Malaysia vs Australia’s 5G strategy: what makes more sense?
During my trip to Malaysia, I noticed a Huawei store—something that’s become rare in Australia. While Huawei phones aren’t banned, they’re hard to find due to the lack of Google services and Australia’s reliance on Google them.
But it got me thinking: Australia has excluded Huawei from its 5G infrastructure, whereas Malaysia has taken a different approach by considering Huawei’s involvement in its 5G rollout. How do you view these differing tech strategies?
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It’s not a tech strategy, its a national security strategy for Australia. Australia is a member of the ‘five eyes intelligence alliance’, China has been identified as a significant competitive/adversarial threat to that intelligence alliance. Something the Chinese probably should be quite proud of, in a funny sort of way. Australia’s decisions on tech strategies is wrapped up in its national security and intelligence needs.
A reason, not a very good one, but a reason why Britain was maybe more open to Chinese tech is because their agencies have more bandwidth to deal with possible issues that may arise, and maybe the threat level of possible intrusion from Britains perspective was, at the time, lower.
Malaysia has a different, and closer relationship in just about all senses to China. They also don’t have as close an intelligence relationship with the US as Australia. Culturally there is a significant part of the Malaysian populace who would claim some Chinese ethnicity. They are physically closer, and in a region who has been influenced by a dominant China for hundreds of years. Their relative openness should be expected.
I know nothing about Malaysia’s tech strategy, but i think whatever it is, you could call their decisions more based on the possibilities of the tech itself, and their associated costs, than Australia’s. Which is fine, different aims from different needs.