While I strongly agree with the blog post and letter, I believe the letter would be more effective if it spent more time explaining how the proposed restrictions will most likely backfire, i.e., put the US in a less advantageous position to defend its dominance in CPU technology with regard to China.
No politician or regulator would like to be labelled as someone who favored a foreign competitor country.
"Any barrier for US persons’ participation will only slow American progress in developing and adopting this technology. It will have an effect opposite of that intended by lawmakers."
Sounds like the letter/blog post already does make this point?
It does. However, if this point were more central to the letter, it would have a greater impact on the reader. For instance, explicitly demonstrating the numerous ways in which American progress could be impeded, explaining how China and Chinese business owners could get ahead in RISC-V technology, and maybe drawing an analogy with the restrictions imposed on federal funding for stem cell research that affected the US in the global landscape [1], among other examples.
Frequently, politicians prioritize their personal agendas and interests, so it's essential to thoroughly address those aspects.
PS: I'm not a US national, so I'm only analyzing the topic rather than engaging in it.
Is Intel really supporting this? It seems like ARM is the one with the most to lose here. Intel could actually benefit from an RISC-V play with their own cores and extensions.
> What is the Administration’s plan to prevent the PRC from achieving dominance in the RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security?
Sounds to me like a call for more investment in RISC-V, not less.
Not if any significant investment in RISC-V would also benefit China to some extent. If the Chinese figure out how to manufacture high-end chips on their own (which is a bigger hurdle) and RISC-V is widespread and well supported by software providers etc. the market will inevitable be flooded with Chinese chips. With ARM/x86 you don't have that "problem".
> It's called lobbying, and the courts consider it "free speech"
No, it's called bribery. If you give a politician money it's bribery. The closest we have to this is the revolving door.
Lobbying involves paying someone to give your letter to an elected. When you call your representative, you are lobbying. When the EFF engages the Congress, they are lobbying. There is campaign contributions, which go to a campaign, not the individual, and PACs, which involve buying messaging. But conflating bribery and lobbying is simply incorrect.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but you'll still be allowed to push public commits to a public RISC-V related repo, but you'll need a special government license to resolve issues opened by anyone related to China?
I'm picturing RISC-V processors being sold in boxes that are actually small bible-like books with ornate binding, full of paper printed source code, with small hollows inside where the chips fit.
> you'll need a special government license to resolve issues opened by anyone related to China?
Yes but that's very similar to how the EUV "ban" works too. As long as you can get a license it's fine but getting the license is expected to be very hard and probably represents a big enough of a risk that you can't base your business around that. So effectively it is a ban.
The license thing does give the executive branch a good deal of leverage when negotiating with China. I think this is likely what the US is really after anyways. It's a pretty hard nosed renegotiation of the existing relationship by both sides.
"Urgent action is needed to prevent U.S. technology and technical know-how from contributing to the PRC’s utilization of this technology."
"the United States should build a robust ecosystem for open-source collaboration among the U.S. and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."
tfw lawyers don't understand what "open source" means :facepalm:
Those darn'd Chinese training a bunch of engineers, participating in a global industry, producing a product at rock-bottom prices and then not forgetting everything they had to learn to help the rest of the world make chips! Dang Them!
Remember when we were all about global free trade and supply side economics and consumer surpluses? I guess it's no fun when someone else does it to us. Sarcasm aside, I think we are now realizing that talking about supply side without considering the demand side (i.e. workers who can afford even these abundant goods) is going to be very detrimental in the long run.
Not just "very detrimental in the long run" - more like "actively fueling far-right fascists in the very short term". The working class does not care who promises them revenge, or even if that revenge is targeted at their oppressors, as long as revenge is eventually provided by someone.
I don't disagree with you about breeding fascists now. Though I wonder, in a few years after we do more Trump and things fail to get better, and then we swing back the other way and elect the ghost of Bernie Sanders (cause I really don't know anyone on the left who could impress the disaffected middle-American electorate.) What then?
I guess that's why the far right wing is trying to take over before we have to have elections again.
I'm just curious if swinging back and forth between left and right wing isn't more destructive than just right wing.
It's funny, because a similar story played out between britain and the US with machine tool technology.
The british were the first to go through the industrial revolution and had the best, most precise machine tool technology. They banned export of this technology to the USA. Well, turns out you can bootstrap precision, moving from less precise to more precise machine tools if you're careful manage your errors well.
Soon enough, the USA had caught up and then pulled ahead in machine tool technology.
End of globalisation is coming, ironically forcing countries to invest into their technology stacks like during the cold war, with plenty of 8 and 16 bit computer clones to chose from.
The concern is that the restrictions would follow the pattern of existing rules around semiconductor equipment and fabricated chips [1].
They are fairly broad and stipulate that US persons cannot transfer technology to any company on an entity list. iirc there was a clarification to the rule that also put a burden on US persons to confirm that they aren't working with a trading front or shell company for the listed entities, which makes any interaction potentially hazardous, because how are you even supposed to check for that?
Note that violations of these rules can "include up to 20 years of imprisonment and up to $1 million in fines per violation, or both" [2]. And the use of "US persons" language means that it's not just companies, it's individual developers too.
If you read the text of the rules, they restrict any kind of technology transfer to these companies. In the case of selling fabrication equipment, that's...fairly clear cut. Don't sell stuff to people on the list, and your deal was probably a few million dollars anyways so you can afford lawyers to research if you're dealing with a shell company.
But the concern is for RISC-V "technology transfer", what happens if you push to a git repository, and...someone from one of these entities pulls your commits? Are you now liable? What if you give a lecture on RISC-V, and someone from one of these entities was in attendance?
Or perhaps you're in charge of crafting an IP strategy for your SoC company. If you pick RISC-V, the ambiguous and changing rules around who you can license your products to is problematic; a client you have today could end up being banned tomorrow. Whereas if you license an ARM core, you don't have to worry about going to jail. It then becomes a no-brainer to just license the ARM core.
Basically, the concern is they will copy/paste the existing rules that are somewhat more tightly confined because they apply to atoms, but instead insert language referring to bits and ideas.
Looks like what they want is to stop Americans from collaborating on RISC-V with any PRC company:
Oct 6 (Reuters) - In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders.
At issue is RISC-V, pronounced "risk five," an open-source technology that competes with costly proprietary technology from British semiconductor and software design company Arm Holdings (O9Ty.F). RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.
Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds.
The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V.
Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select committee on China, said in a statement to Reuters that the Commerce Department needs to "require any American person or company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."
Such calls to regulate RISC-V are the latest in the U.S.-China battle over chip technology that escalated last year with sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has told China it will update this month.
"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.
McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees export-control regulations, and would pursue legislation if that does not materialize.
The bureau "is constantly reviewing the technology landscape and threat environment, and continually assessing how best to apply our export control policies to protect national security and safeguard core technologies," a Commerce Department spokesperson said in a statement.
"Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry," Rubio said in a statement to Reuters. "If we don't broaden our export controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us as the global leader in chip design."
"I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed," Warner said in a statement to Reuters.
RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that coordinates efforts among for-profit companies to develop the technology.
The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB and even the internet, which are freely available and draw on contributions from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.
I was thinking to myself, there's no way that someone's acting like it's 1988 again, and we have to embargo this from leaving the country for fear Saddam Hussein will use it to construct a 50 megaflops supercomputer with which to pre-calculate artillery firing solution tables.
Then I clicked, and it really is that dumb. Way to go Congress.
Bunny’s stance would have been reasonable if someone like Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao was in power, but Xi is different.
Not only has Xi blocked the West from accessing China’s domestic market, but Xi has essentially helped end globalism and started decoupling with his foolish wolf warrior diplomatic policy and the belligerent nine dash line. Let’s also not forget about Xi’s invasion plans for Taiwan ie we’re likely headed for war https://youtu.be/plHRRFHZ_f0
You cannot ignore those issues if you want people to take your position seriously.
Blocked or not blocked from china's market, hindering US companies from developing and becoming leaders in emerging new technologies will not help the US stay ahead.
China wants to catch up, and they will with or without US help. The only question is whether the USA will work to remain competitive by mastering new domains, or whether it will sit back on it's laurels and the technology it's already mastered.
The development of cheap and ubiquitous RISC-V processors has major implications for the economics of putting software into devices. When modern military and civilian tech relies on doing that? This is one of the areas you need to be pushing into to stay competitive.
Why do we have to work on helping China with new tech in order to remain competitive? Why should we help China develop their own chip foundries when we’re about to get into a hot kinetic war with them in the South China Sea? Again, you can’t ignore that issue if you want a strong argument.
Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. That much should be obvious to ANYONE with even a PASSING understanding of how open source works.
In their report, the US gov wants open source collaboration on RISC-V between the US and it's allies.....while also excluding china. Sorry, not fucking possible.
You can either have open colaboration where anyone can participate, and yeah, that means somebody might secretly be working for the PRC, or you have no open colaboration at all. There is NO middle ground, and any attempt to create one will simply kill the open colaboration.
Kill the open collaboration in the USA, and the USA falls behind. All the other countries in the world will continue to collaborate on RISC-V, in the EU, in china, japan, austrailia, canada, and wherever else, and none of that will translate into increased experience or capability for the US. The USA becomes a pure consumer of other people's tech, never contributing anything back for fear that it might find it's way to someone in china either directly or by way of someone else engaging in open colaboration.
Open source collaboration does not mean that mainland Chinese corporate and government entities get to hire Western consultants for money. That’s the only thing this legislation can affect if you understand how open source works so I don’t see the problem.
> All the other countries in the world will continue to collaborate on RISC-V, in the EU, in china, japan, austrailia, canada, and wherever else, and none of that will translate into increased experience or capability for the US.
Yes, and as long as mainland Chinese entities don’t get official support and consultation that is perfectly fine. You can’t stop unofficial support because open source, which is fine.
I can also guarantee that all of the countries that you listed will take the US stance, especially Japan and Australia. anyone would with any familiarity of geopolitics would know that
The PLA navy and the navies of the US and its allies such as Japan, the UK, and Australia are getting ready for combat in the South China Sea as we speak. You cannot ignore that unless you want a weak argument
There's nothing in this about hiring consultants for money. Read it again.
This is about export of technology, which you are doing whenever you post open source implementations of RISC-V technology online. The lawmakers are explicitly concerned that chinese technology companies benefit whenever a US person shares designs or code online. They are specifically, explicitly seeking that all allied countries be able to freely exchange open source stuff, but that the PRC be excluded from this open source exchange.
Here, let me quote it for you: "In response, the United States should build a robust ecosystem for open-source collaboration among the U.S. and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work."
As for whether this is achievable? It's not. In a world with global internet, "don't share the stuff you post online with china" can only be implemented as "don't share the stuff you made online." There is no other way. What they're describing is contradictory. You can't have an ecosystem of open source collaboration while ALSO preventing a specific entity from benefiting from it.
It doesn't especially matter whether other countries are on board with this, since the above even prevents US persons from being able to openly share with each other. They can enact the same policies if they want, or if the US wants them to, but it only replicates the same fundamental problem. Nothing can be shared online, on this great global internet, without also sharing it with the PRC.
This isn't even the first time that the US government has attempted something like this. They tried back in the 90's to block export of cryptographic implementations, including open source ones like GPG, to other countries by posting them on the internet. It was rendered a moot point when someone published the source code of GPG under the first amendment in a book as an act of protest.
You’re right that it’s asinine for those politicians to think they can block open source, and I failed to make my full position clear. Yes, you cannot stop open source. I agree with you there.
However, I still feel that this aggressive stance is still good overall as a starting framework for barring people and companies from providing direct, paid, specialized support for China e.g. expertise in building anything related to chip foundries, et al.
How are western companies blocked from accessing China’s domestic market? Because they are obligated to follow local laws? That’s like saying GDPR blocks American companies from operating in Europe.
This isn’t a new subject. For instance, both Google and Facebook are not allowed in China despite their past attempts to comply with mercurial and vague CCP laws.
I’m sure there are more US companies and industries that are not allowed to compete in China’s domestic market.
The GDPR is protectionist legislation for EU companies, but it doesn’t prevent US companies from doing business in the EU. It’s a terrible comparison to the CCP’s outright ban on many US companies.
Most likely because China relies on Windows? I don’t know and it’s a moot point.
All I know is that there has been a large swath of US and other Western companies that are barred from doing business in China. That’s a fact. As to why, it’s likely protectionism for local mainland companies who wouldn’t have been able to compete.
I’ve already listed one news article with specific examples. One can find more over the past decade. I don’t have the burden of proof. That’s on you since this is common knowledge in the West
Burden of proof would fall upon the person making the claim. Appealing to the cultivated state of general ignorance in the West does not absolve you of this. In fact, the article you reference supports my position since it cites “restrictive laws and regulations” as the reason these companies do not operate in China.
I didn’t make a claim, I asked how Western companies were blocked. But my evidence that Western companies are not blocked is that Apple and Microsoft operate in China. Uber operated there as well but lost to local competition. Phrenology was well known and documented also.
If China's military use is the concern here, then it is worth remembering that most weapons systems don't contain the most modern chips. CPUs 10 to 20 years old are common.
This is how the us build pure cold war style "for military use only" tech. The money wasted reinventing the wheel by defense contractors is why Americans will never have affordable healthcare or sustainable social services.
China simply doesn't do that afaik, it's civilian and military tech isn't always developed independently.
Restated: China blurs the line between military and police state tech. It's tech is frequently multi purpose.
Drones, bipedal and quad petal robots, ai/ml applications etc. Are not 10-20 years old. They are running the latest risc-v cores.
China being "more socialist" really embraced open source, multi use, drtw. It could be many reasons.
I was surprised to discover one the boards an esp32-cam (xtensa core) purchased off aliexpress was originally designed to be used in ccp military/police surveillance applications. I don't know which came first, but the esp32-cam board is so extremely well suited for that specific military application that the entire design and layout of the board made sense to me.
Espressif a Shanghai based company now is making both xtensa and risc-v chips.
> This has long been a trade-off of American innovation philosophy: we can freely exercise our First Amendment rights to share ideas, creating a vibrant intellectual exchange, even at the risk of others benefiting from reading our textbooks, journals and patents.
Sometimes, we have to re-evaluate our positions. We cannot risk supplying our enemies with stuff they can turn around and use as weapons against ourselves any more. The sooner broader society wakes up and realizes that we, as collective Western nations, are at war, the better. It may not be a "conventional" war yet, but that doesn't make it less dangerous!
"'War is a long cliff.' You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you’re just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there’s usually something you’ve missed — a choice you didn’t make — that could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your choices. There’s nothing inevitable about it.”
-Banks - who ought to be quoted more often, here and elsewhere
> We won't win by allowing the enemy to make us more like them.
I agree on that when it comes to a ton of the "anti terror" measures introduced after 9/11 because these are plain bullshit that don't do any objective good, other than annoy passengers.
But regarding high tech capability? Not at all. We have to do everything we can to impede China's progress there, at all costs - because the cost of a Chinese victory would be outright catastrophic.
Do you want the suppler of low cost, powerful RISC-V based microcontrollers to be china or the USA? Oh wait, most of the good MCUs already come out of china these days, like the ESP32 (now made with RISC-V).
If everyone is turning to chinese manufacturers for their fancy new microcontrollers, american firms stop making them or die. Now chna's the only supplier.
Next thing you know, china's conflict with taiwan goes hot and china threatens to cut off exports of chips and products using them to anyone that intervenes. Sudently the USA takes the place of russia, who are scavenging STM32s from washing machines because of their war with ukraine.
> except you aren't at war, you're trying to start one
I would rather like it for there to be no war. The problem is, that decision is not mine, it is not ours to make - China and Russia did that for us, decades ago, when they decided to wage cyber warfare on us: the Chinese mainly in industrial espionage, and Russia in terms of propaganda and "ordinary" cyber crime. Unfortunately we didn't react on this, to the contrary we kept on doing deals with them - all while the few opposition in Russia and China got more and more silent or outright sent to the gulags.
It was our inaction that allowed Xi and Putin to be where they are today, and the cost of stopping both of them got incredibly large as a result, like it tends to happen with deferring problems to the future. Or to put it figuratively, we stood there like a boxing sack while Xi and Putin punched in on us.
Side note: The next one to watch on that front is India, IMHO - Modi has been going ever more authoritarian for years, has zero problem doing deals with Russia, and India is doing absolutely nothing to rein in their scam callcenters that steal billions of dollars a year, and yet we don't even take care to re-home at least parts of the pharmaceutical industry which is causing severe havoc as Europe, especially Germany, is dealing with a massive shortage of basic medicine.
chinese industrial espionage, russian hawkish propaganda, russian crackers, and mass persecution of dissidents in both russia and china are all well-established and lamentable facts
so are government-backed espionage, government-backed hawkish propaganda, and government-backed crackers in countries such as the usa and germany
the usa also has a level of mass imprisonment that russia and china haven't seen in decades, it just isn't for political dissidence, except in a few cases like swartz and assange (who is currently imprisoned in the uk fighting extradition to the usa)
That is not evidence. It is just talking. I mean number of attacks, organization of attacks, if other countries do not do what these do... everything together, unbiased.
I would like to be able to have an idea to compare things in a fair way.
I do not mean you are wrong. I am just a person that believes what he sees. Not what others day they see. For this, real research is the best tool we have.
falsely claiming that non-war activities such as propaganda are actually war, as you are doing, is an extremely common way to try to start wars, and has been for millennia
you must think hn readers are astoundingly dumb
i mean, we are, but not that dumb
if you would like there to be no war, here are a couple of things you could try
- don't try to dictate where rulers of foreign countries get to be or to stop them from ruling their own countries
- don't exaggerate grievances like your industrial espionage nonsense
like, let's suppose there's someone today posting on weibo 'It was our inaction that allowed Biden to be where he is today, and the cost of stopping him got incredibly large as a result, like it tends to happen with deferring problems to the future.' in chinese
do you think that hypothetical post makes war more likely or less likely
> don't try to dictate where leaders of foreign countries get to be
I have zero tolerance for repressive dictatorships. Post 1945 (and partially even before that), the world agreed to at least some sort of basic human rights in peace and in war, but enforcement of that has been sorely lacking - which is what drives authoritarians in their spiral of escalation.
And we're seeing right now less than 1000km away from me sitting comfy and warm in Munich just where that leads to.
> don't exaggerate grievances like your industrial espionage nonsense
My grievances? What about the US government, who finally did wake up [1]?
It's amazing that the move of RISC-V Foundation to Switzerland (as RISC-V International) was actually called for.
Even more amazing is US lawmakers continuing to try & shoot the US in the foot.
RISC-V is now globally developed, that ship has sailed. Same for products based on it. The US can't prevent its 'proliferation'. Only reduce the degree to which US entities are part of, and profit from that.
Are US lawmakers that dumb? (ok I guess that's a rhetorical question).
I posted the numbers as a top level comment here [0], but the short version is that a lot of the signatories of this letter received (small) donations from Intel in the last election cycle.
My best guess is that Intel is actively lobbying against RISC-V using China as the boogeyman, and that these lawmakers were persuaded (sincerely or otherwise) to treat RISC-V as a threat.
I think the donations part of it isn’t even that important.
If you think about how legislation does (and can) work, lawmakers, even if they were the most gifted people on the planet, obviously are not experts on everything. As a result they have to rely on others.
But who should those others be? When it comes to something like chip manufacturing, you’re down to essentially 1 major U.S. company in this area that can provide guidance.
One could argue they could go to academics, but a single academic is good for going deep into a specific area and not so good at cross concerns.
And bringing together all those people is effort.
On the other hand you have Intel that’s got scores of researchers, marketing experts, and lobbyists who are basically giving you high quality data and information for free.
Even without money and therefore outright corruption playing any role, companies like these have an outsized influence on lawmakers for absolutely practical reasons.
Yes, while political donations in general are a concern to me, I think in this case the donations themselves are fairly innocuous. What the donations tell me is not that Intel bribed these representatives, it's that Intel identified these representatives as ones that would be particularly pliable to their legal persuasion efforts.
It's true that Intel has a lot of natural strengths for its lobbying efforts, but some representatives are going to be easier to persuade than others.
I think you'd be pressed to find a representative who didn't receive donations from Intel. Why would they gamble and guess on which ones will win next election or which ones will help them push their agenda?
RISC-V is much more of a threat to ARM microcontroller vendors (STMicro, NXP, Atmel et. al.) than it is to Intel. There is almost zero overlap in products/markets between RISC-V and x86. Even as you go up the stack, vendors like ARM International would care first (as it impacts mobile SOC licenses). Frankly even Apple probably cares more than Intel does.
Apple just switched to ARM away from Intel, and I'm sure Intel is very concerned others will follow their lead. If ARM is at risk from RISC-V, then Intel is as well, transitively.
That there is zero overlap now does not mean it will stay that way, as Apple demonstrated so well.
Yeah, but there's no product. There's no RISC-V CPU targetted at laptop or datacenter users that Intel would be worried about, but there absolutely are from ARM vendors.
So... how would hurting RISC-V, which helps ARM, be good for Intel? It's not. Pick a different boogeyman basically, Intel isn't the one here.
But by that logic Intel should be lobbying the government to outlaw every CPU architecture, or every competing product, or... every product they might conceivably want to compete with. The same logic works for every product! Or every company! It's all specious.
In point of fact, and I'll just say it again: this is dumb. Intel isn't remotely the most likely candidate here (again, my read is that on balance they'd love to see ARM competitors get some pressure on the other side). Trying to claim otherwise is just engaging in platform flamery nonsense. The logic doesn't work.
There was no competitive ARM CPU targeting laptop or datacenter users either, until Apple up and made one.
For Intel to ignore RISC-V right now would be to completely neglect the lessons of Apple Silicon. They appear to have waited until there was an actual product taking their market share before taking ARM seriously. I expect them to learn from that and not wait for a product this time.
ARM in the datacentre was somewhat of a hot topic for a while before Apple released their laptop CPUs; Amazon launched the first Gravitron to GA in 2018. Ampere launched publicly available ARM server CPUs in 2020, around the same time as Apple. Alibaba Cloud launched their instances based on their own CPU in 2021, as did Oracle (based on Ampere's CPUs).
Given the years of engineering effort involved in getting any of these projects to release, this definitely looks like an industry shift, not something driven by Apple.
Perhaps Intel's thinking here is that competition with ARM will drive innovation and cost-downs in that space, which will bleed 'up' and make their own competition's (mostly ARM) products even more competitive.
Note that the shipping RISC-V SoC currently most suited to datacentres, the SG2042, is more powerful than the first Graviton deployed to AWS in November 2018 (five years ago) -- the C910 cores in the SG2042 are similar to the Arm A72 cores in the Graviton, but the SG2042 has 64 of them vs 16 in the Graviton.
Multiple companies have M1-class RISC-V in the pipeline.
Business advice that is tantamount to "Oh, you should just make a better product" is basically bad business advice. Of course they should, everyone should. But the problem is that if they tried, it (1) costs money and (2) leverages no existing advantages.
These low-margin companies live and die on compatibility and integration. The reason you pick a STM32-whatever as your choice for your new product is generally at least partially because your existing staff know the tooling and your existing production people know the board integration requirements.
Swap that for some new RISC-V gadget and, well, you might win! Or you might find your customers walking across the street to buy someone else's gadget, because yours has no advantages.
Ergo, if you're STMicro, RISC-V is a threat in a way that "Oh, you should just use it yourself" doesn't address.
Microcontrollers are, all things considered, not that much about the ISA itself, especially when we've gotten to 32-bit controllers big enough to program in C or higher-level languages.
People aren't reading the raw assembly and juggling registers themselves anymore. But they do care about the onboard peripherals, documentation, and tooling. The STM32 ecosystem is huge because they've nailed those things.
I could see a STM32Vxxx range, same basic design but drop a RISC-V core in, and new-dev projects will adopt it if it's got the same functionality bit is a nickel cheaper.
I can 100% guarantee to you that's not the case. Existing shipping products in this world are based on proprietary toolchains, HALs like CMSIS that are ARM-only, Eclipse-based IDEs that teams refuse to move away from, build tools wrapped around custom linker scripts for one architecture that no one understands anymore, ...
This isn't a FAANG office where everyone's an expert and people change tools weekly. Commercial firmware work for "boring" devices is extremely conservative, and there's a ton of money left to be made shipping junk that's merely "compatible".
That audience is sort of immaterial to the argument.
If you have a firm that's committed to a frozen image of the platform on a specific date, they'll stick with existing products or modest riffs on it. The same premise is why we'll still see Z80 and 8051 derivatives until long past the heat death of the universe.
This is more about why a firm like STMicro doesn't need to freak out too much about RISC-V. There's no reason they 1) can't continue to sell ARM alongside RISC-V for the more change-averse audience and 2) leverage their established reputation in onboard-peripherals, toolchain, and documentation as their competitive edge.
Done right, this can be a real "commoditize your compliment" play: they can focus less effort on the boring "core CPU" functionality of their MCUs and divert it for the parts of the product they can offer a stronger case for.
> That audience is sort of immaterial to the argument.
You lost me. "That audience" is probably 80% of ST's market. If you're not talking about business as it exists then I don't know what your argument is about. It's certainly not responsive to the point I was making, which is that ST (and similar companies) is exposed to RISC-V as a business risk in a way that Intel is not.
> They will for sure should they not switch to the standard ISA.
OK, no, that's just not true. Google "adoption curve". Saying that technology X is likely to win out eventually is not the same thing as saying there's no revenue to be had selling "legacy" technology Y. Even today people still fix bugs in the occasional COBOL gadget.
And if you're one of the companies (STMicro is one) selling at least partially "legacy" technology (they'd say "mature"), then anything that accelerates motion along that curve is a threat.
Nah, they really are this uninformed for the most part (there are notable exceptions of course). Story time! I went to law school in DC. One of my classmates worked as a staffer in the office of a prominent (leadership-level) congressperson (she was from his district). She had also done an internship with the UN. This congressperson had made public statements about defunding the UN and blah blah blah. He took her out to lunch one day and asked her to explain what the UN was and how it worked in the 30 minutes they had so he could field questions he was getting about his public statements.
You don't have to fall back to that. It isn't possible to know all the issues facing national attention. Someone puts in a good/scary story about something and it is really hard to see why that story is wrong. Often the story isn't even wrong, it is just not the complete picture and the evils of what the story misses out on are even worse. There are a bit over 500 people with power in DC, they cannot possibly debate all the possible issues that come up.
China learning from US contributions to Risc-v are not a good thing. However the obvious proposed solution wouldn't stop China from learning (it might delay them a few months, but they have plenty of smart engineers who can figure this out), and so will harm the US more.
I think this discounts the genuine political opinions that many elected officials in the US government have, especially about the new cold war with China.
My trust in US lawmakers practically no longer exists. Now whenever they make a questionable decision, the first thing I try to understand is who stands to make money off of it. If lawmakers have genuine policy opinions that's wonderful, but they have a big PR problem from decades of corruption to address.
It's so beyond dumb that they think this in any way is related to national security, this has the potential very literally create some huge troubles for the US in the future...
Site is partially hugged to death. It has a copy of a letter that Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang sent
> Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
> A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate) in order to prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.
> The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would only serve to reduce American participation in an important emerging technology, while bolstering ARM’s position as an incumbent near-monopoly provider of embedded CPUs.
> When the first report came out, I hoped it was just a blip that would go away, but with the broader bi-partisan group asking for restrictions, I felt I could no longer just stand by and watch: I am an active participant in the RISC-V ecosystem. I’m also subject to US law.
> I did the one thing any American can do, which is write a letter summarizing my thoughts on the issue, and sending it to the White House, Department of Commerce, and the relevant members of Congress
As I understand it, the donation is not the price of legislation, it's the price to get your foot in the door for additional lobbying efforts later.
If a lobbyist connected to a donor requests a meeting, they get it, and if the lobbyist can then make a convincing enough case (preferably legally but sometimes otherwise) they can get action in their favor.
When you think of US politicians: think of the guy who owns the biggest used car dealership in Podunkville, Midwest.
That's your average US politician. Generally: the scummiest, griftiest jerk who happened to get lucky. Generally by inheritance as building the business takes too much energy to screw around with national politics. Not somebody smart. Not somebody moral. Think SBF but no education and knowledge whatsoever.
Bunnie wrote this well by putting the important part right up front: "The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would only serve to reduce American participation in an important emerging technology".
This is a problem the USA experienced (and was widely discussed) during the cold war. It's so discouraging to see this self-destructive approach being revived.
SiFive launched a chinese subsidiary (StarFive) in
2017/2018. And they just announced they were giving
designs for some of their high-end cores to Sophgo (a
company out of Beijing.) My guess is US administrators
want SiFive to apply for export licenses before they do
this again.
I pretty much agree w/ Bunnie on this one. I lived
through the Crypto(graphy) Wars of 90s and still have
my "Sink Clipper" poster around here somewhere. If US
companies are trying to sell products and services
based on technology they can't export, but foreign
countries can easily replicate, the only thing you're
doing is making them (US tech companies) operate at a
disadvantage.
If we were worried about foreign tech dominance, then
maybe we could do what foreign countries do:
a. Develop a national industrial policy.
b. Pay for kids to get EE degrees. (or hell, pay for
kids to get business or art degrees.)
c. Subsidize the chip manufacturing sector the same
way we subsidize farmers or petroleum marketers.
d. Force Samsung and TSMC (both foreign countries) to
form joint ventures with US firms where US
countries own at least 51% of the JV.
Claiming they can close the Pandora's Box of
semiconductor manufacturing knowledge this late in the
game makes them (US Lawmakers) look incompetent. If
they wanted to "save US chip manufacturing" they should
have done something in the 1970s when TI was building
manufacturing plants in Malaysia and Thailand.
Samsung and TSMC may be in foreign countries, but the key thing is both South Korea and Taiwan are very closely aligned with the United States for defense.
This concern is less about the chips being made here, but controlling the ability for enemy powers to get a hold of them. Consider that "bombing the TSMC facilities" has been considered a possible plan if Taiwan is invaded, because a key goal is ensuring China doesn't control that capability.
Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and scared that they beat you at the game? Get off you butt and do something productive then.
> Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and scared that they beat you at the game?
Both can be true at the same time, e.g. Europe buying gas and oil from Russia. Realpolitik is often very messy to navigate, not made easier by the fact that we have collectively decided to tie our fates to Russia (for cheap energy) and China (for cheap production) and that decision is coming back home with a vengeance.
If you are looking for traitors, start with those who thought "change by trade" in the 90s/early 00s was a good idea - and check their paychecks. At least here in Germany, we know that disgraced former Chancellor Schröder is a Russian asset (literally, he got a high-paid job for Rosneft, most likely as a thank-you for pushing through Nord Stream), unfortunately he was clever enough to never implicate himself in a criminally chargeable manner.
>"unfortunately he was clever enough to never implicate himself in a criminally chargeable manner."
This just confirms that they were not enemies. Enemies want to exterminate each other. And trading with the official enemy is a crime last time I checked. I do not think Germany or Russia wanted that. They're neither friends nor enemies, both just looking how to exploit each other.
As I understand it, the U.S. does not subsidize petroleum marketers, or at least not very much. Oil companies are generally taxed on net income after expenses and depreciation, same as all other businesses.
Plus depletion, which like depreciation reflects the value of an asset going down over time, making the company in question worth less than it would be otherwise, i.e. the book value is going down.
"Calculating the cost of U.S. subsidies for the fossil fuel industry is complex because the incentives stretch across the U.S. tax code, but estimates range from $10 to $50 billion per year."
"U.S. oil and gas subsidies include provisions ranging from incentives for domestic production, write-offs and deductions tied to foreign production and income, and approved accounting methods that can reduce the stated taxable value of assets."
"One specific U.S. tax break on domestic production, for example, called intangible drilling costs, allows producers to deduct a majority of their costs from drilling new wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel of Congress, has estimated that eliminating it could generate $13 billion for the public coffers over 10 years."
"Another, the percentage depletion tax break, which allows independent producers to recover development costs of declining oil gas and coal reserves, could generate about $12.9 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to the panel."
Whether tax deductions are subsidies or not depends on whether they are targeted at and benefit particular industries or special interests in a way that others do not qualify for.
Right now we’re having an anti-PRC moment. There are good and intelligent ways to have that moment, and there bad and stupid ways to have that moment. This is one of the latter, but Congress is a deliberative body within a free democracy so we’re going to see all of it.
Something to look out for in recent years are cultist grassroot investors who organize on Reddit and Twitter to influence politicians to do something that is favorable to their stock and harass journalists and YouTubers who report critically and harm their stock.
r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V banned in the US.
Eh. RISC-V isn't really competing with AMD64, which is high performance processors that can natively run x86 binaries, neither of which RISC-V would do any time soon. And if there were they would most likely be made by AMD, who would then make money selling them.
The loser from RISC-V is clearly ARM because it's not nearly as hard to produce a low-power processor with mid-level performance, which is the core of ARM's market but RISC-V allows the vendors to avoid paying for the ARM license. And unlike x86, most existing ARM software isn't distributed as third party binaries tied to a particular architecture and could easily be recompiled for something else.
TBD, but there is nothing magic about RISC-V that would make this possible if it wasn't already possible with ARM. Apple has even done it with ARM, but to date no one else has. And if someone else did, it wouldn't really matter to AMD if it was RISC-V or ARM.
Wonder how much of the pro-Elon nonsense I see here, on Twitter and Reddit is just stockholders who got rich off of Tesla. I like to think that there is some sophisticated automated ML system Elon has got running to find and respond to haters....but then I saw that Youtube video discussing the poor code at Tesla so I dont know what to think anymore.
It's pretty obvious what causes this for both companies. You have companies that were previously in a precarious position, which attracts interest from short sellers who think the company will fail, but instead the company makes money. Then all the people holding a short position get desperate to drive the stock price down so they can close their position without losing their shirts, so they keep attacking the company well past the point that there is no reasonable expectation they're going to go bankrupt anymore.
That makes the company's supporters intolerant of criticism because they've been conditioned to expect criticism to be in bad faith. Which continues even after the short sellers have given up or been eviscerated by margin calls.
You make a good point. I was a lurker on the "RealTesla" and "Teslamotors" subreddits during the whole 2016-2020 saga. So many nutjobs on both sides of the aisle. And more importantly, both sides were very wrong on some things and very right on other things. That was the take away I got from that era.
I wonder how much of the anti-Elon posts I see here, on Twitter and Reddit are just NPCs who have been told to hate a person and regurgitate talking points designed in a lab. I’m pretty sure the answer is 80-90%. I’m also not an Elon fanboy nor have I ever owned Tesla. It just really woke me up seeing the entire internet flip against Elon so quickly and it having been so obviously inorganic.
If you are looking for Anti-Elon content you'll find it. Others have seen the car teardowns and know that somehow his companies manage to produce excellent engineering(at least in some departments). Its possible to both hate him and like him at the same time(for different reasons).
How do you know it's ARM though? Taking low-cost potshots at China is an easy choice for some conservative politicians, there's a large number of voters/small $ donors who are easily activated by the claim to 'standing up to communism'.
The concern is that open-sourcing processor design knowledge will create a "reverse brain drain", allowing other countries (especially the boogeyman China) to catch up. It's nonsense in a globalized world.
It blows my mind that the US keeps treating China, its biggest trade partner, as an enemy. There is no way that China would ever initiate a war against the US. It feels like, if anything, this insistence on treating China as an enemy increases risk for the US.
The thing that blows my mind is that you're blaming the US for the situation. Google China's behavior in the South China Sea to get an idea of the problem. Or it using trade as retaliation against Australia, Lithuania and others. The list goes on from there.
Trade with China has always thought to be a democratising force, instead US has funded is country that is aggressively arming itself against it and becoming a threat to a civil rules based international order. Your 'no way' sounds pretty naive when the evidence points to China walking the path to exactly that. They have stated in not so many words that they will invade Taiwan, and walk right up to that line on a daily basis, and when that happens China will be at war with the US and the west generally.
The assumption is that they will initiate a real war against Taiwan at some point. The result of that assumption is to prepare by slowly phasing out trade where possible rather than waiting for it all to happen at once when they do invade.
And the result of that preparation is that both sides are less entangled with one another and thus (theoretically) more ready to be at war with one another.
Anyway, the chain of who-started-it doesn't have a first link. There is no value-free way to assess it all..
It's true, the US sold Taiwan down the river to drive a wedge between USSR and PRC, then spent decades telling ourselves that PRC would become a nice, (post-Christian) liberal democracy if they just became rich enough. That didn't happen.
Look at the latest iteration of Army doctrine. It says it’s meant to refocus us on being able to fight peer or near-peer nations. It’s very clearly targeted at China alone.
15 years ago I would have agreed with you. However with XI in power and the way he is turning the country I no longer can agree. XI isn't stupid - he won't start a war tomorrow - but he is building up both the military power needed to start a war in 10 years, and the international political climate to make that less harmful to China if he does.
Only time will tell of course, but right now I'm cautious about China as they may be willing to bite their trade partners in the future.
China would never directly initiate a war against the US; China’s long-term goals have nothing to do with militarily weakening the US, and are rather more focused on a global hegemony achieved by economically cornering emerging markets.
However, there are a number of actions China could take against countries other than the US, where the US would either feel obligated to initiate war against China in response; or where US voters might demand the US go to war against China in response.
(And Chinese military analysts are very aware of all of these, drawing big red lines around these parts of strategy-space. Though they're also always re-measuring where these lines land — American public sentiment can waver such that today's "unforgivable" action might be tomorrow's "barely tolerable" action.)
There are also a number of actions China could take against its own citizens, that could "require" the initiation of war against them according to various treaties signed by the US, or even according to "international customary law."
Re: the Genocide Convention:
> Importantly, the Convention establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, “whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals” (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.
(I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)
> (I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop them from doing this.)
They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines, nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes. A land war in Asia against a nuclear armed emerging superpower with a good percentage of the world’s population is practically suicidal.
International customary law only matter if you have the firepower to back it up.
Land war? Who said anything about a land war? This would be a two-pronged war: a war of orbital+information supremacy (probably, but we don't even know the full evolution of internal military doctrine in 2023); and an insurrectionist war.
Specifically, the goal from the Western perspective wouldn't be to "fight China" as one coherent entity, but rather specifically to erase the CCP from existence. A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.
This would be done presumably by:
1. trying to pump information and agent-provocateurs into China, to get China's own people on the same page the rest of the world is on that's making them want to go to war; to get the Chinese people to — at least partially — disavow the CCP as representing their interests. (Seems like this is already well on its way, and has been going on for about a decade now.)
2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.
3. being friendly with the Taiwanese government, and having them ready and briefed to step in when a plug-and-play APT-delivered information campaign triggers that will see them installed them back as the "rightful government of China" — without any of them having to step foot off the safety of their island.
---
A tangent about technology and doctrine:
Every war the US (and partners like Britain) has fought since WW2, every proxy war, every time they've given weapons to allies — the US has been not using its strategic arsenal for these things, in order to not show its hand to bigger enemies.
But China is the bigger enemy. No need to hide anything.
> They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch vehicles and submarines
So, okay, there's a thing you have to recognize that goes on in the world — the declassification treadmill. Technologies become public, stories become declassified, etc. at exactly the point where the government involved in their classification, no longer thinks that there's any competitive advantage in keeping the technology secret. This might be because their opponents now all also have the technology. But it's more-often the point where the government involved has moved on to bigger and better things.
We got a lot of declassification of nuclear technology and history back in the 1970s. (But going so far as to allow that history to be made into a major 2023 motion picture? Well, that's a taunt: basically making fun of your rivals for still thinking nukes pose any threat to you at all.)
The public — and not just the American public — got access to GPS in the 1980s. And to very precise GPS in the 2000s. Do you know what that means? It's a tacit statement that the US military doesn't consider GPS-guided [or BeiDou-guided] ICBMs a viable threat any more, either!
What does a threat look like? Well, it might be something both the US and China secretly have, and will both pull out and go to war with. Or it might be something only the US has. But from the US's posturing, it seems a lot like it's a thing — several things — that only the US has. A thing that China knows or at least suspects the US has, where having this thing is more than enough to entirely subdue China from taking certain aggressive foreign-policy positions.
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> nobody is going to go to war with them over their own domestic crimes
Well, no, of course that's not why anyone would actually bother. The Western goal is to pop China like a pinata and get all the candy that falls out. Not to invade/colonize, per se, but rather to interface directly with the Chinese people as a trading partner, without an insular and ethno-nationalist Chinese government setting the terms. To unplug the propaganda machine that makes Chinese tourists never bother to visit Western countries (except in insular, state-managed tour groups.)
A crime like genocide is just a defensible moral justification that everyone in the room in the UN could agree on, as a signal to get started on the project.
It's like if some awful billionaire who lives in your small town in his mansion with armed guards, one day killed his own wife, and everyone in town found out. From one perspective, it's "his family's internal business." But from another perspective, it's a defensible moral justification to everyone else in town finally forming a posse to storm his mansion, haul him out, do unspeakable things to him, and then auction off everything he owns! (Will his armed guards stop you? Maybe if he's still alive... but what if you could kill him at the very start? Maybe they'd admit they'd been waiting for you to do that for years, and they'll be glad to be off to a new job!)
> A decapitation, of a head from a body that isn't a very big fan of that head.
What's the argument behind this? Yes, there are questions about the quality of polling data you can extract from the Chinese public, but the polls that do exist seem to show broad and wholehearted support and trust in the state.
I can see why: they addressed the core 'are you better off than your father was at this phase in his life' question for the vast majority of their population.
There's a real chance this backfires: you didn't throw off the hated tyrant, you assassinated a respected symbol of progress and prestige.
Maybe China's relatively modest global ambitions come from a conscious attempt to avoid a direct replay of the Cold War. From an idealistic perspective, one obvious lesson was that you can't reliably export philosophy; Soviet satellite states and American-propped-up democracies both became money pits and fell apart. So why not stick to things like Belt and Road, which provide you economic opportunity and soft power on a budget?
>2. having very precise information about where every key member of the CCP is at all times, both optically and packet-traffic-wise. And having some petite, precision, semi-ballistic, hypersonic missiles, to send to those places. Not from submarines, mind you. Nor from planes. From "somewhere else." Somewhere that probably sounds like stupid science fiction if someone without medals on their chest says it's already feasible and has been implemented for years now.
And there's the flaw in your plan, if your orbital slaughterbot fantasy hits the wrong dead man's switch, half the world's population will be wiped out due to the fall out. There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form. Nukes work, and intercepting hypersonic vehicles at scale is still tremendously difficult.
> and intercepting hypersonic vehicles at scale is still tremendously difficult
...as far as you know. Working purely from declassified information, which is all any of us have; but also in clear awareness of the clear forty-year gap between the frontier of declassified military secrets, and what would be the current classified state of the art.
> dead man's switch
I think you missed the part about, uh, the whole other half of how current doctrine works.
Do you know why having cyber supremacy is ranked above having space supremacy?
Because, if you have a sufficiently-good APT, you can have it press buttons! Buttons in places you'll never be able to get a spy inside at the right time! Buttons that subtly break all production missiles at the factory in ways undetectable until launch! Buttons that were meant to give civilian command oversight the emergency-override capability to cancel a pending launch of an insurrectionist military!
(Or, if you don't think that's plausible: "buttons" on a commander's personal cell phone, that calls a staff member of his and deepfakes their voice to tell the staffer to physically hit an air-gapped e-stop button. Add to the theatre by having the APT cut off Milnet-equivalent services at the time, so that a personal cellphone would be the obvious workaround.)
And of course, with previous APTs, you can also steal or more likely, create and plant all the blackmail material you want — to turn previously clean-and-trustworthy "keyholders", into your catspaws, willing to not turn the key when told. (Spies could do this too, but APTs can do it at scale.)
> There's a reason every single nuclear armed state still stands in some form.
Because none of them have yet stepped out of line enough for a major power who has anything "better than nukes" to see the point in showing their hand to their own much stronger opponents who have also moved on to playing this "better than nukes" poker game. (Nobody has had to show their hand at any point in the game so far. It's just been bluffing and folding. Nobody wants to be the first.)
For example, while North Korea has nukes, it has no answer to even basic 1990s-level orbital EMINT; and no functional Navy, let alone long-dive nuclear submarines to serve as untrackable launch platforms. All of NK's nuke launch sites are known — and so could be targeted for bombardment (with plain-old non-nuclear payloads!) in advance of launch, the moment they seem to be getting ready to shoot anyone.
The only reason it hasn't happened already, is that the action of taking the nuke sites out involves cards nobody wants to lay on the table until they have to. It's a move that weakens you, strategically. Although it's something that would almost certainly happen — many times over — the moment a hot war between larger players begins, once all those cards become destined to come out regardless.
Xi invading Taiwan would directly initiate a war with the US. Xi’s illegal actions in the South China Sea is evidence that Xi is willing to cross that line rather than keeping the status quo despite running afoul of PLA leadership and many others within the CCP itself.
> The fact that RISC-V jumped to Switzerland after being funded by the US during its development makes me inclined to say screw RISC-V.
are you perhaps referring to some specific company in the RISC-V space? or are you actually saying "damn, foreign actors embraced an idea we originated, guess i've gotta flip positions and decide the idea of an open ISA is bad now"?
Let's sanction China from using Microsoft or Apple products, forcing them to turn to open source operating systems like Linux, and then let's make Linux illegal, ensuring that only government-approved, sufficiently-backdoored corporate operating systems are allowed! Any responsible, patriotic citizen should be onboard with that!
No politician or regulator would like to be labelled as someone who favored a foreign competitor country.