[throwGuardian]

The be honest, American companies never had a monopoly in any of the parts needed to build a commercially viable phone. Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86, phones were mostly ARM based (in an attempt to prevent Intel's chokehold). And communication standards require FRAND patent grants allowing anyone to build for the spec.

That said, even as recently as a decade back, China was routinely written off as a cheap imitation of US/Japan/Korea in the electronics industry, Huawei & friends have proven otherwise. Their flagships are on par with the Apples and Samsungs, and even lead them on velocity of feature releases, especially hardware

[fluffything]

> Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86

Huawei also makes its own x86 chips, GPUs, and even FPGAs (e.g. TPU-like systems), and while Huawei Cloud still runs other vendors hardware, it's becoming more and more "Huawei-hardware only" each quarter.

I think the US has not realized yet how good it had it, and how much it has screwed things up. The EU, Russia, India, Japan, and China are all super-dependent on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA's products, and therefore, the US, on many critical sectors. By showing China/Huawei [0] how much this dependence can hurt, the US has forced China to become technologically independent, and if China succeeds, then all other super powers will have a real and viable alternative to US products.

Right now, e.g., the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat, but the wind can change very quickly to "let's ball all US products, the NSA spies on us!" any time - it doesn't matter that the actual truth is that, no matter who you buy from, they are going to spy on you.

I personally think that it's good for another global player to enter the sector. I don't think it will disrupt it in any major way, but it is already affecting prices, e.g., in the cloud sector, where we are finding out how much are customers willing to pay to "avoid" a Chinese cloud, and it isn't that much.

[0] In case you did not know, Huawei _is_ China.

[t0ddbonzalez]

> 'Right now, e.g., the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat'

Really? Citation please.

Mike Pompeo's been going around Europe threatening dire consequences for any country which uses Huawei tech ("We won't work with allies that use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks", etc.), but I haven't heard of any calls for a ban at EU level...

Can you show me some proof that the EU wants to ban Huawei products?

[fluffything]

There aren't any EU level bans - I don't think the EU government has authority for that.

What currently exist is a lot of controversy around using Huawei in Europe:

* Huawei products banned from being used by all of Spain's Department of Defense projects and personnel: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/e4ntuk/huawei_smartp...

* Angela Merkel Faces Part revolt over allowing Huawei to build 5G: https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-faces-party-revolt-over-...

* Germany Intelligence Services argues that Huawei cannot be trusted: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-29/german-sp...

and many more. This is enough to nudge public opinion in one particular direction (Huawei == evil), and politicians sometimes do what voters want over here.

This is obviously a quite brittle status quo, and one or two impactful articles here and there about how the US / NSA "collect data" on EU citizens might be enough to turn the wind the other way.

The real news behind all of these articles is that China is now perfectly able to compete with the US technology companies at this particular level. That's interesting because for many countries, depending on the US for most of their electronics is a big risk worth minimizing, so I expect a shift from a US dominated industry to a balance between US and Chinese technologies being integrated in these countries. Nobody wants to exclusively depend on China either.

[t0ddbonzalez]

Exactly. There is no EU call to ban Huawei infrastructure, so I'm mystified as to why you claimed 'the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat'.

The links you posted show that government departments in a couple of EU countries refuse to use Huawei, nothing more...

[fluffything]

I'm not sure I follow you. My claim means that there is the opinion in the EU that Huawei should be banned. For some reason you understand that as "The EU banned Huawei". That's not what I claimed, and I have no idea how you get from one to the other.

[dtwest]

Do you think China wasn't aware of how well the US had it? They had no intention of letting it stay that way. The US did not force them into it, they wanted to do this all along. Recent political action may have sped things up, but this has all been in the works for a long time.

[fluffything]

I fully agree, but I don't think that getting Huawei "banned" (IP use rights blocked, etc.) was some sort of chess master grand move by the Chinese government. The US literally served them the excuse to accelerate this dramatically in a silver platter.

The US had its reasons, but other countries have been able to handle Huawei much better. E.g. the UK allegedly [0] found "backdoors" in Huawei hardware for the government, they let Huawei know, Huawei said "sorry about that", and they fixed it.

[0]: Huawei argued that the "backdoor" was actually debugging software, and the software was verified to only use Telnet..

[afroboy]

I thought x86 Chinese license is only for internal government production and not for public?

[dvfjsdhgfv]

This development is a boon for users worldwide. At the beginning they might just influence pricing, but I bet after a decade or two they will start competing on features.