly competed with Company 6’s products and services. These engineers discussed developments by Company 6 that would have application to HUAWEI’s own prototypes then under design.
Well, yeah, what the hell else are you supposed to do when some supplier sends you a highly technical slide deck, except discuss it with your engineers working on the same thing? I seriously can't fathom why anybody involved here would have any expectation to the contrary.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/us-german-intel-...
so many questions :(
Now that would bring some fireworks. I am not convinced China would not respond in kind.
Indeed. In diplomatic retaliation, China responded to the Huawei CFO's arrest in Canada by quickly arresting two Canadians on charges without evidence or explanation. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. These Canadians have been in Chinese detention for over a year without access to a lawyer or the ability to speak to family or loved ones. Canadian pawns in a USA-China game.
https://globalnews.ca/news/6410460/michael-kovrig-china-cana...
If China steals all the US IP, why are US technology companies still so valuable?
For example, Apple is a very valuable US technology company that also has extensive dealings in China.
Marketing plays a big role.
The third world is a place where many people have an idea of astuteness that differs from intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to design, build, create, manage, or otherwise achieve something in a novel way.
Astuteness is the ability to take an advantage when one presents itself. Think Diego Maradona, or Aladdin.
US technology companies have a great deal of creative intelligence, institutional knowledge, trust from customers, access to talent, and freedom to execute on corporate strategy.
But even the company you mention, Apple, is arguably being outdone by Samsung (moved production out of China) and Huawei (Chinese).
>For example, an official HUAWEI manual labeled “Top Secret” instructed certain individuals working for HUAWEI to conceal their employment with HUAWEI during encounters with foreign law enforcement officials.
>Beginning in or about 2000, the defendants HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI misappropriated operating system source code for internet routers, command line interface (a structure of textual commands used to communicate with routers) and operating system manuals from a U.S. technology company headquartered in the Northern District of California (“Company 1”), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, and incorporated the misappropriated source code into HUAWEI internet routers that FUTUREWEI sold in the United States from approximately April 2002 until December 2002. Toward this end, HUAWEI and FUTUREWEI hired or attempted to hire Company 1 employees and directed these employees to misappropriate Company 1 source code on behalf of the defendants.
>In or about July 2004, at a trade show in Chicago, Illinois, a HUAWEI employee (“Individual-3”), an individual whose identity is known to the Grand Jury, was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company (“Company 3”), an entity the identity of which is known to the Grand Jury, removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside. Individual-3 wore a badge listing his employer as “Weihua,” HUAWEI spelled with its syllables reversed. In official correspondence with Company 3 shortly after this incident, HUAWEI claimed that Individual-3 attended the trade show in his personal capacity and that his attempted misappropriation occurred “without Huawei’s authorization.” According to a purported official statement published in Reuters, HUAWEI claimed, “This is a junior engineer who had never traveled to the United States before. His actions do not reflect the culture or values of Huawei.” Notably, a resume that Individual-3 submitted to the U.S. government in approximately 2012 stated that he had been a “senior R&D Engineer” at HUAWEI from 1997 until July 2004, the time of the incident.
Is it naive to think that IP law should be disintegrated? How would the world, and more specifically the digital landscape, look if there was no concept of IP.
American companies want to sell their products in China. Quite often that requires them to base some part of production in China.
As for the last, yes, there is a large cultural gap between the US and the Chinese and frankly that gap exists mostly on the US side. I'd argue that without understanding the language, you'll never really understand another culture.
Sure, you can base your understanding on a few people that do understand the language, but your understanding will always be skewed by their prejudices.
In my lifetime, I've dealt with business people from a variety of cultures. Some are honest, some aren't. Some are cheap, some believe you have to spend money to make money. Some are successful, some aren't. None of that aligns with any particular culture.
We assign attributes to remote cultures based on reports of the extremes (because the day to day doesn't get reported). When the same behavior gets reported in our own cultures, we simply say well, it's those guys that were bad, not the entire culture.
Who knows what would have happened had Huawei done all their own R&D in the first place. Maybe they'd be in the same place as they are today; maybe not. But when you start from a position of copying someone else's work, the presumption is that everything you added since is tainted, and any profits should be someone else's, not yours.
we all stand in other's shoulders.
also, you in what army ? are you going to invade Asia ?
It would be one thing if Huawei said, “do you mind if I use this?” and received permission. But if they had to use deception to gather information, that’s a pretty clear indication that it’s wrong and is done without consent.
You should read the book "Code of Capital".
The CCP has made it clear that "rule of law" as stated by Mr. Obama is about favoring western capital interests.
I think it's a bigger crime that 6 billion people do not get to enjoy the same standard of living as the 2 billion people on top.
By having no brittle IP rules, the CCP makes sure Chinese businesses stay dynamic and continue to dominate.
which ? the cheap phone everybody uses while taking a dump ?
> take possession of their US assets.
which ? UST bonds ? in the situation you describe, the Chinese supply chain are far more valuable.
> encourage allies to boycott their products
nobody is stupid enough to allow their teenagers to fight a land war in Asia.
> sue them in foreign courts.
Sue them where ? Hague ? how does it stop them selling phones to africans / other asians exactly ?
> repatriate manufacturing of US-based companies' devices
Do you have a 300 million + healthy well educated labour force working for sub 15 dollars an hour ?
Good Luck Bro !
Just wow.
How could any nation, let alone any company, allow any employee of Huawei anywhere near their operations?
Literally, they are incented to steal whatever they can from you, out in the open, systematically, with nary much effort to cover it up it seems.
The message is, you Chinese can do some tech but don't grow too big! Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Amd, Google, AWS, Cisco. Those big must remain American.
Mobile World Congress suden cancelation because Huawei represents half of it... Same same
Pretty much describes the Trump admin in a nutshell. Whatever Obama did, get rid of it, regardless of its value, then implement a worse solution instead.
It's basically what China does today with their neighbors. Economic integration -> domestic power.
It's not that technically, they wouldn't be able to trade with China, but practically speaking, there was little chance.
This isn't true. Australia's biggest trading partner is China and there was no chance the TPP was going to stop that trade.
It was aimed at China, but not like this at all. read my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322371
I think the dependency argument is more that if there is more trade between countries within the TPP system, it would have given China less policy strength because countries aren't as dependent on it.
If a country makes a large amount of their export income from a single source they are very vulnerable to policy blackmail by that country.
It was also hostile towards government efforts to require source access, which interferes with the right to repair: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/time-to-act-on-tpp-is-no...
The TPP was a handout to multinationals and an attack on workers across the US and Pacific. It's a good thing that it didn't come to fruition.
The idea was to reduce trade barriers within the Pacific region, which would make trade there cheaper and hence more attractive vs China.
Specifically, lower wage countries (Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico) would have been more attractive as outsourcing locations compared to China, and in return good and services from high wage countries would have been cheaper in those countries making them more attractive compared to Chinese competitors.
As a specific example, most industrial machinery imported to Vietnam is subject to a 20% import tariff[1]. This means US companies like Caterpillar and GE are relying on political intervention to win deals[2], instead of being more competitive on price.
[1] https://www.customs.gov.vn/SitePages/Tariff-Search.aspx?port...
[2] https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/nation-and-world/us-...
As shown, following a free trade, the Malaysia’s export to the USA would increase by USD 30984 million or 7 percent and the US export to Malaysia would increase by USD 16051 million(22 percent). The substantial increase in the volume of export between two countries is due to removal of trade barriers. The higher increase in the US export to Malaysia relative to the Malaysia export to the US is because Malaysia currently has a higher tariff than the US.
Worth noting that it's absolutely unclear if it would have worked, but how TPP was supposed to be a China containment strategy is clear (which was your original question).
[1] http://www2.southeastern.edu/orgs/econjournal/index_files/JI...
"Further, the export of Malaysia and the US to the world is expected to decline by 0.8 percent and 0.1 percent respectively."
But it doesn't break out "rest of world" into groups, so it's not clear what the impact to China would be, if any. To me, the implication is that without a corresponding drop in imports from China, the net result is zero. Unfortunately the tables at the end are garbled, so I can't see in Table 2 what the import impacts would be from their dataset.
I'd also argue that most analysis is likely to be incorrect given that the rapid growth and specifically industrial expansion of China into new industries is unprecedented.
Having said that, all analysis is incorrect at some level, but some is still useful.
(Also, someone is going an downvoting all my comments on this thread! I'm not sure why - I'm not making an argument for or against TPP, just trying to explain how it aimed to contain China. Someone even downvoted my comment pointing out that China is TPP participant Australia's biggest trading partner, so it was never designed to cut off all trade to China, just make the region less dependant on it. It's pretty annoying really)
It's tremendously ironic that these charges will likely allow US firms to steal money and/or IP from Huawei through what is for all intents and purposes the Trump administration's fiat.
Worse yet, as has been the pattern with the Trump administration so far, many aspects of the economy that were relatively stable and allowed planning and investment have been destroyed, like when a child throws a tantrum and upsets a board game sending the pieces onto the floor. Many international agreements, standards, and trade and diplomatic relationships have been set back decades by the administration.
Note that the major claims have all been false so far:
- The daughter (a journalist) of the Huawei CEO was harrassed and detained without cause, in what was essentially a kidnapping for ransom/extortion. How did the American people not feel outrage when Trump did this?
- There have been repeated accusations of backdoors into 5G hardware, but yet no example of a device that has been hacked by the US or any private sector researchers.
- US officials have (quite inappropriately) tried to foment xenophobia and hatred of Chinese immigrants in the US. This combined with Trump's xenophobic comments show the US's hand quite clearly. China is now a rival and no dirty tactics are off limits.
As an American, I am so deeply embarrassed by all of this.
Proof for the claim that US is trying to steal IP from Huawei?
This is news to me and I can't find anything with a search. Are you referring to Meng Wanzhou? If so, your facts are muddy at best. Meng was arrested in Canada on request of the US, and is currently in the Canadian legal system (under house arrest) facing extradition. She's also directly named in the new charges. Far from being a journalist, she's the CFO of Huawei. And while she was neither harrassed (she's been very complimentary of her detainors) nor detained without cause (the US government was clear about what charges they alleged), China on the other hand arrested two Canadians in retribution fully without cause on bogus espionage charges, in an attempt to assert leverage over Canadian officials to circumvent due process.
Trump's comments over China and Huawei have been inflammatory and frustrating to Canadians, but let's not straight up make stuff up, if this is what you were referring to.
If you're gonna peddle a biased narrative, put some effort into making it appear reasonable.
Exactly. Right now it's convenient for the DOJ that Huawei is a person and can be charged with RICO. Frankly I'm glad to see the "corporations are people" farce being used for good for once.
https://www.nytimes.com/1889/11/08/archives/against-the-suga...
>Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
A corporation is an organization. Also, if you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru..., there's list of instances of companies and even government agencies being charged.
I wonder how much GM and Boeing depends on the Chinese home market , two can play that game since the soybean tradewar went so great they had to bailout oops sorry "aid" the farmers.