The US wants to ban Xiaomi, OPPO and all Chinese manufacturers with Clean Network

Bad news for those who wished for a reconciliation between USA and China: the program CleanNetwork it has just been announced and is preparing to be discussed. The US government website says the Trump administration wants to protect the privacy and sensitive information of its citizens and businesses. The enemy is always the usual: the Chinese Communist Partyaccused of acting illegally against the global population. And then Huawei and ZTEin this vice are likely to end companies like Xiaomi, OPPO, China Mobile and many more.

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The USA Clean Network program aims to take out all contenders from China

The Clean Network program consists of five key points that will be adopted to protect the most sensitive telecommunications infrastructures. It all started with the 5G Clean Patch announced by secretary Mike Pompeo in the spring, with which the US government prevents unreliable companies, such as Huawei and ZTE, from being present in the systems of their telephone operators. Here are the five points of the Clean Network:

Clean Carrier

The first point relates to the aforementioned 5G Clean Path: prevent operators linked to the People's Republic of China from connecting to the US networks. They pose a threat to national security, according to the Trump administration, therefore they can no longer operate to and from the US. One consequence would be the impossibility for operators such as China Mobile to offer roaming to their users when they travel to the USA.

Clean Store

We have already dealt with the second point with the story you see TikTok at risk ban in the USA, unless acquired by Microsoft. The government wants remove apps deemed unsafe from American stores such as Play Store e App Store, as "they threaten privacy, viruses proliferate and spread by propagating and disinformation".

Clean Apps

But that's not all: the third point means that Chinese smartphone manufacturers cannot pre-install or make reliable apps available in their stores. Simply put, companies like Facebook, Instagram, Google and so on should remove their apps from the stores of Chinese companies. Huawei in the first place, with an AppGallery that is slowly growing but which would thus risk suffering a bad setback. But the domino effect could also affect realities such as Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo and so on.

Clean Cloud

The fourth point touches on the world of cloud storage, denying US companies to use the cloud services of companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. The government's will is to "prevent the most sensitive personal information of US citizens and the most valuable intellectual property of our companies, including research on COVID-19 vaccines, from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to our foreign adversaries".

Clean Cable

Finally, the fifth point concerns the management of submarine cables that connect the USA with the internet network all over the world. The Trump administration does not want them to be used for information gathering by China. It is not known in what way, but the US is working with various partners to ensure that these cables are not subject to compromise.

What will be the fate for Chinese companies?

It is fair to specify that in the Clean Network manifesto there is no explicit mention of any Chinese company in particular, with the exception of Huawei. It is not clear, therefore, if the consequences will also fall on the aforementioned Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo, to mention the main brands. Also because, unlike Huawei, Western ROMs can safely use Google services, at least for the moment. Therefore, the impossibility of loading Western apps on their respective stores would only concern China, but apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Google's various have already been absent for years.

And it is precisely here that the moral dilemma arising from the tug of war between the USA and China emerges. On the one hand, we have a Trump government that is exerting heavy pressure on the technology market, pointing to China as spying but never providing concrete evidence. Also because there are those who rightly could bring out all the data breaches committed more or less voluntarily by the whole American Facebook, not to mention the NSA / Edward Snowden case. On the other hand, China has behaved in a substantially equivalent manner, preventing its citizens from using Google, its services and all the various social networks of Western derivation.