Germany to Ban Huawei from Future 6G Network in Sovereignty Push
74 comments
·November 14, 2025kwanbix
deepsun
Nice how you put them all on one row.
How Isaac Asimov said in "Relativity of wrong":
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together".
peterlk
I’m working my way through “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, and the main thesis is that everyone is preparing for demographic collapse. Global populations are declining almost everywhere, and this breaks the current global order. For example, what does the Chinese economy look like when all the people subject to the one child policy retire? What are the knock on effects of labor becoming more expensive almost everywhere? Can immigration solve this problem? What about the cultural friction of mass immigration? What happens to the places that everyone emigrates from?
The book basically argues that a significant amount of the world is headed for destabilization, and a destabilized world involves a lot less trust.
Side note: personally, I find the writing style and general tone to be hyperbolic, but some of the analysis is interesting.
tippa123
[dead]
PeterStuer
They are not wrong, but will they also ban Cisco in their "Sovereignty Push"?
anonporridge
Why should they?
The United States honors international IP law and doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries like China does.
input_sh
> The United States honors international IP law
May I introduce you to a somewhat recent concept people like to call AI.
thewebguyd
Cisco complied with the NSA PRISM program (Snowden leaks) and were putting hardware backdoors in their hardware on request from the NSA, for hardware that was destined for overseas.
Sounds pretty untrustworthy to me.
tharne
> Why should they?
Because bashing all things American while ignoring the threat posed by China is part of Europe's cultural DNA.
fleischhauf
laughs in unhinged head of state that imposes arbitrary tarrifs on half of the world and mistakes dementia test for IQ test, says it's difficult
anonporridge
Ditto Russia.
steve1977
Mentioning Cisco the context of honoring IP is a bit ironic: http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html
kataklasm
Ah yes, the country that has perfected industrial espionage... https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
coliveira
> doesn't cheat its way into threatening domestic production of other countries
Can you still say this with a straight face with everything that is coming from Washington?
tchalla
> “We’ll discuss with industry what we can do, not only to make ourselves independent from China, but also for example independent from the USA, independent from the big tech companies,” Merz said.
Good to know it's not just China.
> Merz ruled out fully decoupling from China, which is Germany’s second-biggest trading partner. “We can’t do that,” he said. “China can’t do that, but we can do it even less.”
And even better to know that the move is practical and understands who has the upper hand.
V__
At the same time they are exploring the use of Palantir and want to use more of Microsofts 365 cloud.
This is all just talk. Either there are very real security concerns or someone lobbied heavily.
coliveira
> Good to know it's not just China.
If you believe this I have a bridge to sell you. They're using this to hide the real reason for the move, which is to do Washington's bid, just like a good colony does.
tchalla
I won't be surprised if they do the Washington's bid. A few years ago, they wouldn't even consider it. By the time we all die, may be they will.
juliusceasar
Better late than never.
China has so many anti-Foreigner laws for doing business in China.
West has made China rich and powerful in exchange for cheap labour.
NoiseBert69
I'd more say: they made clear rules if you want to play business in China.
Europe never set any boundaries. Honestly our fault.
ta12653421
Well, as European, i have to clearly state - unfortunately - this is only because of what happened in the 20th century: WWII. This "event" changed somehow the psychology, not allowing the EU to "stand up straight with our shoulders back".
Unfortunately. With around 500m customers, we could be powerful. But we arent: Stumbling upon our own feeds.
earthnail
The countries that comprise the EU had been among the biggest warmongers for centuries. The EU is the most successful peace project the continent has ever seen. And the reason for that is that every country refrained from trying to be a superpower on the continent.
The European mentality has real, tangible upsides for its continent. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well in a larger world where other actors don’t share the same experience and values.
Just wanted to put that into perspective.
tharne
The only rule the Chinese play by is, "It's only immoral if you get caught".
coliveira
I thought this law was invented by American business.
juliusceasar
Now EU is making clear rules against China. EU should apply exactly the same laws against Chinese like Chinese do against foreigners.
China shouldn't complain, especially don't bitch about racism.
lazyeye
Our leaders in the West have been very naive. Also the Chinese "elite capture" program has been very effective.
croes
You mean old we-don’t-care-bout-human-and-environmental-rights trick?
Let’s face it, nobody would care if China just would be a subordinate receiver of orders.
As soon they became a competitor there was a problem
anonporridge
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
croes
> Letting them cheat the globalist system
They didn’t cheat, we did.
China didn’t force the west to make them their workbench.
China isn’t the first authoritarian country the western industry loved as workforce.
No human wasn’t a negative, it was one of the main selling points.
null
coliveira
So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.
anonporridge
No, it's just game theory.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
jquery
No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.
Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.
ta12653421
this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.
Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".
China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.
RobotToaster
And use American Cisco equipment with definitely no NSA backdoors instead?
ojl
I guess they will use Ericsson and Nokia equipment instead.
daneel_w
It's an east vs west thing.
RcouF1uZ4gsC
That is called being on the other side of an airtight hatch (h/t Raymond Chen)
The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German.
Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.
personomas
[dead]
Incipient
I don't get why Huawei gets specific hate? Shouldn't this equally apply to all Chinese vendors? I wouldn't expect any are less susceptible to government control?
esbranson
Huawei simply accumulated a much more court-defensible paper trail—dominant presence, documented code issues, clearer evidence of state leverage, and heavier export-control exposure.
zweifuss
ZTE is also under scrutiny. The reason it's only Huawei and ZTE is that other Chinese providers are so insignificant that the telecoms will likely be able to replace the infrastructure themselves with spares or consolidation. However, in an emergency, the government would have to foot the bill for replacing Huawei/ZTE systems quickly, as the telecoms couldn't finance this and lack of capacity would mean very high prices.
9cb14c1ec0
Is 6G even a thing? From either a bandwidth demand perspective or a financial perspective? Every US wireless service just about bankrupted themselves rolling out 5G.
londons_explore
Bandwidth demand is very much there...
My connection is 1.5 Gbits at 3am, but at peak time (7pm) I'm lucky to get 10 Mbits.
My network needs more capacity, and if 6G can offer it cheaper than building 5x more 5G masts, that's the route they'll have to take.
9cb14c1ec0
I guess you must live in a much more heavily populated environment than I do. For myself, I'm still trying to figure out remote 5G IOT connectivity that doesn't require $1k in hardware. Non-consumer-grade 5G hardware is incredibly expensive still, which is why we are still deploying new 4G stuff.
jiehong
Which company will design and make 6G telco hardware in Germany?
I guess it will be 3/4/5G for a while, until they can someday cover the country just barely, and then 6G a decade and half later than everyone else (or is it by giving up sovereignty by buying US stuff instead?)
Sorry for being hopeless, but Germany has been very good at proving its inability to fix telco issues (or its train issues…).
filloooo
This is retaliation for China recently phasing out European gears, which should be expected after Europe had banned Chinese gears in effect.
China for years has been allocating a share of the market to European gears, considering their domestic offerings and much cheaper, this was, basically a reciprocal gesture, it's not needed now.
sabjut
Both Nokia (Finland) and Ericsson (Sweden) are great european alternatives. There is no need to reinvent the wheel in every EU country.
PeterStuer
Both Nokia and Ericsson have substantial Blackrock and Vanguard investment.
nemomarx
blackrock and vanguard do index funds, yeah? They have substantial investments in everything on the market that's doing well enough to get on indexes. I don't see how you can avoid that?
null
fodmap
On the other hand Spain is using Huawei servers for almost all of their sensitive data. I wonder how the UE, and NATO, will react to that, because they're using Huawei for Social Security data, wiretapping data (SITEL), or even Intelligence Services data.
https://therecord.media/spain-awards-contracts-huawei-intell...
coliveira
And Spain will have 6G and all the niceties of telecom technology, while Germany will be stuck forever on 5G.
daneel_w
Good. Don't forget their incredibly affordable and attractive smartphones and the fact that they have almost completely captured the market for cellular transceiver chips used in USB mobile modems, both of which are excellent products for espionage and weaponization just like their cellular network equipment.
null
Nice, in 2025, the world is a place where China can not be trusted, Russia can not be trusted, USA can not be trusted, Europe can not be trusted, etc.
We are very far from the "imagine all the people, living live in peace". I wonder why that is...