Huawei announces it will sue the US Government over moves to block Huawei

Huawei has announced that it will be taking legal action against the United States for codifying a legal ban against the use of Huawei equipment on 5G networks in the US.

You can watch the live stream here:

Huawei has announced it has filed a suit against the US government as a result of restrictions placed on the use and purchase of Huawei products. Huawei contends that the restrictions are unlawful, and that they will be fought in court.

Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping has said that Huawei has not, and will not ever, implement backdoors in its products, and it will not allow other parties to do the same.

In an explosive press conference, Huawei also accused the US government of smearing Huawei’s name, hacking into its servers and stealing its emails and proprietary code.

Huawei accuses the U.S. government of hacking its servers and stealing its emails and Huawei source code, as well as attempting to influence US allies and other governments worldwide to enact similar bans against the Chinese company.

Huawei has offered to work with the US government to address security concerns, but it appears that these offers in the past have been ignored, implicitly for political reasons rather than any basis in fact.

The company and its various executives offered an impassioned view as to why the US ban on Huawei should be overturned, in addition to citing legal reasons why the move was unconstitutional.

You can re-watch the press conference on the YouTube link above.

Analysis

The moves in the US are not dissimilar to moves made in Australia last year which have, broadly, similar effect. Unlike the US ban which prevents Huawei from supplying to the US government, or to any contractors to the US government (which you’d imagine might include most large corporations in the US), the Australian ban is focused more narrowly on carrier equipment, and inclusion of same in 5G core networks.

Though more broad, it’s likely that the US government ban will have a similar effect on Huawei there; with all the large carriers likely to provide services to the US government in some shape or form, they are effectively prevented from including any Huawei equipment in their service offering.

That Huawei has not launched similar legal action in Australia could be for a number of reasons, but the most likely is the small size of our market; with a shade under 25 million residents, excluding Huawei from our carriers is unlikely to have anywhere near as significant impact on Huawei’s global operations as the US ban will have.

We will be watching this and other Huawei-related developments keenly to see what happens.