By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
Huawei has been on the U.S. blacklist for years, barred from working with American suppliers like Google over national security concerns. Now HP — an American company — is licensing Huawei's WiFi technology, according to CNBC.
It's a small deal in dollar terms, most likely, but a big signal in what it shows: Huawei's technology keeps finding its way into products sold to American consumers, even as Washington tries to wall the company off. Licensing deals like this one sit in a gray zone — they're not the kind of direct supply relationship the blacklist was built to stop, and they let a company use Huawei's engineering without putting Huawei's name on the box.
For workers and consumers, the practical question is simple: does the hardware in your router or laptop work better, cheaper, because of this arrangement — and does it come with the security trade-offs critics of Huawei have warned about for years? CNBC's report doesn't detail the terms of the licensing agreement or its dollar value, and neither company has laid out publicly what data, if any, changes hands as part of it.
Washington built the blacklist to keep Huawei's influence out of American technology and its supply chains. A licensing deal with a major American PC and printer maker is exactly the kind of workaround that raises the question of whether the wall is holding — or just getting more creative gaps punched in it.
We'll be pressing for the terms of this agreement as they become public. Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by CNBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."