This week we talk about Huawei, DJI, and ByteDance. We also discuss 5G infrastructure, black-box algorithms, and Congressional bundles. Recommended Book: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal Note: my new book, How To Turn 39, is now available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback wherever you get your books :) Transcript In January of 2024, Chinese tech giant Huawei brought an end to its years-long US lobbying effort, meant to help mend fences with western politicians. In mid-2019, then US President Trump had blacklisted the company using an executive order that, in practice, prevented Chinese telecommunications companies from selling specialized equipment in the US, as part of a larger effort to clamp-down on the sale of Chinese 5g and similar infrastructure throughout the US. Around the same time, a Huawei executive was jailed in Canada for allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, and several other western nations were making noises about their own bans, worrying—as Trump's administration said they were worried—that Huawei and similar Chinese tech companies would sell their goods at a loss or at cost, significantly undercutting their foreign competition, and as a consequence would both lock down the burgeoning 5g market, including all the infrastructure that was in the process of being invested in and deployed, while also giving the Chinese government a tool that could allow them to tap all the communications running through this hardware, and potentially even allow them to shut it all down, if they wanted, at some point in the future—if China invaded Taiwan and wanted to keep the West from getting involved, for instance. So while part of this ban on Huawei—for which the President made use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared a national emergency—was undoubtedly political (part of the trade war Trump started as part of the "China is the enemy" platform he was running on leading up to the 2020 election), there were also real-deal concern about China insinuating itself into the world's infrastructure, beginning with the rollout of the next phase of communications technologies; making themselves indispensable, disallowing foreign competition, and yes, possibly even creating a bunch of backdoors they could use at some point in the future to tip the scales in their favor during a conflict. This ban also ensured that Huawei's then quite popular line of smartphones wouldn't be available in the US, or many other Western countries. The company sold off its Honor brand of phones in a scramble to try to protect that line of products from these new blocks on its offerings, which among other things disallowed them from accessing the chips necessary to make competitive smartphone products, but the legislation just kept coming after that initial salvo, the US Federal Communications Commission banning the sale or import of anything made by Huawei in late-2022, and a bunch of fundamental US allies, especially those with which the US collaborates on military and intelligence matters, have likewise banned Huawei products on their shelves and in their communications networks; the idea being that even one Huawei transmitter or modem could tap into the whole of these networks—at least in theory—which is considered a big enough security concern to justify that blanket ban. Huawei has managed to survive, though it didn't scale the way its owners seemed to think it would back before all these bans. Now it exists as a primarily regional outfit, still making billions in revenue each year, though down to about half the revenue it was earning before 2019. Another popular Chinese tech company, DJI, is now scrambling to deploy its lobbyists and circle the wagons, as there's word that it's on a shortlist of potential Chinese security threats, in this case because the company makes very popular consumer and professional grade drones, which have successfully outcompeted many western brands of the same, and which hav