Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced Monday, June 15 that his department would alter previous rules restricting companies from doing business with Huawei that might have implications for the future of 5G. Specifically, companies will now be allowed to work with Huawei in matters involving setting standards for 5G so they will also have a say in how 5G networks will function across different devices.
According to the Commerce Department, standards are critical in order to ensure compatibility and interoperability, especially in international networks. By cutting U.S. companies from working with Huawei, those companies’ abilities to provide input on those standards may have been compromised. The current action is meant to change that, said Secretary Ross. “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,” he said.
Reuters reports that some engineers, wary of inadvertently breaking the rules on what technologies they were allowed to disclose to Huawei, lessened their participation in standard-setting activities. That meant that Huawei, compared to U.S. companies, had a greater say in developing 5G standards, with implications for future 5G networks developed worldwide.
“The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation,” said Secretary Ross.
Under the new rule, established by the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, companies will no longer need an export license in order to reveal certain information to Huawei, provided that information is released “in the context of ‘voluntary consensus standards bodies’ of which Huawei is a participant.” In essence, companies may disclose technology to Huawei for the purposes of developing standards, but not for commercial purposes.
Huawei remains on the Entity List, which restricts U.S. companies from trading with it for commercial purposes: The Commerce Department says that Huawei poses “a significant risk of involvement in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”
The United States government has long maintained that the Chinese government uses Huawei in order to spy on other countries. In May, the Commerce Department took actions to limit Huawei’s ability to purchase semiconductors made using U.S. software and equipment; in February, the Department of Justice indicted the Chinese telecommunications giant for illegal trade of surveillance equipment to Iran and North Korea, theft of intellectual property, and racketeering. China and Huawei, for their part, have accused the United States of unfairly targeting a private company with “the strength of an entire nation,” and maintain that Huawei’s operations are independent from those of the Chinese government.
