Are OTA software updates considered a “backdoor”? Because they essentially are one, even if the company is not doing anything nefarious yet.
I dunno man, in the US you don't just ban people and companies for stuff they haven't yet done. Sure potential attack surfaces are important and you should think about stuff like that. But that's kinda my point.. you should make laws about that and regulate critical infrastructure. (maybe networking equipment shouldn't get OTA updates at all? Maybe that's too simplistic..）
I mean that's like a "bigger" issue. I think it's a completely fair to decide you should just not conduct business with companies under authoritarian regimes (see N.Korea Iran Myanmar etc.). If you wanna blacklist the whole country then okay.. but here it's some indefensible middle ground where you continue to do business with them, until it's inconvenient and some bureaucrat decided it's making you look bad so lets just ban some of their strongest companies to cripple them. We will do business with you as long as you only make low end widgets thankyouverymuch.
That might not be what's actually happening, but that's how it looks
The US government alleges they (Huawei ZTE etc.) colluding to put backdoors in infrastructure equipment. The companies say "no we don't" and the US government just says "well.. we think you're lieing!" - and that's the end of the story. It's all just amateurish and undermines the rule of law and sense of fairness when dealing with America and the American market.
If there was some formal process where countries are semi-sanctioned and all thing made in some super long list of authoritarian countries was not allowed to be used in some other long list of "critical infrastructure" .. well at least there would be a sense of impartiality.
The way things stand.. it looks like Huawei's 5G and infrastructure technology got too good, it threatened the pseudo-monopolies of some big American companies with deep government connections, so the US bureaucrats curb-stomped them as best they could .. and now they can't even sell their laptops/cellphones in the US? It's just completely nonsensical, arbitrary and vindictive.
There is also just very little logic to it, b/c even if all the allegations about their tentacles in networking equipment are true and were proven to be true, why should I be prohibited from buying some completely unrelated consumer good - like a Huawei laptop, but an Apple or Lenovo laptop (also made in China) is totally fine? It's like the US government is in some state of war with these firms and is out to destroy them (based on no public evidence or accountability) - and the threat on US infrastructure seems to have devolved to be a convenient pretext.
Maybe the intentions of the US authorizes are good and pure and they have a good reason for all of this. But they way they're going about it is vindictive, authoritarian and undermines the impartial fairness of the American system
The hypocrisy is that this is the exact anti-competitive behavior the US has been criticizing China for years.
It's possible these companies are doing nefarious things. In which case create a country-agnostic legal framework and take them to court and prove your case. If it's all super-secret-spy-stuff then just do the damn parallel construction and show all these secret backdoors you claim to have found.
If you don't like foreign equipment near military bases or whatever else, then make laws against it
After the Bloomberg microchips-embedded-into-motherboards fantasy stories you can't help but think all this is the product of some CIA director's overactive imagination and isn't based on reality. It does feed into the US frothing-at-the-mouth anti-China rhetoric of the past few years so people eat it up - but cutting out the judicial process and singling out companies/countries just looks horrible imho