People are getting caught up in legal arguments and pointless minutiae, when this is just cut throat geopolitics. Broadly, Meng was extradited/arrested because

People are getting caught up in legal arguments and pointless minutiae, when this is just cut throat geopolitics. Broadly, Meng was extradited/arrested because US DoJ decided to start taking Chinese hostages after their Huawei campaign failed (new DoJ initiative month before her arrest specifically targets Chinese nationals for extradition for economic crimes). In terms of norms, individuals especially foreign billionaires don't get arrested for sanction busting, their companies get fined or some lackeys fall at the sword. Everyone moves on. Her arrest was an escalation of Sino-US techwar. Bonus for extraditing via Canada to further cripple Sino-Canadian relations and increase Canadian dependency on US; Canada scheduled talks with China a week after her arrest expectantly blew up. Of course her arrest is "legal" in the sense that "enhanced interrogation" is legal. The main take away is that her move was norm breaking in terms of contemporary international relations. US makes Canada take political hostage - China retaliates by arresting Canadian (alleged) spies and drug dealers to dissuade further hostage taking by US extradition partners, slaps Canada around for being a lackey. Canada gets caught between rock and hard place, plays the rule of law card. On UK and Canadian Telcos, a year later, until COVID19, only 3.5/195 (US, AU, JP, UK) countries have officially firm banned Huawei. Basically increased US pressure and new entities list had no effect. Still couldn't even get majority of FVEY on board or countries with significant US military basing. So US revised entity list to completely cut Huawei out of critical US semi components, signaled commitment to do whatever it takes to undermine Huawei. This is sufficiently crippling to Huawei that FVEY vendors can now rule out Huawei due to prospective supply issue - effectively soft banning Huawei. Only AU firm banned Huawei before US pressure and entity list. UK / CAN / NZ still has NO official position on banning Huawei. I think FVEY parties are looking to see if this is an agreeable solution that will appease US security interests or if US insists on hard ban for optics. China doesn't want the latter, they're fine with Huawei being lowkey ruled out. China can still hack FVEY with relative impunity regardless of vendor, and Huawei will get patent fees regardless. Would have been cheaper and less of a shit show if US just bought Sony Ericcson, which William Barr mulled over.