[nabla9]

> both Huawei and Google would be entirely benign without such owness.

No. Everything is relative.

Google is relatively more restricted and benign than Huawei. Restricted because it's located in society based in laws and rules. More benign because their workers and even main owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin have values more supportive towards individual privacy even if they work in industry that exploits it. In Chinese society surveillance and government oversight is not just repression. People have value system that is not questioning it as much.

I'm not just implying, I'm strongly asserting that in a world where everything is just shades of grays and relative you can have orders of magnitude differences between actors.

Google is not 'a good guy' but they are orders of magnitude better than Huawei in a good guy axis (if the value system is the western liberal democracy kind).