Inside the Feds’ Battle Against Huawei

By some accounts, about 40 percent of the world’s population relies on Huawei equipment. But even with 191,000 employees and $108 billion in annual revenue, Huawei remained hungry for growth. That desire, however, faced a formidable obstacle: the US government. Washington argued that Huawei’s technology was an elaborate Trojan horse for Chinese government surveillance.  As tech firms like Huawei become ever more indispensable across the globe, American leaders have, not unreasonably, become possessed by the fear that Chinese technology will offer a ruthless Beijing many “backdoors” into Western affairs of state, security, and commerce. And in the past two years, the US has, at least in the case of Huawei, begun to toy with a policy of complete technological quarantine.

A full US ban on Huawei products could mark the beginning of the end of a one-world internet. It could calve the world into two separate tech ecosystems, one in North America and parts of Europe and the other across Asia and the Southern Hemisphere. The former would be dominated by Nokia, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, and the latter by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu.  The Trump administration’s escalating fight has left US companies that supply Huawei reeling and left Huawei wondering if it can ever count on access to US supply chains again. About the only thing that is clear is that the Trump administration’s fight isn’t really about Huawei at all. “There’s a big geopolitical battle going on,” one Huawei executive said, “one that’s far above Huawei’s pay grade.”