5 ms·

I am going to put it in the most blunt, politically incorrect and frankly offensive way: I don't want my communications to touch any Chinese services, hardware,

I am going to put it in the most blunt, politically incorrect and frankly offensive way: I don't want my communications to touch any Chinese services, hardware, applications or processes. This is what my gut feelings are. I have surveyed over 200 suppliers in China, I've got zero trust in their professional ethics. EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure because it's reasonable to expect strong ethics and professionalism. It's completely opposite with Chinese companies. Really. This is a broad generalization to help navigate. Of course there are exceptions, many, in fact. I find it totally ironic that the CCP is recently cracking down on low level corruption in mid-sized firms in China (a good thing), while ignoring their own deeds.

joering2 6y ago
When you mentioned Germany, I chuckled a little. Worked there for many years and corruption and lack of professionalism I witness in IT section was astonishing. At least here in US corporate corruption is not blunt; nobody here - like it happened to me in Germany - will meet you for the first time, listen to your case and then ask for $15,000 Euro bribe. Here is a good start how terrible German ethics are: https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germany/a-16460233 https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germ... And then my favorite case of corrupted to the core Siemens: https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens-corruption-scandal-one-decade-later-108694 https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens...
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Thanks for the contrast. We also know the VW scandal. As I said, this is a broad generalization from my own experience with mid-sized firms in China. I can only expect larger unethical behavior with CCP members in the board meetings. At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Worse, unspoken threat and chilling effect executives and leadership team would have to appease the CCP members. There was a recent example of this - Jack Ma.
  - okl 6y ago
    > At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Sure? https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-german-spies-of-illegal-data-siphoning/a-44002141 https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-germa...
  - onethought 6y ago
    How’s Jack Ma related to your trust in Hua wei? It was a different company and it wasn’t just random interference from the government it was the other way round. Jack Ma started using his position to interfere with government.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      I think it's very much related. Can you imagine Jeff Bezos disappearing for 2 months because he didn't appease the US Feds? Now imagine the chilling effect it would send to the rest of the executives from small to large corporations.
      - onethought 6y ago
        It’s not comparable... China isn’t a democracy and free speech isn’t a thing. Can I imagine Jeff bezos being arrested for committing a federal crime: yes
        systemvoltage 6y ago
        Speaking out against the government is a crime? Did Jack Ma get a trial?
        onethought 6y ago
        Yes. It is a crime. Depending on the type of crime, you may or may not get a public trial.
        sgift 6y ago
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I've worked for a few German mega-corps and I was always struck by how in point their "anti-bribery" training was. It kind of felt like a "how-to" course on bribery where they just tell you not to do the thing at the end. Kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in schools where the police would tell you about all the different drugs and how not to use them. "This here is crack cocaine, it's like regular cocaine but cheaper and more effective. Most people put the crack rock into a glass tube and light it with a torch. Now smoking crack makes your body feel better than anything in the world. So don't do it." Then they tell you how to spot a drug dealer and let you know that most offer free samples.
- nickbauman 6y ago
  Regarding Siemens it reminds me of John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man about the engineering firm Chas T Main. Bribes are merely one technique to obtain power by companies like these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
onethought 6y ago
What did Huawei do to make you come to this conclusion? Why isn’t encryption the solution here?
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  There is a lot of rot in Huawei: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/technology/huawei-racketeering-wire-fraud.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/technology/huawei-rackete...
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    No, the US government and media say there is. That is not necessarily the truth.
- bithavoc 6y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1612385723&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1548547200&page=0&prefix=false&query=huawei%20backdoor&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1612385723&dateRange=custom&...
  - radres 6y ago
    Holy shit
- exyi 6y ago
  Encryption does not protect you from: 1. metadata leaks 2. denial of service backdoors - a real consideration for nations going to trade war with China and Huawei is pretty connected to the Chinese government Also there is the problem that lot of tech is legacy and can not be easily upgraded for encryption (think SMS and mobile calls)
disiplus 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
- elefanten 6y ago
  If you wanna play case for case, we’ll be reading the China stack until heat death
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    While I absolutely do have the perception that Chinese businesses are more corrupt than Western businesses, admittedly any sort of data or analysis would be welcome.
    - frostwhale 6y ago
      that's kinda that point... you dont get any data from China.
      - Judgmentality 6y ago
        You don't trust health data from tobacco companies either, but you can still figure out ways to analyze the health of tobacco. This certainly is not my wheelhouse, but I assume someone has made some attempts to analyze this?
- pupdogg 6y ago
  At least you know that some forces existed where this got documented. Good luck with that in China!
caycep 6y ago
I feel like this is akin to one of those Stanford psychology experiments, but in political science/cultural development, i.e. what happens when you bomb a country back to the stone age (interregnum post-Qiang dynasty, then WWII), but then juice up the economy in 2-3 decades but without the "normal" cultural/political/ethical development, and in a complete effectively laissez-faire libertarian-but-also-authoritarian-with-a-lot-of-bribes environment
dillondoyle 6y ago
It goes beyond ethics. The CCP has clear long term global power goals and espionage plays a large part of this. China threads turn into whataboutism. Yeah obviously the West spies as well. But we don't tend to use that to steal IP and coordinate with our state-owned or virtually quasi state owned companies. Even if we did do that I'd rather the spying be on our side. Plus we do have some individual liberty protections (no matter how deteriorating) and can push for more/transparency (Democracy versus a dictatorship). We're in confrontation already why give up such an important strategic asset?
- throw2102032112 6y ago
  Well, maybe the idea is to fix your own house first? I mean this is the whole reason we've got into the Brexit situation, by constantly casting blame on the EU for our own government's failings. But I guess that's the whole point in Democracy isn't it? Constantly blaming someone else, making up false accusations of someone else, and when they try to defend themselves, intensify the accusations. I am also curious about where you think Huawei stolen the 5G IPs from? Or are you regurgitating false accusations without any evidence?
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    - I never claimed huawei stole 5g ips i don't know much on this subject but you can not argue that China has not stolen IP broadly and aggressively - sure fix the house. but why let a foreign actor in the 'house' who would do even more damage.
vasilakisfil 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scanda...
__sy__ 6y ago
It sincerely pains me to write this, but I tend to agree with the general conclusion of this comment. Of course, Germans, French, Canadians....etc are NOT immune to incompetence or unethical conduct either (see Enron, VW, Total...etc). But once you've dealt long enough with Chinese CM/ODM/OEMs, you've seen things that make you nod along this comment. JUST YESTERDAY, we received an SDK doc from a well-known networking gear OEM that was encrypted using 3DES. [1] [1] https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encryption-standard-3des-tdea https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encr...
- coltsfan 6y ago
  For sure. But the specific statement of expecting "strong" ethics from some group of companies is bizarre. I would go all the way and say that it is completely unreasonable to expect "strong" ethics from any company. There are just too many individuals involved with their own incentives. It's like looking at MLB dopers and expecting european cyclists to be a better type of person and never dope. It will never happen that way. However, you could reasonably expect a sport whose governing body does regular testing of athletes and their gear to have less cheating. You could say that has nothing to do with ethics. It's about consequences. This should be a very easy conclusion for anyone that has ever read about cheating in any kind of system. sports, finance, academia's replication crisis, scrabble tournaments... it is sad, but the most reasonable conclusion is to expect cheating and unethical behavior. It's just what people, including some very good people, end up doing due to pressure and being able to get away with something. And if it is profitable to just pay the fine and not do a recall, don't do a recall. Even if that means kids will die. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
  - __sy__ 6y ago
    I agree wholeheartedly. Another thought that comes to mind is the idea that laws are a weak guarantee of outcome.
skohan 6y ago
> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.
- milankragujevic 6y ago
  If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively. Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure. It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol. When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
throw2102032112 6y ago
I guess maybe you don't hear about as much corruption in Germany is if you are a whistleblower, then you get poisoned https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36185194 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36185194
baybal2 6y ago
> EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. Before telling that EU or US should develop its own infrastructure for communications, think why it's not there already, and why it needs a boot from the government. US, and EU largely nuked their own industries without any foreign spies blowing up bridges. I cannot single out what's in particular what's solely responsible for demise of industrial economy in the West, but having tried it myself I can say that the sense of swimming against the current is omnipresent. Don't just spray money, first think why doing so 10 times before did not work.
- centimeter 6y ago
  I think the decline of the industrial economy in the US is substantially down to the US government effectively subsidizing foreign manufacturing with seignorage (dollar printing) profits.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Optimizing for quarterly returns means nobody plans for 10 or 25 years into the future. You won't get a bonus for planning ahead.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  A lot of it is labor costs. There's also the fact that there are other, more lucrative industries for American industry to chase. Everything has tradeoffs. I don't know if I would say industry left the US due to a failure of any kind. This is kind of the definition of an economic comparative advantage.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Not true at all, labour costs only make few percents of high value goods you import from third world countries. Even if they were to go up tenfold, it will not make that much of difference. People who moan about labour costs making any difference to modern manufacturing are just keeping regurgitating a myth. In fact, trained manufacturing labour costs in coastal China are now significantly passing that of US averages, and even more so of US flyover states.
danlugo92 6y ago
Are you forgetting about COINTELPRO and PRISM?
mountainb 6y ago
I wouldn't trust Americans either if I had no access to courts that had jurisdiction over them. This is one of the issues of trade without reciprocal jurisdiction. The problem extends beyond just communications hardware and the special concerns of that category.
zm262 6y ago
Ironically. You could be right about the 200 suppliers in China, except that Huawei in this case IS actually one of the few trustable Chinese companies.
- bassman9000 6y ago
  In this very same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26019039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26019039
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
simplyaccont 6y ago
I happened to work a few years in German company that made fiber and carrier ethernet products for telecoms. We had a lot of ethics and professionalism and really good feature set, even occasionally we out innovated other companies, but we didn't have the price point that Huawei can achieve, hence contracts went to China.
rbx 6y ago
Wild speculation: this draft proposal would favor smaller chip makers that have been acquired by China. https://www.datenna.com/china-eu-fdi-radar/ https://www.datenna.com/china-eu-fdi-radar/

joering2 6y ago

When you mentioned Germany, I chuckled a little. Worked there for many years and corruption and lack of professionalism I witness in IT section was astonishing. At least here in US corporate corruption is not blunt; nobody here - like it happened to me in Germany - will meet you for the first time, listen to your case and then ask for $15,000 Euro bribe. Here is a good start how terrible German ethics are: https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germany/a-16460233 https://www.dw.com/en/image-problems-mount-in-corporate-germ... And then my favorite case of corrupted to the core Siemens: https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens-corruption-scandal-one-decade-later-108694 https://theconversation.com/lessons-from-the-massive-siemens...

systemvoltage 6y ago
Thanks for the contrast. We also know the VW scandal. As I said, this is a broad generalization from my own experience with mid-sized firms in China. I can only expect larger unethical behavior with CCP members in the board meetings. At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Worse, unspoken threat and chilling effect executives and leadership team would have to appease the CCP members. There was a recent example of this - Jack Ma.
- okl 6y ago
  > At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Sure? https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-german-spies-of-illegal-data-siphoning/a-44002141 https://www.dw.com/en/internet-exchange-de-cix-accuses-germa...
- onethought 6y ago
  How’s Jack Ma related to your trust in Hua wei? It was a different company and it wasn’t just random interference from the government it was the other way round. Jack Ma started using his position to interfere with government.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    I think it's very much related. Can you imagine Jeff Bezos disappearing for 2 months because he didn't appease the US Feds? Now imagine the chilling effect it would send to the rest of the executives from small to large corporations.
    - onethought 6y ago
      It’s not comparable... China isn’t a democracy and free speech isn’t a thing. Can I imagine Jeff bezos being arrested for committing a federal crime: yes
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        Speaking out against the government is a crime? Did Jack Ma get a trial?
        onethought 6y ago
        Yes. It is a crime. Depending on the type of crime, you may or may not get a public trial.
      - sgift 6y ago
mywittyname 6y ago
I've worked for a few German mega-corps and I was always struck by how in point their "anti-bribery" training was. It kind of felt like a "how-to" course on bribery where they just tell you not to do the thing at the end. Kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in schools where the police would tell you about all the different drugs and how not to use them. "This here is crack cocaine, it's like regular cocaine but cheaper and more effective. Most people put the crack rock into a glass tube and light it with a torch. Now smoking crack makes your body feel better than anything in the world. So don't do it." Then they tell you how to spot a drug dealer and let you know that most offer free samples.
nickbauman 6y ago
Regarding Siemens it reminds me of John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man about the engineering firm Chas T Main. Bribes are merely one technique to obtain power by companies like these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

onethought 6y ago

What did Huawei do to make you come to this conclusion? Why isn’t encryption the solution here?

systemvoltage 6y ago
There is a lot of rot in Huawei: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/technology/huawei-racketeering-wire-fraud.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/technology/huawei-rackete...
- lucian1900 6y ago
  No, the US government and media say there is. That is not necessarily the truth.
bithavoc 6y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1612385723&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1548547200&page=0&prefix=false&query=huawei%20backdoor&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1612385723&dateRange=custom&...
- radres 6y ago
  Holy shit
exyi 6y ago
Encryption does not protect you from: 1. metadata leaks 2. denial of service backdoors - a real consideration for nations going to trade war with China and Huawei is pretty connected to the Chinese government Also there is the problem that lot of tech is legacy and can not be easily upgraded for encryption (think SMS and mobile calls)

disiplus 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

elefanten 6y ago
If you wanna play case for case, we’ll be reading the China stack until heat death
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  While I absolutely do have the perception that Chinese businesses are more corrupt than Western businesses, admittedly any sort of data or analysis would be welcome.
  - frostwhale 6y ago
    that's kinda that point... you dont get any data from China.
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      You don't trust health data from tobacco companies either, but you can still figure out ways to analyze the health of tobacco. This certainly is not my wheelhouse, but I assume someone has made some attempts to analyze this?
pupdogg 6y ago
At least you know that some forces existed where this got documented. Good luck with that in China!

caycep 6y ago

I feel like this is akin to one of those Stanford psychology experiments, but in political science/cultural development, i.e. what happens when you bomb a country back to the stone age (interregnum post-Qiang dynasty, then WWII), but then juice up the economy in 2-3 decades but without the "normal" cultural/political/ethical development, and in a complete effectively laissez-faire libertarian-but-also-authoritarian-with-a-lot-of-bribes environment

dillondoyle 6y ago

It goes beyond ethics. The CCP has clear long term global power goals and espionage plays a large part of this. China threads turn into whataboutism. Yeah obviously the West spies as well. But we don't tend to use that to steal IP and coordinate with our state-owned or virtually quasi state owned companies. Even if we did do that I'd rather the spying be on our side. Plus we do have some individual liberty protections (no matter how deteriorating) and can push for more/transparency (Democracy versus a dictatorship). We're in confrontation already why give up such an important strategic asset?

throw2102032112 6y ago
Well, maybe the idea is to fix your own house first? I mean this is the whole reason we've got into the Brexit situation, by constantly casting blame on the EU for our own government's failings. But I guess that's the whole point in Democracy isn't it? Constantly blaming someone else, making up false accusations of someone else, and when they try to defend themselves, intensify the accusations. I am also curious about where you think Huawei stolen the 5G IPs from? Or are you regurgitating false accusations without any evidence?
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  - I never claimed huawei stole 5g ips i don't know much on this subject but you can not argue that China has not stolen IP broadly and aggressively - sure fix the house. but why let a foreign actor in the 'house' who would do even more damage.

vasilakisfil 6y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scanda...

__sy__ 6y ago

It sincerely pains me to write this, but I tend to agree with the general conclusion of this comment. Of course, Germans, French, Canadians....etc are NOT immune to incompetence or unethical conduct either (see Enron, VW, Total...etc). But once you've dealt long enough with Chinese CM/ODM/OEMs, you've seen things that make you nod along this comment. JUST YESTERDAY, we received an SDK doc from a well-known networking gear OEM that was encrypted using 3DES. [1] [1] https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encryption-standard-3des-tdea https://www.precisely.com/blog/data-security/aes-vs-des-encr...

coltsfan 6y ago
For sure. But the specific statement of expecting "strong" ethics from some group of companies is bizarre. I would go all the way and say that it is completely unreasonable to expect "strong" ethics from any company. There are just too many individuals involved with their own incentives. It's like looking at MLB dopers and expecting european cyclists to be a better type of person and never dope. It will never happen that way. However, you could reasonably expect a sport whose governing body does regular testing of athletes and their gear to have less cheating. You could say that has nothing to do with ethics. It's about consequences. This should be a very easy conclusion for anyone that has ever read about cheating in any kind of system. sports, finance, academia's replication crisis, scrabble tournaments... it is sad, but the most reasonable conclusion is to expect cheating and unethical behavior. It's just what people, including some very good people, end up doing due to pressure and being able to get away with something. And if it is profitable to just pay the fine and not do a recall, don't do a recall. Even if that means kids will die. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
- __sy__ 6y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly. Another thought that comes to mind is the idea that laws are a weak guarantee of outcome.

skohan 6y ago

> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.

milankragujevic 6y ago
If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively. Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure. It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol. When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.

throw2102032112 6y ago

I guess maybe you don't hear about as much corruption in Germany is if you are a whistleblower, then you get poisoned https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36185194 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36185194

baybal2 6y ago

> EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. Before telling that EU or US should develop its own infrastructure for communications, think why it's not there already, and why it needs a boot from the government. US, and EU largely nuked their own industries without any foreign spies blowing up bridges. I cannot single out what's in particular what's solely responsible for demise of industrial economy in the West, but having tried it myself I can say that the sense of swimming against the current is omnipresent. Don't just spray money, first think why doing so 10 times before did not work.

centimeter 6y ago
I think the decline of the industrial economy in the US is substantially down to the US government effectively subsidizing foreign manufacturing with seignorage (dollar printing) profits.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Optimizing for quarterly returns means nobody plans for 10 or 25 years into the future. You won't get a bonus for planning ahead.
klmadfejno 6y ago
A lot of it is labor costs. There's also the fact that there are other, more lucrative industries for American industry to chase. Everything has tradeoffs. I don't know if I would say industry left the US due to a failure of any kind. This is kind of the definition of an economic comparative advantage.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Not true at all, labour costs only make few percents of high value goods you import from third world countries. Even if they were to go up tenfold, it will not make that much of difference. People who moan about labour costs making any difference to modern manufacturing are just keeping regurgitating a myth. In fact, trained manufacturing labour costs in coastal China are now significantly passing that of US averages, and even more so of US flyover states.

danlugo92 6y ago

Are you forgetting about COINTELPRO and PRISM?

mountainb 6y ago

I wouldn't trust Americans either if I had no access to courts that had jurisdiction over them. This is one of the issues of trade without reciprocal jurisdiction. The problem extends beyond just communications hardware and the special concerns of that category.

zm262 6y ago

Ironically. You could be right about the 200 suppliers in China, except that Huawei in this case IS actually one of the few trustable Chinese companies.

bassman9000 6y ago
In this very same thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26019039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26019039

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

simplyaccont 6y ago

I happened to work a few years in German company that made fiber and carrier ethernet products for telecoms. We had a lot of ethics and professionalism and really good feature set, even occasionally we out innovated other companies, but we didn't have the price point that Huawei can achieve, hence contracts went to China.

rbx 6y ago

Wild speculation: this draft proposal would favor smaller chip makers that have been acquired by China. https://www.datenna.com/china-eu-fdi-radar/ https://www.datenna.com/china-eu-fdi-radar/