The ban is a continued effort to ban US in terms of lobbying its allies to ban Huawei, which it alleges that the Chinese government is using Huawei for spying on citizens. Pompeo is of the view that Chinese govt has a legal mandate to obtain the information of the citizens transiting in the Huawei network. It was also mentioned that Britain new proposal to allow Huawei to build the non-core parts of the 5G infrastructure jeopardizes the intelligence sharing between the 5 EYES security alliance.
Boris Johnson, UK prime minister is of the view that it will work towards providing access to the best of the technology to its citizens, He also added that he doesn’t want to impair Britain relation with US and to compromise its national security infrastructure or imperil the Five Eyes securities cooperation.
The Five Eyes is formed of US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
US has imposed trade restrictions on Huawei. It has further blocked American companies from dealing with it and has asked for a complete ban on Huawei in 5G networks.
Australia and New Zealand have followed suit and have banned Huawei, while Canada is still sitting on the fence on the issue.
Interestingly, EU also has security concerns, although it hasn’t banned Huawei but it has issues guidelines to its members to restrict 5G technology from its “high risk suppliers”.
Let’s look at makes Huawei so enigmatic in the world of telecom.
There is an increasingly global alarm being sounded about domination of China in the 5G technology network. Huawei, in the last 15 years, has seen a stupendous rise, which is alluded to the close links to the Chinese govt, the subsidies received from the Chinese government and other assistance offered.
Critics also raise concerns that Huawei has appropriated some western competitive technology which has allowed to take a notch up in the growth curve evolution.
Interestingly, the state of alternative suppliers in the global markets is also a concern. The weakening state of competitors in the global market including the competition from China has weakened them immensely. This can allow Huawei to come with a very low offering price to ride on a monopoly state and wipe out competition to later dominate the market and its pricing.
Huawei had started out focused on the Chinese domestic market which allowed it a perfect petridish of consumer and business playground to be accentuated on economies of scale and size of the Chinese domestic market.
Huawei has also been a pioneer in the 3G and the 4G technologies. Its commitment to innovation and research is clear from the fact that in 2015, Huawei remained the top patent applicant for the second year, with 3,898 applications.
Huawei invested over US$15 billion in 2018. In the next five years, the invest is planned at US$100 billion. Huawei is one of the world’s largest patent holders. We have been granted 87,805 patents and 11,152 core technology patents were granted by the United States.
5G : Are you being watched or is it the New World Order ?
This issue has also to be evaluated at a perspective of political and power play of technological control. The 5G technologies limits are still being evaluated as the scope of the connectivity are still being assessed as this could be the blood of the next generation technology superhighway which would be holding very sensitive information. It’s being dubbed as dual use technology which will have commercial and security applications.
The whole issue started in October 2012, when Mike Rogers, Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence presented a report to the congress about the “Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE” which led to questions around the Chinese mobile phones being used by US defense contractors.
The ownership structure of Huawei also did not help the cause as it being an employee-owned company also raised red flags on questions of its relations to the Chinese government.
Beijing passed laws on counter espionage (2014) and a National Intelligence (2017) respectively. This legislation allows the Communist Party to compel Chinese companies to turn over information and open their systems to the country’s intelligence and security apparatus.
It would be interesting to watch out the new political alignment which emerges post Brexit with the Chinese govt. It could also test the UK-US relations in that scenario and can might have a bearing too post US presidential elections this year.
The countries who are going to appoint companies of non-state origin need to work on establishing control points in software and hardware setup and make a clear demarcation in role identifying of the companies the core or the non-core parts setup of the 5G technology.
The risks cannot be eliminated in today scenario and we need to think of mitigation and process control measures from the perspective of hardware and software connect points.
The third-party audit supervision proposal of Huawei brings strong line of transparency and such a thing should be relevantly made the industry standard in terms of transparency.
America's wireless companies are investing an estimated $275 billion into building 5G networks. This will create three million new jobs and add $500 billion to the economy. In fact, it’s estimated that one out of every 100 Americans will benefit from a new 5G job. The world is looking towards the likes of Ericsson and Nokia to present a competitive front to Huawei, but companies are finding it difficult to match the continuous focus on R&D investment by the Chinese tech giant.
I leave the readers to decide and evaluate if we are witnessing a matter of security concerns or are we witnessing a regional polarization, or the case of commercial interests mixed with political influencing at play or are we seeing a rise of a IOT enabled surveillance system which could be the ‘eye’ of Earth.
Sources and
Bibliography
Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues :
https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=96
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