> Nvidia will retain Arm’s United Kingdom headquarters - which exempt it from many U.S. export control laws
I was not aware that all it took for a U.S. company to profit from bypassing national security concerns, human rights protections, and weapons proliferation limits[0] was to simply open a foreign HQ or buy a company with one.
Not that Arm or Nvidia plan to do any of those things, but it sounds like a regulatory moat to me.
You make it sound as if the USA has a high standard from any of those topics.
Its national security concerns keep violating laws and even the constitution. Or, take violating laws abroad and numerous international treaties. It doesn't fully implement something as basic as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Or, just take what Amnesty International reported already years ago about all US states violating the country's international obligations regarding accountability for police violence. As for weapons proliferation, that has to be the biggest joke of them all. It blatantly makes false claims about other countries, only to have a justification for unilateral withdrawal from treaties and expand nuclear weapon productions. Or, just take the countless wars it has started around the globe, both to make a killing on weapons sales and cynically use them as testing grounds for new weapons.
But indeed, none of all that is relevant in this particular case. Even thought the deal is bad news for a number of other reasons. Maybe first and foremost because it is a US company getting its hands on foreign assets. nVidea certainly knows how to evade taxes, so who knows how much of the deal money actually shouldn't be theirs in the first place.
That site phrases it as "US-origin dual-use goods".
It's not enough to have a foreign HQ, but if you have a separate development organization abroad and a clear delineation between their technology and your US-developed technology, this seems very workable.
It's also an attempt to not give reasons to the British government to red-light the acquisition. If you read the BBC, lots of British personalities (including the founders of Acorn and ARM themselves) have been extremely critical about the whole deal and are vehemently lobbying the UK government in order to stop it and bring back the company into British hands. If they let slip that they considered moving even a single job out of the UK, they would have basically confirmed what everybody was saying. Probably the UK government won't do anything because due to Brexit they desperately need trade deals and new partners, so they need to lick the US's arse and avoid angering Donald Trump, but still, it wouldn't be wise nevertheless.
> Probably the UK government won't do anything because due to Brexit they desperately need trade deals and new partners, so they need to lick the US's arse and avoid angering Donald Trump
That doesn't mean they need to approve the purchase - it just means they have to stall until they know the outcome of the election.
There's no chance of a trade deal being done before the election, and waving the sale through to earn Trump's favour is pointless if it's Biden they're making a trade deal with.
It was clear SoftBank didn't give a damn about ARM, they only bought it to grab some of the sweet monies they were raking up and pretty much left everything as-is. Not so much for NVIDIA, which is a big player in the industry and is American.
Just think about the meaning of your comment. US law isn't universal. The UK and every other nation has its own independent government and laws. Every country decides for itself what a national security concern is, what human rights protections its citizens have and what weapons proliferation limits should be enforced. Enforcing US laws in a foreign country against the will of that foreign country is only possible by occupying it via military and stationing US law enforcement in it. Such a country would just be a colony of the US and last time I checked the UK isn't part of the US.
Yes, exactly. Perhaps you're not familiar with the term "regulatory moat" but basically I'm saying that these types of laws are nearly unenforceable on big players, so really the only purpose they serve is to limit competition rather than any of their stated purposes.
But how do you define a US company? In a globalized world it is very difficult to pin point a company to a country, so the headquarter is one way to defined it. Though it is not going to prevent the US to impose sanction to whoever they want.
I think you misunderstood my point. I was specifically referring to the USG wording of the export controls requirements, and how they seem to apply harsh limitations on companies who are small, while large companies can just step right over those lines.
Those issues you mention are important, but unrelated to regulatory moats created around small competitors.
I was not aware that all it took for a U.S. company to profit from bypassing national security concerns, human rights protections, and weapons proliferation limits[0] was to simply open a foreign HQ or buy a company with one.
Not that Arm or Nvidia plan to do any of those things, but it sounds like a regulatory moat to me.
0: https://2009-2017.state.gov/strategictrade/overview/index.ht...