China said it “deplores and firmly opposes” Monday's action of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security adding 28 Chinese entities to its trade blacklist for alleged involvement in human rights violations of China’s Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang province. The human-rights allegations are “merely made-up pretexts” for U.S. interference in China’s “internal affairs,” said a Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Tuesday. The U.S. criticism “is nothing more than fact-distorting gibberish,” he said. The 28 entities include eight China-based technology and science companies, among them Hikvision, a major supplier of video surveillance products. Hikvision opposes the BIS decision as one that "will hamper efforts by global companies to improve human rights" worldwide, emailed a company spokesperson Tuesday. Hikvision "respects human rights," she said. It has been "engaging" with Trump administration officials over the past year "to clarify misunderstandings about the company and address their concerns," she said. The action is effective Wednesday when it's to be published in the Federal Register, and it involves license requirements.

The U.S. government lacks technical knowledge and a single, leading voice in its approach to technology competition with China, the Brookings Institution was told. U.S. industries are concerned technology policies, such as export controls, are being made without full understanding of impact, said Adam Segal, Council on Foreign Relations emerging technologies chair. “We have to have a much better sense of the technologies involved and how they're actually deployed across a range of sectors," he told a Friday panel. Artificial intelligence isn't "going to look the same as quantum, which is not going to look the same as semiconductors, even though we’re all clumping them together as emerging technologies,” he added. The Commerce Department is working on tech export control regulations (see 1907110044). U.S. industries say there doesn’t seem to be a single voice for the U.S. on technology involving China, Segal said. “There are many voices, often competing, and not explicitly being driven from executive [branch] agencies." Abraham Newman, director of Georgetown University's Mortara Center for International Studies, doesn't believe the U.S. “has a clear strategy of what it’s pursuing vis-a-vis China in the technology sphere.” He wants the U.S. approach coordinated with trading partners: “I don’t have the sense that the current government is pursuing that.” The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy didn't comment.

Prices for wireless service emerged as a major issue in Canada’s Oct. 21 federal election, a “cautionary tale” for the U.S., blogged Bronwyn Howell, American Enterprise Institute adjunct scholar, Monday. “The Liberal Party of Canada will, if successful at the ballot-box, intervene directly (via a method not yet disclosed) to set mobile telephony prices and mandate the sale of wholesale elements enabling mobile virtual network operators to resell services provided by existing network operators,” Howell said: The New Democratic Party pledged to impose price caps on wireless and require all carriers offer basic and unlimited data plans. “The politicization of mobile connection price flies in the face of conventional wisdom (if not even an article of faith) holding from at least the early 1990s that the long-term interests of telecommunications consumers are best served by political interests staying as far away as possible from day-to-day industry activities,” Howell said.

Facebook should expand end-to-end encryption across its messaging services, despite pushback from Attorney General William Barr and colleagues in Australia and the UK (see 1910030058), more than 50 tech and privacy groups wrote the platform Thursday. Access Now, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Engine, Free Press, Internet Society, New America’s Open Technology Institute and TechFreedom signed. “Each day that platforms do not support strong end-to-end security is another day that this data can be breached, mishandled, or otherwise obtained by powerful entities or rogue actors to exploit it,” they wrote. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation separately asked DOJ not to undermine encryption. The department “is clearly attempting to reboot its failed arguments on encryption by reframing the debate as one needed to protect children,” Vice President Daniel Castro wrote, citing better alternatives like “tracking meta-data about user behavior, infiltrating networks of bad actors, and screening images before they are uploaded.” The department didn’t comment Friday.

Facebook should forgo plans to deploy end-to-end encryption across its messaging services unless it can ensure user safety isn’t compromised and includes lawful police access to content, Attorney General William Barr reportedly plans to write the company with officials from the U.K. and Australia. Barr prepared the draft letter to Facebook with U.K. Secretary of State for the Home Department Priti Patel, Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton and acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan. The draft cites Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s March 6 post acknowledging “real safety concerns to address before we can implement end-to-end encryption across all our messaging services.” The government officials noted Zuckerberg said the company has a “responsibility to work with law enforcement and to help prevent” child sexual exploitation, terrorism and extortion. The company and department didn’t comment.

Of 15 categories of Chinese-sourced Mac Pro components Apple sought exclusions from 25 percent Section 301 List 3 tariffs in July (see 1907260027), the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative granted 10, agency records show. Of the five denials, USTR rejected all because Apple “failed to show that the imposition of additional duties on the particular product would cause severe economic harm to you or other U.S. interests,” said Sept. 23 notices posted Monday and searchable in the public docket. The denials were for Mac Pro CPU heat sinks, BIOS printed circuit boards, AC power cables, caster wheel assemblies and data cables, said the docket. Waivers were granted on the 10 other requests in mid-September. Apple didn’t comment.

Liberty Global's Virgin Media launched 1 Gbps in the U.K., after its Telenet launched similar speeds earlier this month in parts of Belgium, and UPC Switzerland doing likewise across its footprint, it said Monday. Liberty Global did 15 "GigaCity" deployments in Slovakia and Poland earlier this year, it said. It said it will do more GigaCity launches now through 2020.

Revenue declined 23 percent in Micron Technology’s fiscal 2019 ended Aug. 29, but senior executives on a fiscal Q4 call Thursday wouldn’t break out how much of the decrease was attributable to the disruption in shipments to Huawei. Revenue in Q4 was down 42 percent from a year earlier, but up 2 percent sequentially, exceeding Micron’s previous guidance on better-than-expected demand in the quarter, said the company. “In recent months, we have seen increased demand from customers headquartered in mainland China,” said CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. Some customers “could be making strategic decisions to build higher levels of inventory in the face of increased trade tensions between the U.S. and China,” he said. The components Micron sells have heavy exposure in the first three rounds of Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods. President Donald Trump announced in August he would hike those tariffs in October (see 1908230006). Micron, “with continued mitigation,” was able to limit the tariffs’ impact on Q4's consolidated gross margin to fewer than 20 basis points, said Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner. Micron resumed shipping “some products” to Huawei in Q3 that were “not subject” to the Trump administration’s export restrictions, said Mehrotra. Sales to Huawei in Q4 declined sequentially and “were down meaningfully from the levels we anticipated” before the Commerce Department put Huawei on the entity list, he said. Micron applied to Commerce for licenses “that would allow us to ship additional products, but there have been no decisions on licenses to date,” he said. “If the entity list restrictions against Huawei continue and we are unable to get licenses, we could see a worsening decline in our sales to Huawei over the coming quarters.” The stock plunged 11 percent Friday to $43.21.

DOJ and European Commission officials began formal negotiations Wednesday on an E.U.-U.S. agreement to “facilitate access to electronic evidence in criminal investigations,” the department announced Thursday. The sides will review progress at the E.U.-U.S. Justice and Home Affairs Ministerial in December. “This type of agreement can enhance public safety and national security by providing an improved and more rapid ability to identify and respond to criminal threats on both sides of the Atlantic,” Attorney General William Barr said, citing assurances to respect the rule of law, privacy and civil liberties. Negotiations “will strengthen our security, while protecting the data privacy and procedural safeguards of our citizens,” said European Commissioner for Justice Vera Jourova.

Rationales for opposing the President Donald Trump’s plan to increase Section 301 duties on Chinese goods to 30 percent “have only strengthened with the passage of time since the imposition of the original tariffs on Lists 1, 2, and 3,” commented CTA in docket USTR-2019-0015. Since July 2018, “these tariffs have cost the consumer technology industry and its consumers -- not China -- more than $10 billion,” it said. That includes more than $1 billion in tariff payments “on 5G-related products, it said. For Q4, the industry “expects to pay an additional $7 billion to account for tariffs on new products,” said CTA. Tariffs create “a negative chain reaction” for the consumer tech industry, commented the Information Technology Industry Council. The administration claimed it acted “to avoid placing tariffs on consumer products” when it imposed the first three rounds of 25 percent duties, but “there is simply no way to protect consumers from tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods,” said ITI. Hiking the duty rates to 30 percent “would only cause additional harm to U.S. consumers, cost U.S. jobs, and undermine U.S. technology companies in the fight for global leadership,” said ITI. “The proposed increase of tariffs on products from Lists 1-3 specifically affects” a wide variety of consumer products, including smart appliances and virtual-reality headsets, it said. Raising tariffs “will have broad implications, as all telecommunications equipment relies on gateways, modems, optical transceivers and routers,” it said.