We have to be careful here and distinguish between espionage and censorship.
In most western countries, there is remarkably little censorship at the internet level. I could write nearly anything here in this window, and you (hruodr) and the other FreeBSD forum members would be able to read it, obviously assuming that our dear moderators and administrators are OK with it being written here. That includes strongly anti-government messages. Due to some interesting circumstances, I read in some discussion forums that have lots of highly libertarian and anti-government members (off-road dirt motorcyclists, gun enthusiasts), and there is a lot of stuff posted there which most people would find highly offensive (like using scatological terms to describe government officials and the judicial system), and quite open calls for revolt and assassination. It's not uncommon to read there that "the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of ... (insert disliked politician here)" and "string her up" for the likes of Senator Schumer or Secretary Clinton. That situation is very different in China and Russia. Yes, I have colleagues who work in China, a few in Moscow, and a few friends in Russia, and in those states, if you were to write things like that, they would not remain visible. But that's not a debate for the low level of TCP/IP protocols, and in particular not about countries taking control of the address and port numbering authority; this type of censorship is at a different level. The Huawei proposal helps to make packet filtering easier at the low levels, but it has nothing to do with content-based censorship.
What it has to do with is control of addressing and numbering. Say a totalitarian government finds that a computer at IP address 1.2.3.4 is transmitting packets (for example to WhatsApp) that have unwelcome content. Today, the mapping of that IP address to a person is complex, and control of that mapping is spread all over. For example, you can ask DNS servers (which are visible at addresses such as 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9) who that person is, but most of those servers and the number assignments are not under the control of a single totalitarian country government. What the New IP proposal wants to do is to take the numbering and mapping authority and make it a political function.
Here is just one example of simplification. Have you ever tried blocking or identifying all packets that come from China at a firewall? It is doable, and I know people who have to do such tasks. But it is backbreakingly difficult, and a huge maintenance hassle, because China uses about 7000 or 8000 IP address blocks on IPv4 alone. So answering the question "is IP address 1.2.3.4 in China or not" is today a very nasty question, and doing such filtering at speed requires extraordinary hardware resources. With Huawei's "New IP", such things become trivial, and under the full authority of a country. Want to block all IP traffic from Aachen and Zurich? Done. How about inspecting all packets that go to 123 Main Street, Everytown, USA? Easy-peasy.
Today, the internet is one way people can (to some extent) work around communications restrictions imposed by national governments, because no single government controls TCP/IP. With Huawei's New IP, that changes. Actually, within China it doesn't change very much, because there much of the filtering is already well established (but even there, people are capable of working around it).
A separate question is espionage. In most countries with well-funded and well-working "agencies", we can safely assume that much of the network traffic (both voice and IP traffic) is monitored. For most encrypted connections, this is only traffic analysis, unless something about it has been flagged as a high-value target (decrypting everything takes too much CPU power). This applies both in the west as well as in the east. It probably does not apply in developing countries, where there is simply not enough funding for their local agencies. As an example, I don't think the Brasilian government has the CPU power to listen to 200 million people chattering excitedly on cell phones, whereas the NSA in the US does have such abilities. To do that today, they don't need new protocols; they can do that perfectly well already. Taking full control of numbering authorities makes espionage somewhat harder to evade, but I don't think it makes a big difference.
In most western countries, there is remarkably little censorship at the internet level. I could write nearly anything here in this window, and you (hruodr) and the other FreeBSD forum members would be able to read it, obviously assuming that our dear moderators and administrators are OK with it being written here. That includes strongly anti-government messages. Due to some interesting circumstances, I read in some discussion forums that have lots of highly libertarian and anti-government members (off-road dirt motorcyclists, gun enthusiasts), and there is a lot of stuff posted there which most people would find highly offensive (like using scatological terms to describe government officials and the judicial system), and quite open calls for revolt and assassination. It's not uncommon to read there that "the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of ... (insert disliked politician here)" and "string her up" for the likes of Senator Schumer or Secretary Clinton. That situation is very different in China and Russia. Yes, I have colleagues who work in China, a few in Moscow, and a few friends in Russia, and in those states, if you were to write things like that, they would not remain visible. But that's not a debate for the low level of TCP/IP protocols, and in particular not about countries taking control of the address and port numbering authority; this type of censorship is at a different level. The Huawei proposal helps to make packet filtering easier at the low levels, but it has nothing to do with content-based censorship.
What it has to do with is control of addressing and numbering. Say a totalitarian government finds that a computer at IP address 1.2.3.4 is transmitting packets (for example to WhatsApp) that have unwelcome content. Today, the mapping of that IP address to a person is complex, and control of that mapping is spread all over. For example, you can ask DNS servers (which are visible at addresses such as 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9) who that person is, but most of those servers and the number assignments are not under the control of a single totalitarian country government. What the New IP proposal wants to do is to take the numbering and mapping authority and make it a political function.
Here is just one example of simplification. Have you ever tried blocking or identifying all packets that come from China at a firewall? It is doable, and I know people who have to do such tasks. But it is backbreakingly difficult, and a huge maintenance hassle, because China uses about 7000 or 8000 IP address blocks on IPv4 alone. So answering the question "is IP address 1.2.3.4 in China or not" is today a very nasty question, and doing such filtering at speed requires extraordinary hardware resources. With Huawei's "New IP", such things become trivial, and under the full authority of a country. Want to block all IP traffic from Aachen and Zurich? Done. How about inspecting all packets that go to 123 Main Street, Everytown, USA? Easy-peasy.
Today, the internet is one way people can (to some extent) work around communications restrictions imposed by national governments, because no single government controls TCP/IP. With Huawei's New IP, that changes. Actually, within China it doesn't change very much, because there much of the filtering is already well established (but even there, people are capable of working around it).
A separate question is espionage. In most countries with well-funded and well-working "agencies", we can safely assume that much of the network traffic (both voice and IP traffic) is monitored. For most encrypted connections, this is only traffic analysis, unless something about it has been flagged as a high-value target (decrypting everything takes too much CPU power). This applies both in the west as well as in the east. It probably does not apply in developing countries, where there is simply not enough funding for their local agencies. As an example, I don't think the Brasilian government has the CPU power to listen to 200 million people chattering excitedly on cell phones, whereas the NSA in the US does have such abilities. To do that today, they don't need new protocols; they can do that perfectly well already. Taking full control of numbering authorities makes espionage somewhat harder to evade, but I don't think it makes a big difference.