Huawei’s recently launched trifold smartphone is another plank in the growing scaffold of what I call an emerging Digital Westphalia — a systemic alternative to the historically dominant model of American technology operating in effect as a global technology.
It’s not because the Huawei phone showcases a range of innovations in design, material sciences or form factors. It’s because, once again, it places the spotlight on an expanding ecosystem and design ethos anchored by an independent technical operating system, HarmonyOS, and what this signals as countries around the world seek to maximize their data sovereignty and independence.
For the past 30 years, much of the world’s technological architecture — whether it’s hardware or software, including the all-pervasive operating systems — has been dominated by big American technology companies, which have led the world in the development of information and communication technologies, equipment and software applications. Big U.S. tech companies are synonymous with the notion of a “neutral" global technology — ostensibly providing a global public good.
Hardware, software and technical standards have largely been dominated by American companies. Similarly, commercial rights, secured by IP protections backed by an extensive array of patents, have ensured the Americans a rent-seeking advantage in an environment Frederic Durand and Yanis Varoufakis have separately called techno-feudalism. It enabled these companies to garner above-average profits and gave them, along with U.S. government regulators, the ability to exercise an outsized influence over an increasingly digitized globe. This is despite the fact that in recent years U.S. antitrust regulators have also grown concerned about the quasi-monopoly position of U.S. tech majors, with lawsuits initiated against Google and Facebook.
In their recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” U.S. researchers Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman document the history of how the U.S. security state progressively transformed the global networks of fiber-optic cables, routers, switches and data centers into tools of domination. Amazon estimates that around 70 percent of global data traffic goes through data centers concentrated in Northern Virginia. SWIFT— the global bank-to-bank platform — operates a data center in northern Virginia.
After 9/11, as the U.S. ramped up its global “war on terror,” it’s intelligence agencies and other government departments increasingly exploited this reality — at first to gather intelligence on the affairs and dealings of others around the world but in time to intervene in the transnational payment system to weaponize the U.S. dollar-based international finance network. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. Treasury demanded access to SWIFT’s data. Even though similar requests were previously refused, SWIFT eventually relented. The U.S. gained access to a treasure trove of real-time data on global financial transactions.
Access to data was one thing, but it wasn’t long before the U.S. took the next step — responding to suspicions that Iran was using SWIFT to finance its nuclear program. Although similar requests had been refused in the past, SWIFT gave in this time, and the U.S. gained an unprecedented real-time look into global financial transactions. American officials pushed for Iranian banks to be cut off from the global financial network, and SWIFT yielded to pressure once more.
The rest, as they say, is history. The weaponizing of SWIFT has now extended to the confiscation of the U.S. dollar reserves of the Venezuelan and Afghan governments and the sanctioning of assorted entities and countries such as North Korea, Sudan, Belarus and Myanmar — rendering them unable to facilitate cross-border transactions. Russia is the most recent case.
The risk of digital censorship and malfeasance by the U.S. has grown globally and even within the United States itself. As Anne Toomey McKenna has documented, the personal information of U.S. citizens has been sold by commercial data brokers to numerous government agencies over the years, including the FBI, the Department of Defense and the NSA. Commercial and state security interests under techno-feudalism have long coincided. The U.S. government and American bigtech have a shared interest in maintaining their hegemony. The public dispute between the U.S. and China over 5G network technologies — involving the sanctioning of the world’s leader in 5G technologies, Huawei — is perhaps the most prominent example of this protectionist mindset. The DoD’s own defense innovation board even publicly acknowledged in 2019 that the U.S. had already lost first-mover opportunities in both standards and technologies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It recommended that the state rely on attacks like export controls and aggressive intellectual property protections to slow the expansion of China’s telecommunications ecosystem. The Biden administration has followed through on these recommendations.
Unsurprisingly, in the face of censorship and sanctions risks, countries around the globe are seeking ways to mitigate such risks and enhance their own capabilities to act autonomously. For this to happen, digital systems need to be rebuilt, with national sovereignty as a cornerstone of the entire architecture.
China is one of a handful of countries that is effectively digitally sovereign. This capacity is being strengthened through the work of companies like Huawei to develop alternative ecosystems of hardware, software and standards that are beyond the reach of American authorities. These capabilities can be adapted and adopted by other countries, enabling a rapid immunization against digital capture.
What Huawei and other Chinese companies are enabling is an example of Digital Westphalia — a concept that emphasizes data sovereignty while enabling cross-border interoperability. It creates the possibility that open-source systems can limit the power of digital corporate rentiers. Digital Westphalia reasserts the primacy of nation-states in the governance and operation of information systems and associated technology while also insisting on protocols that make possible cross-national interoperability in a world lacking trust.
Digital Westphalia has at least five main features:
• Digital sovereignty — Countries determine their own applicable data governance regimes, with a focus on the creation of digital ecosystems that are located and governed within specific national boundaries. The days of unregulated data flows are coming to an end. That won’t help the American surveillance state, which has successfully weaponized the global digital networks to date.
• Open Source — Ecosystems built not on proprietary software but using open-source platforms, enabling rapid scaling and interoperability and with applications developed on top of such platforms to suit the needs of nations and their requirements. While certain open-source technologies, such as Linux Kernel, have long underpinned digitalization, others have lagged behind proprietary systems in many domains in terms of adoption and development speed. This situation may well be coming to an end. Many companies, particularly those from China, actively embrace the possibilities and benefits of open-source technologies and platforms. Huawei and Intel were the top two contributors to Linux Kernel 5.10, the core of the Linux open-source operating system, when it was released in December 2020. Apple Intel, Google, and Nvidia recently joined Baidu and Alibaba in backing the open-source chip architecture RISC-V.
• Collective truths — Instead of systems of truth tribes, which fragment societies, Digital Westphalia enables common truths to be sustained as a basis of social cohesion. This dimension is intimately linked to digital sovereignty.
• Distributed ledgers — To address the absence of trust, distributed ledgers hold stakeholders collectively responsible for data integrity and no single actor can meddle with the information base. In an environment featuring a chronic lack of trust, creating conditions of trust is an increasingly fraught process. The practical alternative is to create institutions that can enable functional communications and transactions to be made in an environment of zero trust.
• Data ecologies — These are public goods designed and governed to make rent-seeking interests subordinate to the public interest on a national and global scale.
Huawei’s trifold launch caught the attention of the world for its innovative features. More important, however, is the Digital Westphalia to which it points and the challenge this poses to American authority over the flows of information around the world.
