Two Screenings: Why Europe Screened Huawei but not the Hyperscalers¶

Stefane Fermigier (Abilian) · sf@abilian.com

Draft working paper v0.9, 2026-09-23. Comparative case analysis with an imported theoretical frame. No formal result is derived: the documentary record is consistent with the account, and live falsifiers remain open.

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Abstract¶

Within a single polity and a single decade, the European Union designed opposite screens for foreign suppliers of critical digital infrastructure. For Chinese telecom vendors, the 2020 5G Toolbox screened structurally, on ownership and home-state control; for US cloud providers, EU instruments converged on behavioural requirements, and the EUCS certification scheme dropped the ownership and immunity criteria in 2024. Alliance structure plausibly explains the level difference: Europe screened the rival and spared the patron. It does not explain where each screen was captured, why structural criteria sat in the cloud drafts for nearly two years before their deletion, or why they re-emerged in procurement instruments while the alliance stood unchanged. We explain that locus of capture with channels from a companion mechanism-design model. The first is verification feasibility: the decisive attribute is trivially verifiable in one case and requires a contested apparatus in the other. The second is the stage at which each screen was lost: national enforcement where its design was publicly legible (5G), and design where it was not (cloud), in a low-salience venue, through a member-state majority that supplier campaigning supported. A design-by-enforcement matrix organizes the record and yields three predictions. The record through mid-2026 (the Cloud Sovereignty Framework, the Cloud and AI Development Act, the 2026 Cybersecurity Act revision) is consistent with them. The tests still open are live falsifiers: the Act's structural tiers, still before Council and Parliament, and the Cybersecurity Act revision in Council.

Keywords: procurement, screening, regulatory capture, 5G, cloud, digital sovereignty, European Union.

JEL: D82, D72, H57, L96.

Sovereignty criteria at the highest level of the EUCS certification drafts, December 2020 to March 2024: introduced in 2022, softened in November 2023, removed in March 2024.

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Fermigier, S. (2026). Two Screenings: Why Europe Screened Huawei but not the Hyperscalers.
Draft working paper v0.9, Abilian Econ Lab.
https://econ.lab.abilian.com/papers/two-screenings/