[throwawaaay129]

This whole things looks more and more embarrassing. From the outside it just looks like the US is struggling to compete and so they create extrajudicial barriers based on "secret evidence" to block competitors.

The hypocrisy is that this is the exact anti-competitive behavior the US has been criticizing China for years.

It's possible these companies are doing nefarious things. In which case create a country-agnostic legal framework and take them to court and prove your case. If it's all super-secret-spy-stuff then just do the damn parallel construction and show all these secret backdoors you claim to have found.

If you don't like foreign equipment near military bases or whatever else, then make laws against it

After the Bloomberg microchips-embedded-into-motherboards fantasy stories you can't help but think all this is the product of some CIA director's overactive imagination and isn't based on reality. It does feed into the US frothing-at-the-mouth anti-China rhetoric of the past few years so people eat it up - but cutting out the judicial process and singling out companies/countries just looks horrible imho

[rlt]

> It's possible these companies are doing nefarious things. In which case create a country-agnostic legal framework and take them to court and prove your case. If it's all super-secret-spy-stuff then just do the damn parallel construction and show all these secret backdoors you claim to have found.

Are OTA software updates considered a “backdoor”? Because they essentially are one, even if the company is not doing anything nefarious yet.

[throwawaaay129]

Yeah I saw Minority Report. I know about future crime :) Now I'm imagining clones in vats at CIA headquarters telling them which companies will turn evil.

I dunno man, in the US you don't just ban people and companies for stuff they haven't yet done. Sure potential attack surfaces are important and you should think about stuff like that. But that's kinda my point.. you should make laws about that and regulate critical infrastructure. (maybe networking equipment shouldn't get OTA updates at all? Maybe that's too simplistic..）

[vorpalhex]

Or just ban the PLA owned companies and go back to working on more important stuff. Keep it simple. No need to bend over backwards to help CCP owned and controlled companies (that are legally mandated to serve the CCP's requests) make a quick buck selling commodity hardware.

[throwawaaay129]

I think singling out China or the PLA is kinda the problem... Just any government/military controlled company from any country arguably is an issue. If you make it more country agnostic then it's going to be taken more seriously

[ajkjk]

I feel like I don't really have any moral problem with US passing laws to protect US interests, as long as the laws aren't super unreasonable or evil. They're, like, unfair to some people, but not.. really... morally wrong? The moral complaint about China isn't that they have anti-competitive laws, it's the Orwellian thought-suppression psy-ops stuff.

[throwawaaay129]

"it's the Orwellian thought-suppression psy-ops stuff."

I mean that's like a "bigger" issue. I think it's a completely fair to decide you should just not conduct business with companies under authoritarian regimes (see N.Korea Iran Myanmar etc.). If you wanna blacklist the whole country then okay.. but here it's some indefensible middle ground where you continue to do business with them, until it's inconvenient and some bureaucrat decided it's making you look bad so lets just ban some of their strongest companies to cripple them. We will do business with you as long as you only make low end widgets thankyouverymuch.

That might not be what's actually happening, but that's how it looks

[ksenzee]

I don't see why the middle ground is indefensible. We'll buy your widgets, but not if they're sophisticated enough to be backdoored and cause a national security issue? That seems okay to me.

[throwawaaay129]

B/c there is no sense of justice about it. It's just the arbitrary fickleness of some decision maker and it can't be appealed.

The US government alleges they (Huawei ZTE etc.) colluding to put backdoors in infrastructure equipment. The companies say "no we don't" and the US government just says "well.. we think you're lieing!" - and that's the end of the story. It's all just amateurish and undermines the rule of law and sense of fairness when dealing with America and the American market.

If there was some formal process where countries are semi-sanctioned and all thing made in some super long list of authoritarian countries was not allowed to be used in some other long list of "critical infrastructure" .. well at least there would be a sense of impartiality.

The way things stand.. it looks like Huawei's 5G and infrastructure technology got too good, it threatened the pseudo-monopolies of some big American companies with deep government connections, so the US bureaucrats curb-stomped them as best they could .. and now they can't even sell their laptops/cellphones in the US? It's just completely nonsensical, arbitrary and vindictive.

There is also just very little logic to it, b/c even if all the allegations about their tentacles in networking equipment are true and were proven to be true, why should I be prohibited from buying some completely unrelated consumer good - like a Huawei laptop, but an Apple or Lenovo laptop (also made in China) is totally fine? It's like the US government is in some state of war with these firms and is out to destroy them (based on no public evidence or accountability) - and the threat on US infrastructure seems to have devolved to be a convenient pretext.

Maybe the intentions of the US authorizes are good and pure and they have a good reason for all of this. But they way they're going about it is vindictive, authoritarian and undermines the impartial fairness of the American system

[ajkjk]

Well there is much more that goes on to make and uphold these decisions. It's not like one person somewhere arbitrarily made the call, it's a massive organization ostensibly overseen by Congress.

[skohan]

It's not just the US which has adopted this approach. Iirc Germany for example doesn't allow Chinese tech for telecom infrastructure over concerns about security.

[nnx]

IIRC this was at the express demand of the US... similar situation in UK as well.