Dividing the Stack Into Thirds

Five years ago at what turned out to be only the beginning of the still ongoing trade war between the United States and China, I sat down and wrote about how our technology stack was fracturing, about how the tools and services we in the West are using were diverging from what we're seeing used in China. Chief amongst those indicators was the sudden interest, and the rapid adoption of, RISC-V inside China.

However, just as the trade war has dragged on, so too has the split between our technology stacks continued — with the separation between China and the West only being accelerated by the pandemic — and a new leading indicator of this divergence is the design of the Huawei tri-fold phone.

Designed in China for the domestic market, the new Huawei tri-fold phone doesn't have to appeal to western consumers, who will mostly never even have the opportunity to hold one, let alone have an opportunity to buy one.

However, I think the design of the phone speaks not just to market targeting, but to a divergence in our underlying design languages. It speaks to how the designers themselves think about how physical things should look and feel, and that's differently than designers here in the West. Casting back, we've even seen this sort of design divergence happen before, with the Soviet Union.

Isolated from the West, designers in the Soviet Union had a distinctive style, it was visible in their propaganda, but also in the physical things that were built behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The Soyuz spacecraft and other space hardware whose origin dates from the Soviet space programme has a very distinctive look compared to western designs from the period. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Western design influence dominated post-Soviet Russia diluting this unique sense of design. Proposed replacements for Soyuz, the post-Soviet post-Cold War CSTS and Orel capsules, have far more similarities to western hardware than their Soviet fore-bearers.

I believe the design movements we see in China, away from the common global design language, indicate that product designers in China are feeling increasingly isolated from mainstream western markets.

But if the shortages, and the supply chain problems, we saw during the pandemic — and the disaster of the British exit from the EU — have taught us anything, they should have taught us that we live in a global economy. Isolating your economy from your trading partners, especially if you're China, a country that has a vital roll in world trade, isn't going to go well for either side.

No matter what you might have be told, tariffs are a regressive tax. They're paid by the end user, the person buying the imported thing, rather than the foreign companies they purportedly target. They make everyone poorer.

In the modern world, a trade war benefits almost nobody.

Worryingly however, we're now seeing other fracture lines, right here in the West, this time between the United States and the European Union.

With the arrival of the iPhone 16, and the release of iOS 18, Apple is launching Apple Intelligence. That is, unless you live in China, or in the European Union.

It's clear why Apple Intelligence will not be released in China, local legislation requires data to be processed on Chinese servers instead of being sent to third-party servers in other countries.

However, it's not entirely clear why Apple Intelligence isn't being rolled out inside the EU. The most likely explanation is that Apple fears having to change how the service might work in Europe as a consequence of new regulations around AI, or that the training and implementation of the models behind the service just can't be made to fit within the recently-passed AI Act.

While the act is being rolled out over the next two years, to give regulators time to implement the new laws, obviously its impact is already being seen.

But alongside Apple Intelligence there are other new iOS features — iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay Screen Sharing — that seem to have fallen foul of the Digital Markets Act. While it's also unclear how these features might breach the act, Apple said in a statement that modifying them to comply with the legislation would compromise “privacy and security”

Apple claims to be engaging with regulators in the EU — and also in China — around the missing features, but no release date for them has been announced.

This isn't the first time that the EU has butted heads with the Valley. It's not even the second, or the third, time. There are regular confrontations between the two, most recently with Apple over anti-competition complaints around the App Store, and of course the forced transition from Lightning to USB-C connectors on the iPhone. Let's not even mention the €13 billion tax bill, which not even Ireland wanted Apple to have to pay.

However, the Digital Markets Act, and the new AI Act, are very much a continuation of an ongoing battle when it comes to the war between the Valley and the EU. The first major campaign was the GDPR, and the reaction from Silicon Valley to that was predictable.

Since it was passed into law the GDPR has had a significant impact, not just on the Internet, but on the design of smart devices and the business models behind them. It introduced requirements around consent.

It required that you must consent to any processing of your personal data, and that this consent cannot be just be presumed if you do nothing. Importantly, consent also couldn't be regarded as given if you have no real choice, or you were unable to withdraw your consent later.

It also required privacy by design and by default, and imposed obligations on manufacturers to assess the impact of any data they collect. No more shrink-wrapped terms of service around your data, at least in theory.

It also conferred new rights with respect to your personal data. Including the right to be forgotten, and the right and ability to move your data between devices.

All of which on the face of it seemed entirely reasonable. Why shouldn't consumers have control of their own personal information, why does that control make it too hard for Valley companies to provide services?

But some US-based websites who didn’t want to think about the implications of the GDPR, along with some makers of ‘smart’ devices, just stopped providing service when the GDPR came into force.

The battle between the Valley and the EU is fundamentally driven by the differing views held on privacy in the United States and in Europe, something that is based in part on a good number Europeans having survived under repressive governments in living memory.

This cultural divide, or perhaps rather the ongoing decline in American cultural dominance worldwide, has created the fracture between the United States and Europe — and to an extent I also include the United Kingdom here as, despite Brexit, the cultural norms there are still far closer to those in the EU than they are to those in the US.

While we've seen a change in the physical building blocks of technology between the US and China, the divide opening up between the US and the EU is more philosophical. It is about software and services. About data. It's not necessarily about the technology itself, it's about the ecosystem the technology lives in.

But you have to wonder whether these cultural fracture lines between the United States and the EU will be enough to trigger a second trade war, and if so how long before the design language between the blocks starts to diverge if, or when, that war begins.