Google’s withdrawal from Huawei mobile phones: tech or Trump?
On 19 May, it was confirmed that Google had revoked Huawei’s Android license. Other top US tech companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, have also cut off Huawei’s supplies. However, the most devastating blow to Huawei is perhaps that Google services, including the Google Play store and Gmail will be unavailable to Huawei phone users. Recently, Huawei smart phones with their relatively high specification and low price have become increasingly popular outside China, particularly in emerging markets (in Colombia, for example, one out of five smart phones owned by users are by Huawei).
To me, having bought a Huawei phone last year alongside 200 million other people across the globe, this news is very worrying. I, like millions of users, use Google Play store for searching, selecting and installing mobile apps. More seriously, the Google Mail account is usually the umbrella account for a user to log in to a vast array of other applications and services hosted by Google. Like many hundreds of millions of users, I have been using Gmail since its conception. And like 1 billion active Google Play users worldwide, my everyday life and work, alongside the expanding of Google’s app services and user networks, has become increasingly dependent on Google. It’s hard to imagine life without it.
It is undeniable how powerful Google has become to people across the globe, regardless where we live geographically or which jurisdiction we live under. More worryingly, who would have anticipated how powerless the people and governments of nation states may become when facing the consequences of a mere business decision made by a private company like Google, such as on the Huawei issue? Who has rendered such power to a private American company, which is unfortunately under the Trump’s presidency today, and how?
These questions take me back to 2004, when I carried out research investigating why Microsoft windows operating system. It held an exclusively powerful position over its new challenger, the Open-source Linux, despite costing “as much as a month’s salary for an average office worker” in China, while the government-supported Linux system was nearly free. I - together with my colleagues who worked on the study - found this an interesting phenomenon, with the distinctive features of a ‘de facto’ infrastructure system, created in the digital age. It was because PC users in China had used and become familiar with the Windows system and the longer they used the system, the more time they invested in it, the more dependent on Windows they became.
It feels ironic that the powerful position of Microsoft is derived from mass contributions to it. Once it became the ‘de facto’ standard for the PC, other PC users needed to adopt Microsoft’s standard in its design and make changes when Microsoft upgrades. Because Microsoft’s operating system is a proprietary (closed) software system, using it incurs a cost, which enraged software engineer communities and triggered the ‘open source software’ movement. In this battle, Microsoft triumphed but began to shift its commercial strategy to a more collaborative approach.
Google Play is very much like Microsoft Windows in nature, but aimed at mobile users. Wisely, Google has followed a different strategy, adopting the Android Open Source system as its operating system so that everyone can study and use it freely. The conception of the Android Open Project has attracted vast numbers of app developers. In mobile technology, where Google was a latecomer, the number of apps on Google Play reached 2.6 million in 2018, and the number is still increasing. By using the banner of the Android Open Project, Google has avoided resistance and antipathy from software developers and industrial players. But in practice, although Android is an open source system helpings thousands of independent developers produce apps, Google continues to have total control of the store and can decide which companies can have access to the system.
The Google Play store is integrated with its distribution and development platforms like a highly complex living organism, and once it was born, the body of the organism began to grow in mass and complexity until the whole of society had been sucked in. All elements are interconnected - commerce and social life; work and leisure. App developers rely on the Google Play platform to reach millions and billions of users across the globe and generate payment for usage; smart phone makers need the Play store to serve its users; mobile network operators depend on mobile phone users to use their service, so on and so forth. The whole of society is contributing part of the system and at the same time is dependent on it.
For conventional infrastructural mechanisms, such as 5G mobile network, when the installation project is completed, the key for the control is handed over to the operator, BT or EE in Britain. In contrast, when the Google Play store becomes an infrastructure system, the key for control is handed by collective participatory commercial and individual users to the operator and the owner: Google.
Unlike conventional infrastructures that are highly regulated by a country’s government, today’s ‘de facto’ information infrastructures (like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) can expand beyond geographic and political boundaries and have global reach, without ownership constraints. Consumers are divided by the digital devices and technical systems which they have chosen to use. Thus, their consumer rights do not automatically fall into the protection of the residing jurisdictions.
This is why, at this point of time, Huawei phone users have nowhere to turn to; the best option is, perhaps, to sell the phone cheaply in the market like many Singaporeans did responding swiftly to the Google-Huawei news.
The Google-Huawei incident reminds us we are not only subject to the decision of a technology empire like Google. We also submit ourselves to President Trump’s rule by proxy because Google is an American company, and it has to comply with the American government’s legislation. Hundreds of millions of Huawei phone users across the world have become the victims of Trump’s strategies deployed in the US-China trade war.
