Seagate gets fined for selling HDDs to China?

[blueone]

Seagate Hit with $300 Million Fine for Shipping 7.4 Million HDDs to Huawei

U.S. government imposes record fine on Seagate for violating sanctions against Seagate.

www.tomshardware.com

Seriously? Why would the US mind at all if Huawei had to tolerate multi-millisecond average latencies, tail latencies that extend to ten times that long, and transfer rates for enterprise HDDs roughly the same as client USB SATA SSDs? Just a matter of principle it seems, as the controllers were designed with restricted CAD tools. Yes, $300M serious.

 

[ta152h]

Seagate Hit with $300 Million Fine for Shipping 7.4 Million HDDs to Huawei

U.S. government imposes record fine on Seagate for violating sanctions against Seagate.

www.tomshardware.com

Seriously? Why would the US mind at all if Huawei had to tolerate multi-millisecond average latencies, tail latencies that extend to ten times that long, and transfer rates for enterprise HDDs roughly the same as client USB SATA SSDs? Just a matter of principle it seems, as the controllers were designed with restricted CAD tools. Yes, $300M serious.

Because they broke the rules? I realize that in today's world, laws and rules aren't considered sacrosanct, but believe if you make laws or rules, you enforce them. If you don't want to, you remove them. You don't arbitrarily enforce some and not others. Yeah, I'm old, and completely out of touch to think that way. But, the other way really makes me anxious and seems far more problematic.

But, the better question would be why these were restricted, which seems to be what you're alluding to. But, if they are, and you break those restrictions, I'm all for fining them. And making them like it. But, I'm definitely not disputing these are disputing their value to the company, or lack thereof. That's a different discussion. But, I would say, if Huawei bought that many, they must have had a reason too. I'm not that sure it's a compelling reason to disallow sales though, but again, that's a different discussion. You probably are right.

 

[blueone]

Because they broke the rules? I realize that in today's world, laws and rules aren't considered sacrosanct, but believe if you make laws or rules, you enforce them. If you don't want to, you remove them. You don't arbitrarily enforce some and not others. Yeah, I'm old, and completely out of touch to think that way. But, the other way really makes me anxious and seems far more problematic.

But, the better question would be why these were restricted, which seems to be what you're alluding to. But, if they are, and you break those restrictions, I'm all for fining them. And making them like it. But, I'm definitely not disputing these are disputing their value to the company, or lack thereof. That's a different discussion. But, I would say, if Huawei bought that many, they must have had a reason too. I'm not that sure it's a compelling reason to disallow sales though, but again, that's a different discussion. You probably are right.

As the article describes, the rule that was broken was that Seagate was supposed to get an export license for selling the HDDs to Huawei because the controller ASIC was designed with restricted CAD technology. There's no doubt that Seagate broke the rule and did not apply for the required export license, but a $300M fine for selling HDDs I wouldn't use on my desktop system I use for emails and the internet due to low performance seems excessive. This smacks of bureaucrats setting an example with a silly example.