The Huawei ban, as I recall, was mostly about 5G equipment for which the primary competitor is Ericsson (based in Sweden). There wasn’t really a viable US alternative and the ban wasn’t protecting some US-based company.
Huawei is banned because they installed backdoors for a hostile foreign government in their devices and got caught. Not "just" because they're foreign.
You can buy lots of Chinese made and foreign-made handsets in the US.
If that were the case, the US government would not ban US companies from selling to equipment and software to Huawei.
After all, if all the US were worried about were back doored Huawei equipment (of which there's no evidence), why would it care if Huawei phones in China use Google services?
Based on the actions taken by multiple agencies in the US and other governments it sounds like Huawei is actively working with the Chinese government to monitor devices they’ve sold. I don’t think the US has ulterior motives behind the ban, I think they’re genuinely concerned about the risk. I hope we eventually get a report on what they know about the devices.
The long term impact of this Huawei dispute will be China building out a complete vertical communications/computing stack from low level chips to operating system to phone design. They won't get any market share in the U.S. but they'll dominate China (obv), India, Africa, and have some decent minority share in Europe.
The ban is great for U.S. companies in the short term that are behind on 5G, but this will harm U.S. tech industry interests in the long term once China has that vertical stack up and running.
I wish the U.S. government had used their power to push for some form of a mandatory and transparent security audit to ensure data privacy.
Huawei is banned from an infrastructure point of view. Qualcomm does device chips for phones and whatnot, not network infrastructure.
The US government hasn't banned consumer devices of Huawei (except for government purchases). So you can still buy a Huawei phone or laptop.
Also, Qualcomm basically had a monopoly in the US due to patents applying to CDMA phone tech (it's why most phones had different SKUs in the US versus the rest of the world, as you effectively needed a Qualcomm chip to get on Verizon's or Sprint's networks.)
My guess is that most of restrictions on Huawei will be rolled back within a relative short period. However the damage this has done to America's reputation will stand for a long time and will impact some major strategic decisions not only in China but also in Europe.
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