New Huawei bans are in limbo because of disagreement in the Trump administration.
What you need to know
- The U.S. Commerce Department was set to put new bans on the sale of U.S. technology to Huawei.
- Pentagon officials reportedly disagreed with the ban, and the Commerce Department has pulled the ruling.
- A Trump administration Cabinet meeting next week will likely decide the fate of this ban.
Earlier today, we found out that the U.S. Commerce Department had put forth a ruling that would further limit the sale of U.S. technology to Huawei. Now, it turns out, the Commerce Department has pulled the ruling, citing disagreements from within the Pentagon. According to Reuters, Pentagon officials are siding with some U.S. businesses that don’t want the government to regulate the sale of U.S. products to Huawei.
These businesses are pushing back against the measure because, they say, it will encourage Huawei to rely even less on the U.S. than it already does. Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei has already stated that the company plans to make more changes to reduce American influence over its supply lines and sales, and it appears that the fears of U.S. businesses follow along this same line of thinking. Essentially, further bans from the U.S. government would only hurt U.S. interests and businesses while affecting Huawei very little.
Given the difference in opinion within the Trump administration on how to handle Huawei, there’s little telling what will happen to this ruling during the scheduled Cabinet meeting next week. As it stands, next week’s meeting is set to cover this very topic and could result in a revised version of the ruling from the U.S. Commerce Department. Many government officials, including prominent Senators and House members, have expressed their displeasure at the lack of control over foreign supply lines, including the inability to properly regulate the sale of U.S. goods to the China.
Huawei is feverishly working to move away from Google’s Android and create its own ecosystem based on the open-source version of Android, including Huawei’s own software traits. Google has important hooks into Android, including search, the Google Play app store and accompanying ecosystem, and several dozen apps that many Android users rely on daily.
So far, we’ve seen Huawei launch their own version of Instant Apps, spend millions of dollars to court developers into porting apps to their app store, and have even made significant headway into their own version of Android, called Harmony OS.
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