Apple CEO Tim Cook praised the Chinese tech giant Huawei during the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust’s hearing with executives from four of the nation’s largest tech companies on Wednesday.
“Companies like Samsung, LG, Huawei, and Google have built successful businesses with different approaches,” Cook said before House lawmakers.
Huawei however, which was just banned from the United Kingdom’s 5G network earlier this month is also accused by the U.S. intelligence community of serving as an instrument of the Chinese Communist Party to conduct espionage operations within western adversaries.
In mid-July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo handed down sanctions against the Chinese company for its role in human rights abuses, charged the company denied.
Huawei, Pompeo said, is “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the indentured servitude of its population shipped all over China.”
Cook’s comments come as the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Amazon testify before lawmakers defending what many on both sides of the aisle in Washington have alleged with weaponizing anti-competitive market practices as their global influence builds from Silicon Valley.
Together, the four companies represented on Capitol Hill Wednesday rack up a net-worth of nearly $5 trillion.
