silicon curtain
English
Etymology
From silicon (“computing”) and Iron Curtain.
Noun
silicon curtain (plural not attested)
- A legal barrier to technology transfer and sale of advanced computer equipment between China and the West.
- [2019 March 6, Karishma Vaswani, “Huawei: The story of a controversial company”, in BBC News:
- What this would mean in reality is a world of two internets - or what analysts are calling a "digital iron curtain" - dividing the world into parts that do business with Chinese companies like Huawei, and those that don't.]
- 2019 November 11, Carolynn Look and Jeff Black, “Peering Through the Silicon Curtain Between the U.S. and China”, in Bloomberg News:
- We hear also from Huawei’s founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, who explains that while the company doesn’t want to exist behind a “silicon curtain,” cut off from global suppliers, it is readying its own operating system to replace the one it used to buy from Google.
- 2021 February, Eric Boehm, “A Silicon Curtain Descends”, in Reason, published 2020:
- Pence went on to say that America did not seek a technological decoupling from China. But other parts of that speech—and some of the actions taken by the Trump administration in the months since—conjure images of a silicon curtain descending across the world.