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Comment by mundo | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly vague. Is this a proposal for some kind of standard or protocol? It says that "many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos", so whatever it is it can't be that difficult to achieve.

Is someone familiar enough with this to provide a source that discusses what "Clean Carrier/Telco/Store/etc" entails technically?

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Also, how does this impact countries outside the US that have significant interactions with it like Canada or Mexico? Will their telco carriers have to remove all Huawei equipment before connecting to US telco networks to provide roaming services? Do cellphones coming in from those countries have to be scanned to ensure no blacklisted apps are installed?

I think that's what's implied in

> Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.

Seems like the idea is to form a network that's "clean" of PRC influence.

> PRC apps threaten our privacy, proliferate viruses, and spread propaganda and disinformation.

It's hard to discern propaganda from the attempt to fight it nowadays, or maybe there never was a difference in the first place.

"clean" is a very interesting choice of word

"clean" because not connected to the "dirty" Chinese is pretty blatant.

This isn't about technology, it's about organizations and vendors. It's saying that PRC carriers may not connect directly to US telecommunications networks; that PRC apps cannot be available in app stores selling to US customers; that PRC smartphone manufacturers may not bypass the restriction on stores by selling phones to Americans with PRC apps pre-installed; that US cloud properties must be accessible to PRC companies; and that undersea cables aren't tapped by PRC intelligence agencies.

It's not about technology, it's about a business qualification for US telecoms and technology companies like Apple and Amazon. If they meet these standards, they're part of the "clean network" (which is just ugly obvious racism).

As a practical matter, this is dubious because there's hundreds of ways around these requirements bureaucratically. The value of this is the threat to China, that specific examples like TikTok can be chosen and banned; or that third parties like European businesses might move away from China to avoid jeopardizing U.S. business. This is just another front in the trade war.

I don’t see how the use of the word clean is racist. It is obviously playing to disgust sensitivity [interestingly, authoritarianism rises in the presence of infectious disease] but it isn’t obvious that ‘clean’ any more refers to ethnicities than it does to political, teleological or ideological world views.

What makes one "clean" or a member of the "clean network"? No contact with the Chinese. Subtle distinctions in what "Chinese" might refer to are polite rationalizations to excuse the plain reading, which is the level at which the insinuation works.

Ah, I see the gist of your point. I wonder if this Clean distinction allows connection with Hong Kong or other Chinese but not-exactly-PRC groups.

The information provided on the site is vague, but based on my reading I don't see why it would restrict connection to any entity other than the PRC and their allies. So Hong Kong might be tricky in the current geopolitical climate, but there are many US-aligned countries which are majority ethnically Chinese such as Taiwan and Singapore. I see no indication this would restrict connection to those countries.

This is very explicitly not racist in its goal, even if it also a bad idea for other reasons. This has nothing to do with Chinese people as a race/ethnicity and everything to do with the behavior of the PRC/CCP government and state run corporations.

I am not defending this policy, but I think calling it racist is absurd.

Hong Kong is over. After Beijing's power grab earlier this year Executive Order 13936 removed differential treatment for Hong Kong under a variety of US laws. The US has already blocked turning on a new cable to Hong Kong.

Your first paragraph seems accurate. I think this move represents a failure of the spiritual goals of the Internet to provide standardized interconnection between networks globally, so I don't approve of the move. That said, I think you are far too casually throwing out the term "racist" in your comments here and elsewhere in the thread.

There are blatant, obvious actions that the CCP has taken or sponsored which have negatively impacted the security and privacy of people who are not citizens of China and data sovereignty is not a foreign concept. That's not even counting the more subtle things that we don't hear about in the news. So I think assigning "racism" as a motivation is naive and looking for an easy criticism rather than trying to intellectually wrestle with the very real complication of having standardized globally interconnected communication networks while at the same time having geopolitical conflicts (and all of the things which stem from that).

Well, another goal of the internet was to have a network without central coordinators that can continue to function even if parts of it went offline, say in a nuclear attack. This has no problem facilitating the global internet splintering into many smaller networks. Just goes to show how amazing the design of the IP protocol really is.

> which is just ugly obvious racism

This is Chinese as in China, not Chinese as in the race/ethnicity.

If they meant to demonize all people of Chinese descent, I would agree, but that isn't the case. This isn't targeted at Singapore, Taiwan, or any other country that might have a significant ethnic Chinese population.

It's nationalism, plain and simple. Still not great, but it's not what you demonize it for being.

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