In 2019, when Donald Trump placed telecom giant Huawei on the corporate blacklist and closed its access to the American market, it was much more than suspicion of espionage that motivated this decision, it was the dominance of the market for the newest mobile telecommunications technology, 5G. Because if European manufacturers have dominated 3G and Americans 4G, China has imposed itself on the global 5G market. Certainly, Beijing invested heavily in research and carried out the testing and validation of technologies very early on. But it is also the presence of Chinese actors within international standardization bodies that weighed.
In the toolbox of industrial sovereignty, standards and regulations play an essential role, because they give a certain advantage to the country which imposes them, an advantage that is both economic and political, providing it with wide access to the market and sometimes a control of uses, or even, in the case of digital technology, control of data. Regulations established by a country or an international organization and imposed on the whole world are an effective means of protecting the industries, jobs and innovations of that country or organization. Thus, Europe has managed to impose the General Data Protection Regulation.
But that’s also what the Americans do, for example with the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), a regulation that controls the sale and export of any weapon or weapon system – whether it or it contains even a component or a piece of software listed in the ITAR – and which applies extraterritorially… “ITAR contaminates everythingnotes Marie de Saint Salvy, deputy general manager of CS Group. For example, it will require authorization to sell Patroller tactical drones, developed by Safran, because they contain “ITARized” software.…” Or how to control the industrial activity of its competitors…