Comment by happymellon 4 days ago
> like nobody trusts Huawei or Xiaomi phones.
Loads of people trusted Huawei, even after all the hyperbole about backdoors for the government. It needed regulators banning Huawei to knock their share of the market and protect the homegrown spyware.
> network security
This was the only reason I remember being given.
And was also the one that was contradicted the most as they were sharing all the source code, and several areas of national security reviewed it, including GCHQ, giving it the clear.
Politics and trying to stop an economic competitor from taking business away from overpriced alternatives was the real unspoken reason.
> to leave those allies with only American companies to buy from
This is conspiratorial nonsense, the EU has Sweden's Ericsson and Finland's Nokia and along with South Korea's Samsung there are plenty of choices. I can't actually think of comparable American companies.
They can make great phones and still be spying on the user and everyone near them.
They wouldn't be good for intel gathering (either deliberate or incidental, c.f. FitBit or whatever leaking some US military info because of all the soldiers tracking themselves) if they weren't also just straight up good products.
This lack of exclusivity between "quality" and "spying" is also why I found it hard to trust US products even before Trump 2.
I get what you mean.
I guess it comes down to "does the government that is spying on me, want me to succeed in general or fail in general?"
As a British citizen living in Berlin, running US software on Chinese hardware (iPhone? Made in China; Kindle? Made in China; MacBook Pro? Made in China; random torches? Made in China; PV? Made in China), it's kinda hard for me to guess who is doing what spying and what they care about with that spying.
The government bans on Huawei were obviously do to three reasons: network security, economic competition, and politics.
Huawei doesn’t only make phones — they also make the cell network infrastructure and they sell it at much lower costs than American companies do. The US put pressure on allied countries to divest from Huawei infrastructure (especially 5G cell networking) to both avoid the security risks and to leave those allies with only American companies to buy from.
And we can’t forget that Trump very publicly used Huawei’s executive as a hostage to a negotiation.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_case_of_Meng_Wanzh...