U.S. intelligence intervened with DOJ to push HPE-Juniper merger

Here is the archived Bloomberg article. If you want to edit this into your comment, no problem.

https://archive.ph/LlUJM

That has always been true, and yet almost every country buys both US or Chinese equipment, and a good many by both.

The Snowden leaks showed 20 years ago that cisco routers were being sent to NSA for "aftermarket" modifications before being sent to clients. It's not news.

Is there any computer or internet company that the US IC doesn't treat as their own department? Maybe some very small and insignificant ones.

I knew there must be a good reason for this push.

I believe that (1) happened prior to the acquisition of netscreen by Juniper. (so, if your comment is meant to suggest something about the integrity of the management, etc. it may not be as significant as you're suggesting).

Rule #1.a.: Some part of your network is already compromised. You just don't know which part. Design everything with this in mind.

Probably not.

Look at Juniper specifically. In 2021, their revenue roughly broke down as 40% service provider, 35% enterprise campuses, 25% cloud. In 2025, that had shifted to 45% enterprise campuses, 30% service provider, and 25% cloud. That shift is mostly reflected by how much money they pumped into Mist, and how successful that was.

Scrappy little upstarts have a _really_ hard time selling networking equipment to service providers and enterprises, who require tons of arcane features that take a long time to build and validate. They also operate very much on reputation, and rely on training pipelines outside of their own organizations (i.e., certifications). On the SP side (and the more modern enterprise side) there's also the significant issue of integration with other IT systems. At that scale, people aren't just command line jockeys that log into a router to provision something - Comcast can't operate like that, they need well defined API integrations with their provisioning system.

It is interesting and noteworthy that HPE's interest in Juniper is mostly due to the success of Mist, which _was_ a scrappy little upstart that got purchased by Juniper in 2019 (???). Mist (as a product line) only got successful once it was backed by Juniper, a known player. They had a much, much harder time selling to big accounts before that.

However, it's not a random scrappy little upstart, it got started by very senior people from Cisco that couldn't get their vision executed at Cisco. Specifically, Bob Friday (who co-founded Airespace in 2001, which was purchased by Cisco and directly led to Cisco wireless controllers), and Sujay Hajela, who was an SVP responsible for enterprise and wireless at Cisco, having led the Meraki purchase. More than a decade later, Meraki - another upstart, I guess - still isn't aimed at much other than SMB.

That Mist made it as an newcomer is the exception to the rule and entirely due to those very specific people and their very specific contacts. I wouldn't be surprised if at all if Mist had initially been fully intended to be a spin-out from Cisco with the express purpose of folding them back in a decade later if they were successful enough, and it just so happened that they got snagged up by Juniper first.

“We need bigger companies so smaller ones have a chance” is a weird take.

Sure, and then the clunky monoliths buy the scrappy little disruptors and take them apart.

(Source: worked for a scrappy little disruptor that was bought out and cannibalized)

Maybe, but what’s to stop “scrappy upstart” from becoming the next HPE?

We need companies owned by the people that built the company. Not by the C-level executives that are appointed by a board of billionaire lackeys, bankers, trust fund kiddies who are hellbent on flipping a profit at all costs.

Also of course more regulation, and higher corporate tax. Get rid of the stock manipulation tactic known as stock buybacks that only encourage short term growth/pump in price of stock.

Ericsson is a Swedish company with headquarters in Stockholm. They (and everybody else) have lost and continue to lose market share to Huawei short of these types of overt government interventions/market interventions.

Because it’s really about putting one’s thumb on the scale of market participation, not actually about China at all.

This is why Boeing can make as many bad planes as they want. They’re part of the US government and they will always “win” the game we pretend they play against other vendors.

Same goes for Lockheed, Raytheon, AT&T, Microsoft, HP, and Dell. Delta. Probably also Ford and GM.

AWS is trying to get on this list (see the whole JEDI thing that was gift-wrapped for them until Oracle got mad and noisy about the corruption) and almost certainly will eventually if they haven’t already.

Circumstances suggest that Apple (because iPhone use aiding in global surveillance due to iMessage), Google (because Gmail and search), and Meta (because WhatsApp) are similarly favored (although not totally integrated like Microsoft and Boeing and AT&T) over any competitors, due to their massive and often-overlooked strategic geopolitical importance, both domestic and abroad. There are unimaginably big perks to playing ball with the state, just ask Palantir.

Others I would assume get special treatment: Comcast, Level 3, Verizon. Probably also Visa.

Good luck trying to compete with any of them in the market on merit when the people who own and control the market don’t want their buddies or surveillance partners to lose.

It’s mostly about the transfer of MANY billions of dollars of public tax money to the friends and associates of those who direct that money. China is just a convenient excuse. We all know the US as a unit is totally incapable of catching up to Chinese technology output or development pace (save for isolated pockets like Apple and SpaceX who thrive despite being in the US, not because of it).

Most of the functions of the state are around allocation of ostensibly-public money, and little else, I find.

I was surprised to learn that he also wrote a children's book

https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-King-Kash-Patel/dp/19555...