BRUSSELS — First it was telecom snooping. Now Europe is growing worried that Huawei could turn the lights off. The Chinese tech giant is at the heart of a brewing storm over the security of Europe’s energy grids. Lawmakers are writing to the European Commission to urge it to “restrict high-risk vendors” from solar energy systems, in a letter seen by POLITICO. Such restrictions would target Huawei first and foremost, as the dominant Chinese supplier of critical parts of these systems. The fears center around solar panel inverters, a piece of technology that turns solar panels’ electricity into current that flows into the grid. China is a dominant supplier of these inverters, and Huawei is its biggest player. Because the inverters are hooked up to the internet, security experts warn the inverters could be tampered with or shut down through remote access, potentially causing dangerous surges or drops in electricity in Europe’s networks. The warnings come as European governments have woken up to the risks of being reliant on other regions for critical services — from Russian gas to Chinese critical raw materials and American digital services. The bloc is in a stand-off with Beijing over trade in raw materials, and has faced months of pressure from Washington on how Brussels regulates U.S. tech giants. Cybersecurity authorities are close to finalizing work on a new “toolbox” to de-risk tech supply chains, with solar panels among its key target sectors, alongside connected cars and smart cameras. Two members of the European Parliament, Dutch liberal Bart Groothuis and Slovak center-right lawmaker Miriam Lexmann, drafted a letter warning the European Commission of the risks. “We urge you to propose immediate and binding measures to restrict high-risk vendors from our critical infrastructure,” the two wrote. The members had gathered the support of a dozen colleagues by Wednesday and are canvassing for more to join the initiative before sending the letter mid next week.   According to research by trade body SolarPower Europe, Chinese firms control approximately 65 percent of the total installed power in the solar sector. The largest company in the European market is Huawei, a tech giant that is considered a high-risk vendor of telecom equipment. The second-largest firm is Sungrow, which is also Chinese, and controls about half the amount of solar power as Huawei. Huawei’s market power recently allowed it to make its way back into SolarPower Europe, the solar sector’s most prominent lobby association in Brussels, despite an ongoing Belgian bribery investigation focused on the firm’s lobbying activities in Brussels that saw it banned from meeting with European Commission and Parliament officials. Security hawks are now upping the ante. Cybersecurity experts and European manufacturers say the Chinese conglomerate and its peers could hack into Europe’s power grid.  “They can disable safety parameters. They can set it on fire,” Erika Langerová, a cybersecurity researcher at the Czech Technical University in Prague, said in a media briefing hosted by the U.S. Mission to the EU in September.  Even switching solar installation off and on again could disrupt energy supply, Langerová said. “When you do it on one installation, it’s not a problem, but then you do it on thousands of installations it becomes a problem because the … compound effect of these sudden changes in the operation of the device can destabilize the power grid.”  Surges in electricity supply can trigger wider blackouts, as seen in Spain and Portugal in April. | Matias Chiofalo/Europa Press via Getty Images Surges in electricity supply can trigger wider blackouts, as seen in Spain and Portugal in April. Some governments have already taken further measures. Last November, Lithuania imposed a ban on remote access by Chinese firms to renewable energy installations above 100 kilowatts, effectively stopping the use of Chinese inverters. In September, the Czech Republic issued a warning on the threat posed by Chinese remote access via components including solar inverters. And in Germany, security officials already in 2023 told lawmakers that an “energy management component” from Huawei had them on alert, leading to a government probe of the firm’s equipment. CHINESE CONTROL, EU RESPONSE  The arguments leveled against Chinese manufacturers of solar inverters echo those heard from security experts in previous years, in debates on whether or not to block companies like video-sharing app TikTok, airport scanner maker Nuctech and — yes — Huawei’s 5G network equipment. Distrust of Chinese technology has skyrocketed. Under President Xi Jinping, the Beijing government has rolled out regulations forcing Chinese companies to cooperate with security services’ requests to share data and flag vulnerabilities in their software. It has led to Western concerns that it opens the door to surveillance and snooping. One of the most direct threats involves remote management from China of products embedded in European critical infrastructure. Manufacturers have remote access to install updates and maintenance. Europe has also grown heavily reliant on Chinese tech suppliers, particularly when it comes to renewable energy, which is powering an increasing proportion of European energy. Domestic manufacturers of solar panels have enough supply to fill the gap that any EU action to restrict Chinese inverters would create, Langerová said. But Europe does not yet have enough battery or wind manufacturers — two clean energy sector China also dominates. China’s dominance also undercuts Europe’s own tech sector and comes with risks of economic coercion. Until only a few years ago, European firms were competitive, before being undercut by heavily subsidized Chinese products, said Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. China on the other hand does not allow foreign firms in its market because of cybersecurity concerns, he said. The European Union previously developed a 5G security toolbox to reduce its dependence on Huawei over these fears. It is also working on a similar initiative, known as the ICT supply chain toolbox, to help national governments scan their wider digital infrastructure for weak points, with a view to blocking or reduce the use of “high-risk suppliers.” According to Groothuis and Lexmann, “binding legislation to restrict risky vendors in our critical infrastructure is urgently required” across the European Union. Until legislation is passed, the EU should put temporary measures in place, they said in their letter.  Huawei did not respond to requests for comment before publication. This article has been updated.

A major outage of Amazon Web Services servers affecting multiple websites Monday morning prompted immediate calls for Europe to boost its tech sovereignty. Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were among the affected sites. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud servers that allow these services and millions of other websites and platforms to run. Brussels is in the midst of a debate on how to achieve digital sovereignty, and what that means exactly, with cloud services at the center of the conversation. EU leaders are expected to take a position during a high-level summit meeting later this week. “Today’s outage shows how concentrated power makes the internet fragile and this lack of resilience hits our economies as a result,” technologist Robin Berjon said in an email. Berjon co-founded the Eurostack project — an initiative campaigning to make Europe self-reliant in digital services. “Europe’s dependency on monopoly cloud companies like Amazon is a security vulnerability and an economic threat we can’t ignore,” Cori Crider, executive director of the Future of Technology Institute, said in an email. According to AWS’s health dashboard, which shows a “running log of AWS service interruptions for the past 12 months,” the outage originated with servers in North America and specifically Virginia. That prompted reaction including from Ulrike Franke, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations: “My robot vacuum cleaner no longer works and can someone explain why a robot in Paris is linked to U.S. East? Talk about European digital sovereignty…” she posted on Bluesky. “These disruptions are not just technical issues, they’re democratic failures,” said Corinne Cath-Speth, head of digital at civil society group Article 19. “When a single provider goes dark, critical services go offline with it — media outlets become inaccessible, secure communication apps like Signal stop functioning, and the infrastructure that serves our digital society crumbles.” “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing,” she added. Transcription service Trint said in an email that it had experienced disruption but “customers on our EU servers should be largely unaffected.” In a statement shared with media outlets, Amazon Web Services said: “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services. We can confirm global services and features that rely on US-EAST-1 have also recovered. We continue to work towards full resolution and will provide updates as we have more information to share.” Asked at a briefing of reporters in Brussels on Monday, European Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert said the outage “would be a question for the companies, this is not for us to comment on.” With regard to how it had affected the Commission’s own operations, Paula Pinho, chief spokesperson for the European Commission, said: “We were more using for instance e-mails. We go back to our traditional methods.” Pieter Haeck contributed reporting.

The European Commission has opened a door marked danger. In July it issued a guidance letter blessing the creation of what is known as an Automotive Licensing Negotiation Group (Auto LNG). In doing so, it gave the green light to rival carmakers to form a cartel-like entity to negotiate licenses for patents that underpin standardized technologies (standards essential patents, or SEPs).   > SEPs are vital in many industries because they enable devices and services to interoperate seamlessly across different manufacturers, platforms and geographies. They cover technologies such as Wi-Fi, 5G and video coding, and are integral to the Internet of Things.   > SEPs are vital in many industries because they enable devices and services to > interoperate seamlessly across different manufacturers, platforms and > geographies. For decades, EU competition law treated the collective bargaining among competitors that LNGs of any kind represent as off-limits. The timing of the change was not incidental.   In September the Commission also released draft revisions of its Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation and Technology Transfer Guidelines (TTG). Together, these texts shape how Europe manages its innovation economy, including its SEP licensing market.  A success story at stake  On the positive side, the drafts reaffirm the importance of transparent patent pools. Such pools bring together complementary SEPs owned by multiple parties and make them available through a single license. Pools cut transaction costs, create efficiencies and provide clarity to technology implementers.    SEP owners who contribute technology to a standard promise to license their patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Pools put that commitment into practice by offering a single license that the market can accept or reject.   The draft TTG strengthens requirements for transparency and governance in pools by emphasizing the importance of essentiality checks, published terms, open participation and safeguards against collusion. These measures codify practices many pools already follow. In doing so, the Commission is rightly cementing transparent pools’ role as trusted intermediaries in SEP licensing.  LNGs and FRAND cannot co-exist  Properly structured pools only succeed if implementers view their terms as balanced; they cannot ‘enforce’ acceptance into existence. When the market pushes back, pools adjust. That responsiveness makes them both pro-competitive and self-correcting.   LNGs invert that logic. As coalitions of buyers, their explicit objective is to aggregate purchasing power to secure discounts from the prevailing FRAND rate — all while their members continue to use the technology. However, the non-discrimination limb of FRAND makes across the board ‘group discounts’ very hard to square with commitments owed to all implementers, including those that have already taken licenses, directly or through a pool. This distorts competition by enabling buyers to exert undue pressure on licensors.  The draft TTG seeks to allay concerns by requiring LNG participation to be open and internally non-discriminatory, yet it does not grapple with the external effect on the SEP holder’s non-discrimination duty. That omission risks forcing a de facto “LNG rate” onto the whole market.   Asymmetry and holdout risk  The asymmetry here is striking. If price talks fail for tangible inputs, suppliers can simply stop shipments. Not so with SEPs: once standardized, the technology is embedded and keeps being used unless long, costly litigation is pursued. This reality gives coordinated buyers leverage to delay or avoid paying – a textbook recipe for holdout and cartel-like behavior.  Some argue that if licensors can license jointly through pools, licensees should be able to do so in LNGs. This is false logic. Pools aggregate non-competing assets to make complementary patents accessible. LNGs aggregate competing buyers to dictate price, a monopsony dynamic that competition law has long treated with suspicion. Pools, by contrast, have no such power. They live or die by market acceptance. Their incentive is to align with existing demand.  Process shortcuts, shaky justifications  Equally troubling is how the Commission chose to act. The July letter was issued under an ‘informal guidance’ procedure, an opaque tool usually used to clarify cutting-edge cases. SEP holders and smaller innovators were not consulted, despite being directly affected.  The substantive justification is no better. Both the Commission and Germany’s Bundeskartellamt, which had previously authorized the ALNG in June 2024, leaned on a market-share threshold, finding automakers represent less than 15 percent of the ‘general mobile communications’ market.   However, connected cars represent a completely separate vertical, with distinct technical features like vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and the market threshold should apply to it specifically. Furthermore, in licensing markets, a coordinated 15 percent holdout can freeze dealmaking across the board. That risk is ignored.  > Connected cars represent a completely separate vertical, with distinct > technical features. Meanwhile, the invocation of decarbonization as a reason to tolerate cartel-like structures conflates policy domains. Climate objectives, however worthy, cannot excuse weakening competition law guardrails.  Keep the back door closed  Pools already deliver the benefits LNGs claim — lower transaction costs, broader access, transparent terms, market efficiencies — without cartel risks. Most importantly, the FRAND framework, tested in courts and practice, continues to support rapid technology rollouts across the EU and is fully compatible with pools. It is utterly incompatible with LNGs. To adhere to FRAND principles that are the cornerstone of SEP licensing worldwide, LNGs cannot exist.  > Pools already deliver the benefits LNGs claim — lower transaction costs, > broader access, transparent terms, market efficiencies — without cartel risks. If the Commission wants to modernize SEP policy, it should do so openly and only when market failures are identified. This involves consultation to establish clear criteria and evidence of consumer benefit. By contrast, its current approach threatens to disrupt efficient markets, squeeze royalties that fund research and development, and slow Europe’s pace of innovation.  In reinforcing transparent pools, the Commission got one big thing right with its draft TTG. It should not squander that by blessing LNGs.  Roberto Dini has more than 40 years’ experience in patent licensing and is recognized as one of the global market’s most respected experts.    For a detailed analysis of the legal, economic and procedural defects in the Auto LNG approach — and a fuller comparison between pools and LNGs — see: Auto Licensing Negotiation Groups are a Bad, Anticompetitive Idea.