The United States banned approvals of new telecommunications equipment from Huawei and ZTE, opens new tab in 2022 and has encouraged Europe to do the same.
EU will eventually phase out US big tech too.
Don’t hold your breath on either one. The attempted phase out of Chinese electronics is its own self-imposed economic drag, especially as China’s semiconductor industry takes off while the western manufacturers are hobbled by their fixation on AI.
When CPU and RAM prices get high enough, you’re going to see some very lucrative black markets for sanctions evasion.
Telecommunications equipment and PC parts are not the same
All the major telecoms are heavily exposed to the computer hardware market.
And? Do you understand the rationale behind the existing bans?
The argument - that goes back to the Bush “War on Terror” anti-China tech policy - is that any hardware produced outside the NATO sphere could leave domestic users vulnerable to foreign surveillance.
But scratch the surface of this critique and you find something very different. It’s the US technology that’s riddled with backdoors.
According to reports, the hack took advantage of systems built by ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink) to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the ISPs’ user data. This gave China unprecedented access to data related to U.S. government requests to these major telecommunications companies. It’s still unclear how much communication and internet traffic, and related to whom, Salt Typhoon accessed.
The problem with Chinese technology is that, in many cases, American surveillance companies haven’t penetrated it. A domestic market with Chinese phones and routers and other online gadgets riddles the Five Eyes Panopticon with blind spots.
I think the more balanced take would be both sides are doing it lmao.
Sure. But to say the American entrenchment around American tech companies is some kind of buffer to Chinese spying clearly hasn’t born out in practice. Americans have pockmarked their tech with security vulnerabilities and Chinese hackers have waltzed right through them. You aren’t safer from the CCP because you’re on American hardware. Just the opposite.
