It’s bitterly amusing to see the USA and EU fussing over their discovery that the rest of the world is not going to play with their stacked deck:
A move by the United Nations to approve a Russian-sponsored and China-backed resolution that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime has alarmed rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom.
The resolution was approved on Friday by the general assembly by a vote of 79-60, with 33 abstentions.
It establishes an expert committee representing all regions of the world “to elaborate a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes”. The resolution said the committee will meet in August 2020 to agree on an outline of its activities.
The United States, European powers and rights groups fear that the language is code for legitimising crackdowns on expression, with numerous countries defining criticism of the government as “criminal”.
Meanwhile, the US, the European powers, and rights groups are busy cracking down on expression of which they do not approve. They simply don’t have a leg to stand on, and the rest of the world knows it. Do they really think that China, Russia, India, and everyone else don’t see that no one is allowed to criticize certain peoples, races, and orientations despite this supposed freedom of expression?
And furthermore, Huawei is discovering the advantage of being forced to build your own platforms:
Being cut off from the world’s most popular mobile OS and being left with its open-source version at best was a blow for Huawei – but the split between the two tech giants is a sword that is capable of cutting both ways. Just months after Google’s decision, Huawei unveiled its own Harmony mobile OS and rolled out a new flagship smartphone without any proprietary Google apps. It vowed to finalize the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) – a replacement for popular Google apps – by the end of the year.
The Chinese giant did not stop at that, and entered into negotiations with India’s top 150 app developers to convince them to publish their products on HMS, which itself could offer up to 150 ‘own apps’ to customers all over the world.
“In the future, Chinese companies might push the American one from the entire Asian market. Huawei’s indigenously developed services might soon replace Google services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Then, the US company will be in real trouble.”
I switched from Samsung to Huawei several years ago. Both their tablets and their phones are great; as for the OS, I barely noticed when the switch to Harmony took place. This is why I have no doubt that we will soon see a China-Russia-India technological alliance that, unlike the China-Russia-Iran military alliance, will be fundamentally offensive in nature.