Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Businesses China Government United States

US Commerce Dept. Amends Huawei Ban To Allow For Development of 5G Standards (techcrunch.com) 54

The United States Department of Commerce today issued a change to allow American companies to participate in developing more streamlined standards for 5G with Huawei. TechCrunch reports: According to the Department: "This action is meant to ensure Huawei's placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei's pervasive participation in standards-development organizations."

The change is designed to allow Huawei and U.S. to both play a role in hashing out the parameters for the next-generation wireless technology. "The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. This action recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic and national security," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. "The Department is committed to protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by encouraging U.S. industry to fully engage and advocate for U.S. technologies to become international standards."

The new Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) rule essentially allows companies to share information about technologies in order to develop a joint standard without requiring an export license. Beyond that, however, the DOC has no stated plans to ease up after placing Huawei on its entities list last year.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

US Commerce Dept. Amends Huawei Ban To Allow For Development of 5G Standards

Comments Filter:
  • by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @05:31AM (#60188652)

    The United States Department of Commerce today issued a change to allow American companies to participate in developing more streamlined standards for 5G with Huawei.

    Sadly, I must admit here: The USA blinked!! That's fact. The USA did the same in the early 80s when it came to rocket technology. The Chinese now do not need us in that field

    Ditto in chips/semi conductors. They will not need us one day.

    So POTUS and his men have finally come to their senses I guess. Waging such a war was insane. For a country with less than 1/3 of [essential] 5G patents to state: The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation" one administration official was quoted saying, is laughable.

    Huawei is a dangerous company!" POTUS once said. Now his administration is granting permission to work with a "dangerous" company? Absurd!!

    • He said the same thing about Comcast and Amazon last week. Huawei isn't dangerous, they offered to open-source their 5G code last year. If USA wants nice things they need to accept that they can no longer make them without China (unless you think weird etsy sweaters are nice things).
      • He said the same thing about Comcast and Amazon last week.

        Yeah but about those two he's right. Some foreign company having ties to some foreign government spying on you is no where near as dangerous to you in America as a local company getting monopoly status and using said status to embed themselves as the only player in the marketplace slowly killing off or buying out all sources of competition.

        Huawei may be dangerous to national security on a local level (as in personal equipment level, since we should never trust intermediate infrastructure anyway). So if you

        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          What market can Amazon possibly be a monopoly in? You could open your own online store tomorrow and **IF** you can do it better take their place. The Amazon hate seems to be mostly a product of envy from people and competitors who have no clue what 'customer service' actually means.

    • POTUS = President Of The United States.
    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      "So POTUS and his men have finally come to their senses"

      No. One constant in the alleged administration is that they do not learn anything new. New is dangerous, it threatens their 1950s view of the world.

  • I like how pervasive participation in global standards bodies is somehow implied to be negative and/or sinister, while the restriction has to be loosened just to enable US companies to participate in the same bodies, which apparently have had no problems moving forward without US "leadership".

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Huawei did the work for 5G. That's why they own a lot of essential patents on it that must be licenced to produce 5G gear.

      That's also why Huawei has been targeted by the US. China took the lead in mobile technology and this is a lame attempt to hobble them so American companies can catch up. It does nothing to address the real problem.

      • Sorry, Huawei had a working first on market device. It works. No new standards are necessary. They are already in stone. All the modulation modes are built in. Streamline? Do you mean remove point to point communication like a walkie talkie, that bypasses any telco? If USA wants to get even, release some software that works on a $5 SDR so we can listen in on other peoples calls etc. Or USA can deem some expensive software certification is needed = oh wait a lot of existing USA software may fail that one.
      • I love it when the US pushes China to respect "intellectual property" and now that system is being used against them.

        Patents holds back innovation, and it will be the US that suffers the most.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The US is running mostly on delusions now. One of them is that they are global leaders in everything (when they are basically behind in everything). Another one is that they are the best country to live in on the planet (when that is not even remotely true by any sane metric). If the US did not have sheer size on its side, it would have long since be left by the wayside by the rest of the world. But thanks to a certain fool, the rest of the west is slowly coming to realize that they need to be able to stand

      • To be fair, for aging white gun-owners, ala Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, USA is probably where you want to be.
        • To be fair, for aging white gun-owners, ala Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, USA is probably where you want to be.

          No.

        • by nnet ( 20306 )
          As long as you're healthy.
        • To be fair, for aging white gun-owners, ala Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, USA is probably where you want to be.

          If that's what you took away about his character in that film, I think you need to rewatch it, because you clearly didn't grasp the lessons it was trying to teach.

    • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @06:10AM (#60188708)

      I like how pervasive participation in global standards bodies is somehow implied to be negative and/or sinister, while the restriction has to be loosened just to enable US companies to participate in the same bodies, which apparently have had no problems moving forward without US "leadership".

      Yup, all of a sudden the US wakes up, realises that isolationism isn't a good idea because developing your own standards that nobody else uses kind of kills your prospects of technology exports in an age where interconnectivity is key. Thus the US has now decided that while Huawei still can't do business in the US because they are supposedly spying for the Chinese government even if nobody can prove it, Huawei is still supposed to sit down with their US competitors, sing "Kumbaya ..." and help those US companies play catch up with Huawei in the development of next-generation wireless technology?

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The question of how much being isolationist and doing your own thing hurts your economy is an interesting one.

        The textbook example is Japan. They call it "Galapagos" because a lot of tech there evolves separately to the rest of the world. For a long time mobile networks were to some extent incompatible with the rest of the world. A lot of stuff that becomes popular in Japan never even gets released elsewhere. Language plays a part too, in the west few have heard of DOS/V or PC98 or FM Townes.

        How much has th

        • by Pimpy ( 143938 )

          The trend has also shifted in Japan since they became more aware of the fragility of their domestic supply chains. I worked for a Japanese semiconductor in Tokyo for many years, they prided themselves on doing all of the sourcing and fabrication domestically - that is, until the tsunami knocked out critical fabs in Tohoku and they were unable to meet the supply requirements of some of their biggest domestic customers, who in turn had to push back new product launches by over a year, which in turn reduced th

      • Huawei owns the patents, so helping the US companies play catch up is to get patent licensing royalties faster.
  • Apart from the question why there muat be a "leadership" and one can't just work together like actual humans...

    Good luck with that, in the coming years, dear America! :D

  • So, US tactics of "we'll be idea guys, others will do the actual work", which is no-bullshit translation for "we will develop intellectual property and sell it to actual producers" doesn't work after all. Who would've taught?

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt. -- Henry J. Kaiser

Working...