Geotech Wars : Huawei, Beijing

"This is a challenge to all free people and open economies of the world."

"This is not just about technology but about trade and economics. The biggest driver for economies in the future is technology."

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Hudson Institute conference

 

Huawei 5G upgrade infrastructure

Allowed:

Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Cyprus, Egypt, Estonia, Faroe Islands, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Moldova, Monaco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan

Banned:

Australia, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States

Credit: Emily Feng, Amy Cheng and Thomas Wilburn / NPR

Chinese autonomous driving start-ups are looking for cost-efficient ways to achieve large-scale adoption of the technology. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has formed a team to focus on developing low-cost multichannel lidar sensors with the goal of making the technology affordable enough for all smart vehicles.   Photo: Handout

Canada now remains the sole member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States that has not yet announced a decision with respect to permitting Huawei the telecom giant that Beijing considers its leading telecommunications instrument to bind the world into a Chinese-connected interconnectivity web as it seeks to dominate world technology, effectively yanking it out from under the influence of the U.S. whose technology pioneered the Internet and everything that flowed from it.

Canadian public opinion is dead set against allowing Huawei access to Canada's 5G upgrade. Beijing's bullying tactics in threatening Chinese Canadians who are loyal to their adopted Canadian citizenship when they dare criticize the Chinese dictatorship, its crackdown on Hong Kong democratic freedoms, its 're-education' camps for a million Chinese Muslims in Xinjiang province, the abduction and imprisonment of two Canadians charged with espionage, its agricultural trade war with Canada, all reason enough.

 

But the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remains mired in placatory overtures toward Beijing, unwilling to state unequivocally that along with the other four members of the Western intelligence alliance, Canada too will opt out of giving Huawei the green light it is waiting for. Huawei's Canada-based management went so far as to put together a guarantee, a "no-spying" agreement to put to rest concerns that Huawei's involvement in Canadian communications infrastructure will give it a spying portal.

Canada has had previous experience with the Chinese penchant for industrial espionage, when Chinese technicians hired by Canada's then-global communications giant Nortel, spirited classified data into China, and those former employees then helped to set up China's counterpart of Nortel based on technique acquired and purloined information on structure and research, giving birth to Huawei. Nortel died a painful death as a result of the competition based on its own R&D, and Huawei made its way into the world at large.

Mr.Chandraselchar, a tech entrepreneur, and member of India's Parliament, led India's Huawei ban along with banning hundreds of other Chinese software, spurred in no small part by China's aggression against India on their disputed Himalayan border. The military alliance including India, Japan, Australia and the United States occupy the agenda in concerns over Beijing's long-range plans of world conquest, part of which is its Belt and Road initiative, an investment of immense proportions effectively tying countries from Europe, Africa and Asia in bondage to China, unable to pay off Chinese investment.

The future is destined for hyper-automation linkage with trillions of internet-connected devices -- all of which Huawei intends to have a connection with and ultimately control using whatever methods work,  from subsidies to takeovers eliminating rivals, to rise unequalled in reach and power. And Huawei has succeeded to the extent that it now has a majority of global nations in the process of adopting some or part of Huawei's networking technologies.

 

In 2017, a report published in the United States concluded that "Chinese theft of American (intellectual property) currently costs between $225 billion and $600 billion annually". Leading Washington to ban any American technologies from being accessed by Chinese tech companies, leaving the abusive trade bully that Beijing has become to continue engaging in its global dominance war but denying access to critical U.S.-produced technologies and urging other countries to proceed with caution in business with China.

"Meanwhile, Huawei has a baked-in 5G advantage in Europe, where it already has helped build out extensive 4G networks. That means countries that opt for faster and cheaper 'non-standalone implementation' — building out the first wave of 5G on top of existing 4G infrastructure — have to incorporate at least some Huawei equipment or begin the expensive and complex task of extricating Huawei from their 4G networks, analysts say."

"'That's why 4G is quite important to 5G implementation. It's also why you see pushback from countries like the U.K.', says Nikhil Batra, a senior research manager at research firm IDC in Australia."

Emily Feng, Amy Cheng, NPR

 

Internet Evangelist, Vinton Cerf

"The most troubling thing about the internet environment is the buggy software.  You hear people worrying about artificial intelligence and machine learning but I'm worried about autonomous software running on the Internet of Things [networks attached to smart devices] that have bugs."
"We have a lot of work to do to clean up the ecology we've created."
"It is a dog's breakfast of ideas [China's proposed New Internet Protocol] that do not fit together very well. What they wanted to do was to get more control."
"I have trouble believing it doesn't have any software in there [Huawei Communications] that lets the Chinese government get access to anything."
Vinton Cerf, father of the Internet, vice-president Google

The standards we now take for granted that maintain our electronic devices in connection to the internet were pioneered in 1973 by Vint Cerf, a then-assistant professor at Stanford University, along with his colleague Bob Kahn. They did that enormous deed to the world when they developed the Internet Protocol (IP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for use by the U.S.  military to enable different types of software, hardware, operating systems and networks to communicate.

Their intention, as the developers of a brave new world of communications was to ensure that this be viewed as a universal tool open to being built upon, expanded and customized, with its basic underpinnings intact. When software developers came along to build over the basic structure they were able to do so with ease and confidence, bringing the world further along in recognition of the usefulness of the indispensable communication tool the product became, one that is still expanding.

It took five years to see the World Wide Web develop following the launch of the internet in 1983. Decades on, the wide open, free-to-use internet, geographically unattached is edging away from its place as a global standard, leading to what Vint Cerf speaks of as a "Splinternet", coined by the Cato Institute. A New Internet Protocol representing a set of standards replacing the original internet was proposed last year by China.

A country with vast influence, power and ambition, China seeks to control the internet just as its goal has become clear internationally to control everything and anything it recognizes for its importance to a fast-developing world of unimaginable technological advances. China alone has up to a billion internet users, where several successful internet companies such as Alibaba and Baidu are top of the Chinese social networks facilitating contact between its enormous population base.

And it has been China that has pioneered a goal of its own relating to the internet as it began to filter, block and manipulate social media for its own controlling purposes; technology they are making available at a price to other countries eager to control what their populations see and have access to under authoritarian governments. Britain's still tenuous intention to retain equipment from Huawei in its 5G network upgrade, U.S. warning aside of threats to national security also concern Vint Cerf.

Search Engine Journal  Vinton Cerf

Apart from his certainty that the Chinese government will have access to other countries' sovereign data, he worries that worldwide routing systems as well are not protected adequately. He spends a good portion of his time now campaigning for internet security, net neutrality and backing up information as being of vital importance.

American government agencies had created various networks for electronic communication, prohibited for public use by the late 1980s. This, at a time when Mr.Cerf worked for MCI Mail, among the first of the commercial email providers. He sought government permission in experimenting to determine if he could connect MCI's private email-system to the internet. Given a year, his efforts were successful, leading other email providers to lobby for access openings and  soon public email accounts were rampant.

For the past 15 years Mr. Cerf has worked for Google, advocating for accessibility-by-design to service Google's business plan, now viewed by the public as a conglomerate advertising machine with political biases. Mr. Cerf has seen the internet morph from neutral to hosting abuses such as fake news, cyber bullying and other negatives of social media. Google's neutral platform position is seen now to be hanging in the balance.

Image:NASA/JPL

"Many of us did not anticipate the harmful potential of these technologies. The people who are creating these products and writing the software should feel a much greater burden than in the past because the harmful side effects can be devastating on a global scale."
"Not only do individuals need to feel this ethical pressure, but I feel that companies need to be incentivized to do everything in their ability to ensure these bad things do not happen."
Vinton Cerf