The UK lets in Huawei — and the US is not about it

Keeping Huawei away... might be harder than the US initially thought. The UK gov just gave Chinese tech giant Huawei the greenlight to build part of its next-gen 5G network, defying warnings from the Trump admin. And 5G is the critical wireless tech infrastructure for the next wave of the internet.

• The US is worried that Huawei will act as a Chinese gov spy on American/Euro communications (sounds familiar). The US & UK govs share sensitive intelligence info with each other on the reg, so if China can tap the UK's calls, it kinda taps into the US.
• Doesn't help much that Huawei itself couldn't really explain who owns it in the course of a 90-minute speech. Huawei denies it would let China's government use its network for spying... but defying orders from the Chinese government doesn't really happen.
• Yesterday, the UK decided Huawei would build "noncritical" parts of its 5G network — it concluded that the security risks were manageable, and not using Huawei would cost a ton of money (bad news for the other 2 5G providers, Ericsson and Nokia).

There's a lot going on... for the UK right now. Brexit is (finally) happening on Jan 31, so the UK is looking to keep its trade relations strong. The US is a key component of that, but so is not antagonizing China.