This chapter adopts a futures research approach and applies causal layered analysis to present 6G visions specifically focusing on the different national perspectives between China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the USA. The chapter identifies the assumptions behind mobile communications, analyzes the different national visions, and presents based on the multiple ideologies and epistemes of the stakeholders and transformed futures beyond 6G mobile communications. The chapter concludes with policy implications for developing global mobile communications.
Alles war Märchen, alles war um eine Dimension reicher,
um eine Bedeutung tiefer, war Spiel und Symbol.
(Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf)
Assumptions Identified for Mobile Communications
In retrospect, mobile communications can be explained to have developed in an evolutive manner from 1G to the current 5G, as described in preceding chapters. To chart future 5G evolution and 6G, this book applied the technology foresight perspective, which focuses on science, technology, and innovation to make better-informed policy decisions (Pietrobelli & Puppato, 2016), thereby following the technology enablers, regulatory delimitations, and business and other societal and environmental phenomena associated with 6G. To look beyond 6G with a futures research approach, one must therefore pay attention to the weight of the past in mobile communications, the push of the presently recognizable trends, events, and preferences, but especially, emphasize the pull of the future to achieve plausibility (Inayatullah, 2008). For what we label beyond 6G, there will be no single inevitable future, but rather a set of numerous alternative futures. Thus, the future of mobile communications should not be considered evolutive or predictable, but malleable.
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To look beyond 6G, this chapter applies a futures research approach that builds on causal layered analysis (Inayatullah, 2019; Inayatullah & Milojevic, 2015), following four steps of inquiry:
We identify three types of assumptions behind the analysis. Ontological assumptions are assumptions regarding the reality faced in the research. Epistemological assumptions are associated with human knowledge, or what forms valid knowledge, whether it can be known, and how a researcher can get it and transfer it. Axiological assumptions concern the level of influence of the researcher’s values on the research process, or what is essential and valuable in the research (Burrell & Morgan, 2005). For assumptions, we list the key identified assumptions for the analysis of 6G and beyond. To understand the visions related to beyond 6G, we will present the key 6G visions and frameworks by China, Europe, South Korea, Japan, the USA, and ITU-R. Regarding transformed futures, we analyze the presented 6G visions and identify them from legitimation perspective alternative routes to beyond 6G. Finally, we provide policy implications for developing future mobile communications.
Building on the previous chapters, we identify the following assumptions regarding the changes toward future mobile communications generations:
From technology-centricity and service-centricity toward human-centricity. The definition of mobile communications generations has evolved from technology-centric definitions toward service-centricity in 5G and toward human-centricity for 6G and beyond.
From technology push toward pull from social and environmental goals. Up to 5G, the traditional innovation process in mobile communications can be characterized as a technology push from technology and equipment vendors toward operators and end-users. With 6G, new demands for social inclusivity or privacy, security, and safety up to national sovereignty, as well as environmental pressures, have raised triple bottom line sustainability to a driver for developing 6G as a general-purpose technology and an ecosystem-wide effort. This is also expected to continue in beyond 6G.
From international to national and local communications toward focal communications. The provisioning of mobile communications services is changing from international and national operators’ mass-produced and top-down offered services toward tailored local communications in 5G and 6G, e.g., with the help of softwarization, virtualization, cloudification, and network slicing. However, it is envisaged that in beyond 6G communications, focally provisioned bottom-up-built personalized on-demand services will emerge.
From quality of service and quality of experiencetoward immersion. The utilization of mobile communications services has been by provisioning-defined quality of service or utilization-based quality of experience in up to 5G communications. In beyond 6G communications, immersive extended reality, holographic communications, and the metaverse(s) require novel types of quantification for the quality of utilization and experience.
From ubiquitousconnectivitytoward ubiquitousintelligence. With the convergence of artificial intelligence and other new capabilities like sensing with mobile communications, the assisting and automating role of these capabilities in up to 5G communications is expected to become augmenting in 6G, which means that the nature of communications will change from an availability challenge into what the degree of intelligence or other integrated capabilities available for use is.
From human–machine interfacestoward transhumanism. The traditional device-based use of mobile communications in up to 5G networks is expected to change with new human–machine interfaces like virtual glasses or haptic communications in 6G. For beyond 6G communications, implanted sensors or devices enhance human capabilities and give rise to the emergence of transhumanism, the integration of humans and machines, but also new moral, ethical, and value-related concerns due to the presence of artificial intelligence.
Visions for Future Mobile Communications
This section summarizes the key findings of the recent national developments focusing on the 6G futures envisioned by government initiatives from China, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the USA. The recent ITU-R activities on IMT toward 2030 and beyond, including 6G, are discussed.
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China
In China, mobile communications technologies have become closely tied to national issues of development and prestige, and wider strategic infrastructure and digitalization initiatives such as China standards 2035, belt and road, digital silk road, and made in China 2025. The ministry of science and technology (MOST) has constituted a working group for 6G research, development, and policymaking, consisting of key research institutes and enterprises. In 2019, the ministry of industry and information technology (MIIT) established the IMT-2030 promotion group as the main platform for gathering China’s industry and academic forces to promote technological research, advance international dialog and cooperation, and develop a national standardization strategy. In 2020, the Chinese government introduced a subsidies and stimulus package worth RMB 10 T until 2025, focusing on the evolution of 5G, artificial intelligence, data centers, and smart manufacturing. A Chinese 6G white paper on 6G vision and candidate technologies was released in 2021 (China’s IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group, 2021). The vision, called ‘Intelligent connection of everything, digital twin,’ envisioned an intelligent era of society built on balanced high-quality social services, scientific and precise social governance, and green energy-saving social development. The vision urges the establishment of new technological industries for high-quality economic growth, driven by the shift from physical products to digital services. The imbalance in wealth and demographics was seen to anticipate changes in social structure. Moreover, a more diversified and flattened governance structure was found to demand scientific and precise governance powered by digital twinning and AI to make timely accurate decisions and respond to real-time topical events. Eight usage scenarios were discussed: the proliferation of intelligence with a ubiquitous smart core; immersive cloud extended reality; digital twinning; holographic communications; converged communication and sensing; sensory fusion; intelligent interactions of feelings and thoughts; global seamless nationwide coverage; and a cross-cutting theme of multilateral network security. China’s IMT-2030 (6G) promotion group determined the antecedents of the successful 6G development as follows (China’s IMT-2030 (6G) Promotion Group, 2021):
To ensure the successful commercial deployment of preceding 5G.
Introduction of native AI intelligence and computing awareness.
Expansion to higher spectrum bands and bandwidths such as THz and visible light communications.
To further improve the efficient use of all the spectrum resources via refarming, aggregation, and sharing.
Expand the coverage ubiquitously on land, at sea, in the sky, and in space.
Europe
In 2020, the European Commission (EC) set extensive political goals to boost economies and competitiveness: green deal; fit for the digital age; an economy that works for people; a stronger Europe in the world; promoting our European way of life; and a new push for European democracy (EU, 2020). It is planned that European geostrategic and global approach initiatives will be pursued via partnerships with like-minded countries and regions. The objectives of the established smart networks and services joint undertaking (SNSJU, 2021) program with the Euro 0.9 B budget are to safeguard industrial leadership and foster technological sovereignty in future 6G. The key means to achieve the goals are the research and innovation program leading to conception and standardization around 2025 and preparatory actions for early market adoption of 6G technologies by the end of the decade. The initial work program has strategic aims to advance an open strategic autonomy via human-centric technologies and innovations. It is envisioned that Europe will become the first digital-led circular, climate-neutral, and sustainable region, leveraging Europe’s technological innovation advantages in digital and future emerging technologies (SBS JU, 2021). This is planned to contribute to several key technology policies: green deal; resilient communication privacy and security; AI, data & cloud computing; blockchain technology; high-performance computing; the Internet of things; and microelectronic components. From a services and applications perspective, it is foreseen that the program will impact communication and sensing fusion, immersive environments, digital twinning, and holographic communication. The programs will be measured via democracy, ecosystem, innovation, and sustainability key value indicators:
Democracy: privacy, fairness, digital inclusion, and trust.
Ecosystem: sustainability, business value, economic growth, open collaboration, and new value chain.
Innovation: safety, security, resilience, regulation, responsibility, and energy consumption.
Seventeen United Nations sustainable development goals (UN SDGs).
The European-level 6G visions (Uusitalo et al., 2021) and initiatives have recently been complemented by several national 6G visions including 6G Flagship in Finland (Latva-aho & Leppänen, 2019), Technology futures in the UK (Ofcom, 2021), and Six questions about 6G whitepaper in Germany (Bayern Innovativ, 2021).
Japan
The beyond 5G promotion consortium (B5GPC, 2020) was established in 2020 by the government, academia, and industry for information sharing and promoting Japanese first-mover advantage in 6G (The Japanese ministry of internal affairs and communications, 2020). The three policy objectives set for the launched program were global first, the creation of an innovation ecosystem, and strengthening competitive advantages in R&D through concentrated allocation of resources (The Japanese ministry of internal affairs and communications, 2020). Japan sets numerical targets for the infrastructure market share (30%) and the share of the number of standard essential patents(10%). The key means of achieving the objectives are to promote global harmonized standardization and policies, collaborative research, and bidirectional globalization.
While targeting the export of its own technologies, Japan also aims to establish a hub of excellence to co-create values for society by calling together researchers and practitioners and their novel visions, as well as technological innovation. In the Japanese 6G vision, it is anticipated that novel mobile communications architecture will contribute to the new sustainable value creation stemming from low energy consumption, improved security and reliability, autonomy, scalability, and advancing 5G performance in data speed, capacity, latency, and density (The Japanese ministry of internal affairs and communications, 2020). From a societal sustainability perspective, it is projected that 6G will develop into a social infrastructure that integrates cyberspace with the real world. In this knowledge-intensive ‘Society5.0,’ real-time data will be available to all people safely and without an impact on the global environment. In 2021, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) published a beyond 5G/6G white paper, discussing the creation of three scenarios toward 2035: the cybernetic avatar society; the city on the moon; and transcending space and time (NICT, 2021).
South Korea
In 2021, the program was launched by the South Korean ministry of science and ICT (MSIT) to accelerate the digitalization of industries, support productivity and economic growth, and ‘transform our economy from a fast follower into a pace setter1’ (MSIT, 2021). MSIT has prioritized 6G, AI, and cybersecurity as strategic technologies in the digital sector. It is planed that the established program will contribute to digital inclusion, digital education, and the digitalization of enterprises. The goal is to gain leadership in international 6G standardization and patenting and be the first in line to launch a 6G trial in 2028, utilizing government-supported public–private partnerships. For the first 5-year period, the government is investing KRW 200 billion, focusing on strategic priorities consisting of space communications, new spectrum (THz) and antennas, ultra-precision, AI, reliability, and the improvement of mobile communications performance KPIs.
South Korea established the 5G Forum Korea as a non-profit organization to promote the evolution and convergence of the extended global ecosystem, especially in the context of Industry4.0. Their 6G vision is based on the selected three drivers of the future society: cleanness and safety; sustainability; and fairness and transparency. The projected key usage scenarios are:
Internet of inclusive education and experience
Human augmentation for health
Sustainable automation in industry and the workforce
Ubiquitous artificial intelligence in transportation and public safety
It is envisioned that these usage scenarios will deliver a truly immersive experience, connected real-time intelligence, and interaction between the physical and digital worlds, built on the distributed data-centric network and service infrastructure (5G Forum, 2021).
USA
In the USA, the Clean Network Initiative was established in 2020 to address the envisioned cybersecurity threats related to data privacy, security, human rights, and democracy (The United States Government, 2021). To advance future wireless technological leadership, the alliance for telecommunications industry solutions (ATIS) established the NextG alliance (NGA), leveraging sector efforts in 2021 (ATIS NGA, 2021). The NGA program is organized in six working groups: applications; greenG; national goals; societal and economic needs; spectrum; and technology. The developed national roadmap exhibits six objectives for 6G mobile communication networks:
Resilience, security, privacy-preserving, safe, reliable, and available for private, business, and governmental users.
Applicability to critical infrastructure, national security, and the military.
End-to-end cost-effectiveness.
Supporting life-improving value creation via transformative forms of human-to-human collaboration and human–machine and machine–machine interactions.
Leveraging artificial intelligence to improve robustness, performance, and efficiency.
Augmented intelligence with increased flexibility, performance, and resilience built on ultra-reliable low latency communication, multi-sensing, distributed cloud, and virtualization technologies.
Carbon neutrality by 2040 via 6G energy efficiency and the use of ICT as an enabler.
The NGA’s key objective is to advance North American ICT ecosystem leadership over the next decade, encompassing research and development, manufacturing, standardization, and market readiness (ATIS NGA, 2021). In December 2021, the urgency of resilience and sovereignty was stressed by the three cybersecurity senate bills focusing on mobile communications networks, particularly future 6G deployments, and the national cyber literacy campaign (The Senate of the United States, 2021). Societal sustainability and digital inclusion were addressed in August 2021 via the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which includes USD 42 billion in investments in broadband coverage in unserved and underserved areas.
Global ITU-R
The international level joint process for IMT toward 2030 and beyond, which corresponds to 6G, is underway at the ITU-R working party 5D (ITU-R WP5D). The technology trends have been identified and published in Future Technology Trends Towards 2030 and Beyond in late 2022 (ITU-R, 2022). Work on the recommendation about the framework for IMT is ongoing and will be completed in June 2023 with the presentation of new usage scenarios for 6G. Work at the ITU-R WP5D on the framework for the future IMT systems involves member states and organizations worldwide to contribute to forecasting driving factors such as user and application trends, use cases, usage scenarios, and capabilities.
The first report published by the ITU-R in 2022 (ITU-R, 2022) identifies the following services and application trends for IMT toward 2030 and beyond:
Networks supporting enabling services that help steer communities and countries toward reaching the UN SDGs.
Increasing customization of user experience with user-centric resource orchestration models.
Localized demand–supply–consumption models.
Community-driven networks and public–private partnerships with new models for service provisioning.
Strong role of networks’ vertical and industrial contexts.
Lowered market entry barriers by the decoupling of technology platforms, allowing multiple entities to contribute to innovation.
Empowering citizens as knowledge producers, users, and developers, contributing to human-centered innovation.
Privacy influenced by increased platform data economy or sharing economy.
Monitoring and steering of the circular economy, including co-creation to promote sustainable interaction with existing resources and processes.
Development of products and technologies that innovate to zero (e.g., zero-waste and zero-emission technologies).
Immersive digital realities, facilitating new ways of learning, understanding, and memorizing in different scientific fields.
The spectrum discussions related to 6G are expected to take place at the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2027 (WRC-27) if the WRC in 2023 (WRC-23) develops an agenda item on the IMT spectrum. The actual requirements definition phase will start in the beginning of 2024 and will be finalized in early 2026. The required evaluation criteria and processes will be finalized by the end of 2026. Technology proposals for IMT are expected in 2027–2028, with decisions in 2029.
Transformed Futures for Mobile Communications
This section explores the selected national and regional visions using the causal layered analysis (CLA) method, which articulates alternative perspectives, ideologies, and epistemes, as Table 11.1 illustrates. The futures research CLA method (Inayatullah & Milojevic, 2015) has proven useful in deepening visioning, strategic planning, and policy development. The framework is built on four layers (Inayatullah, 2019). The first is the official unquestioned future documented via the lists of details and contents (litany layer). The social systemic layer analyzes the litany as consisting of political-environmental, social, technological, economic, and legal (PESTLE) causation and meanings. The third discourse and worldview layer amplifies ideological and discursive assumptions and explores different stakeholder views on the litany and system. Finally, the myths and metaphors layer deepens the discovery of the unconscious emotive dimensions. In the CLA process, the four layers of analysis are engaged upward and downward to ensure different ways of knowing and breadth of perspectives. In particular, the ideologies and epistemes of the national and regional 6G vision stakeholders are brought into the worldview and the myth layers. In the final phase, the transformed future perspectives of 6G evolution were developed by reinterpreting the layers, considering the inflection and reconstructing the more visible upper levels of the systems and litany (Inayatullah, 2019) to create reconciled understanding of and visions toward beyond 6G.
Table 11.1
The causal layered analysis of national and regional 6G visions transformed into 6G futures toward beyond 6G
CLA layer
Regional/national 6G visions
Key joint vision elements
Litany of surface-level details of the available 6G visions
• Key performance indicators
• Key value indicators
• Emerging, enabling, and embedded role of technologies
• 6G general-purpose technology
• Global harmonized standardization
• Intellectual property licensing policy
• Sustainability-driven KPIs and KVIs
Social systemic causation and meanings embedded in the 6G visions
• Capabilities: networks of networks
• Leadership
• Global vs. national targets
• Human- vs. technology-centricity
• R&D
• Standards
• Society
• Verticals
• Triple bottom line accounting for social, economic, and environmental sustainability
• Trustworthy 6G and stable rules for artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Anticipatory regulation promoting open innovation and sustainability
Worldviews and discourse used to legitimate 6G visions
• Competition/partnerships
• National/international
• Social perspective and democracy
• Growth and innovation
• Ecosystem legitimacy
• Empowered human
• Citizen-driven
• Ethics and morality
Myths and metaphors explaining the 6G visions’ deep meaning
• Rights
• Level of democracy
• Business
• Healing world
• Harmonious society advancement
Litany Layer
At the surface level, a high similarity of key performance indicators and key value indicators between 6G visions was found, as Table 11.1 summarizes. The emerging technologies (Kapoor & Teece, 2021) highlighted in the visions seize the novelty via radical new knowledge and disruptions in terms of improved functionality and the value creation funded. Government funding was widely utilized to cope with initial diversity, high uncertainty, large investments, and the variety of complementary assets to achieve commercialization. The emphasized enabling technologies commercializes more horizontally necessitating coordination, a variety of complementary assets and tailored investments in which public–private partnership policies can be utilized to incentivize technological innovations. The envisioned embedded technologies were found to further expand the applicability across adjacent businesses. Global harmonization of standards, regulations, and policies will become a key antecedent for interoperability, security, data privacy, AI rights, and novel sharing of economy-based platform business models. In the 6G visions, the role of collaboration was emphasized in the early technological innovations. The value creation and capture were seen to increasingly stem from complementary assets and capabilities, shifting from a focal firm-led supply side to dynamic demand and multifaceted business models in platforms and ecosystems. For China, Japan, and South Korea, leadership in standardization is seen as a way to improve quality and increase international competitiveness, while the outcomes are left to the market in the USA.
Social Systemic Layer
In the explored 6G visions, a high similarity of technological capabilities was visible, while differences were found in their exploitation. The competitive free-market approach in the USA emphasizes the role of an enterprise or a focal platform, while the visions originating in Asia underline the role of society and governance. In Europe, global collaboration and the role of environmental, societal, and economic sustainability were central. In general, the nature and speed of technological innovations and the potential disruption related to AI/ML, Web3, and quantum compute were considered to put the current policy and regulatory systems under increasing stress. The common policy concerns of governments about the development of 6G were related to the accelerated global competition and disparity of policies and legislation between the major geopolitical nodes. The development may lead to technological divergence, compartmentalized innovation ecosystems, techno-nationalism, and market protection.
Worldview, Myths, and Metaphor Layers
The underlying assumptions and views in the visions reveal major differences in the legitimation of 6G that can be defined through value creation and value capture (Biloslavo et al., 2020), the selection of the ‘right thing to do’ (Palazzo & Scherer, 2006), and the socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions within the ecosystem (Suchman, 1995). In the visions originating in Asia, the pragmatic sociopolitical legitimation perspective was visibly adopted, emphasizing innovation compliance with established social rules, regulations, and norms.
In China, passive discursive legitimation was built into the visions, stressing the acceptance and familiarity of existing institutions or the absence of alternatives. The industry legitimation perspective was clearly noticeable in the Japanese and South Korean 6G visions, stemming from the innovation in the industry’s institutionalized practices (Kwak & Yoon, 2020). The performative legitimation route in the US visions can be seen to demonstrate the viability of the 6G ecosystem through the processes of strategic action, value realization, adoption, and external intervention. Active legitimation orchestrated by dominant organizations and/or platforms can be built without discursive and performative processes. In Europe, the interaction of the above discussed discursive and performative legitimation was visible in the 6G ecosystem identity construction, founded on an emerging mutual understanding among stakeholders regarding the central, enduring, and distinctive characteristics of the ecosystem value proposition. There was a common understanding that to cope with the liability of newness in 6G and related technological innovation and potential disruption, it would be essential to leverage the interdependencies and resources built alongside collaborative research initiative, regulation, and standardization forums.
Transformed Futures Beyond 6G
Building on the causal layered analysis of the selected national and regional 6G visions, we explored and created new spaces wherein preferable futures visions and strategies could take place (Yrjölä et al., 2022) as Fig. 11.1 summarizes. The analyzed visions shared a characterization of the 6G system as having a ubiquitous economy-wide impact, driving innovation complementarities across industries and application domains and founded on sustained technological improvement across disciplines. Based on the common view on the governing effect on future society, 6G can be defined as a general-purpose technology (GPT) and platform (Teece, 2018). In this vision, the ecosystem legitimacy route will become essential to overcome the liability of newness in 6G.
A diagram illustrates the 6 G vision, showcasing the performance and discursive legitimation of the U S A, E U, China, Japan, and Korea. It also represents the drivers, challenges, and limitations associated with each region.
Fig. 11.1
A legitimation view of the worldviews, myths, and metaphors in 6G visions
×
Collective action among different ecosystem participants through collaborative research projects, trials, and demonstrations to develop a common set of standards that applies to all industries and geographies will ensure consistency, complementarity, extendibility, and economies of scale in the 6G and beyond rollouts. In policymaking, attention should be paid to support the value capture for innovators of the critical technological innovations, as the expanded ecosystem will lead to an increasingly complex patent licensing landscape. The sustainability discussion can be seen as moving from an engineering-driven performance discussion to a more holistic triple bottom line visioning, comprising the economic, societal, and environmental perspectives. The introduced complexity to anticipate sustainable development, use of disruptive technologies, and novel innovative business models more flexibly and in a timely manner, with legitimacy and public acceptance, calls for reframed regulation in the form of anticipatory regulation methods. Following the recent discussions and development in harmonized regulation and ethical guidelines for AI, a similar policy for the 6G system can be envisioned. Trustworthy 6G can be characterized as transparent, fair, accountable, robust and safe, human agency and oversight, and private and governed data. 6G futures will extend the role of users from consumer- to producer- and developer-centricity. This emphasizes 6G as an explanatory system that can explain the technical processes and the decisions they make to stakeholders, and the data sets and AI/ML decisions must be documented in a standardized manner to allow for traceability and auditability. The governance mechanisms must support human oversight, and users and developers should be given the knowledge and tools to comprehend and interact with the systems.
Implications for Future Mobile Communications Policy
In the light of the presented discussion, it is envisioned that mobile communications capabilities will play a central role for future societies in different aspects of human and machine life. As futurists, we seek preferred futures but see several bottlenecks and risks facing the development of global 6G and beyond communications that warrant broad policy action and global collaboration.
In recent years, transformative innovation policies have been created to address grand challenges and broader societal goals like those of sustainability or future competitiveness (Diercks et al., 2019; Haddad & Bergek, 2023). Amidst the current geopolitical tension, we are concerned about the fragmentation of global 6G markets, technologies, and regulations. Transformative innovation policies consider the innovation process and agendas (Diercks et al., 2019) and address system and market failures and developing and expanding new markets, all based on the shared understanding of how change is expected to take place for the preferred future. For policymaking, the identified assumptions, presented visions, and transformed futures give grounds for discussing five intertwined areas of implications for future beyond 6G communications: innovation policy; regulation; sustainability; trustworthy communications; and strategic autonomy and sovereignty.
Innovationpolicy. Fair or perfect competition never exists. Innovation policies aim to increase companies’ and nations’ competitiveness both directly and indirectly by affecting firms’ intellectual property creation. General-purpose technologies like 6G and beyond require international ecosystemic cross-industry sector innovation. These innovation efforts need to be based on shared goals and expected impacts that enable the creation of a shared vision for 6G and beyond. As future mobile communications technologies are expected to build on the extended use of several complementary technologies such as artificial intelligence, it is of the utmost importance to engage both developers and users of future 6G and beyond in collaboration. We therefore argue for a global transformative innovation policy that can push mobile communications ecosystems to deal with system and market failures and address the opportunities for transition and value creation and spillover effects identified for future mobile communications.
Regulation. Although the mobile communications business is highly regulated, the regulative domain for future mobile communications is becoming increasingly complex, especially in Europe, where the mobile communication networks are used to serve specific vertical sectors of society with their own sector-specific regulations. However, the increasing complexity should not create barriers to sustainable value creation or hamper innovation. We therefore argue for anticipatory regulation, which defines the rules ex ante for developing 6G and beyond, and ex post when deploying and using the services. In practice, the whole regulatory process should be more agile and anticipatory in the context of new technologies, entailing a more proactive, iterative, and responsive approach to evolving markets’ regulation and emphasizing flexibility, collaboration, and innovation.
Sustainability. Already for 6G, the integrated triple bottom line of sustainability (social, economic, and environmental, considered in parallel as balanced and uncompromised) has been introduced as a new holistic design criterion. What this means in practice remains underdefined. 6G and beyond communications can be used to solve the grand environmental and social/societal challenges of sustainability, provided that a shared vision of 6G exists. On the social/societal side, 6G could contribute to fighting climate change, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, or environmental pollution in different sectors, but on the social/societal side, the use of artificial intelligence may result in new values-based challenges to be solved. We argue for integrated triple bottom line sustainability and resilience when developing future 6G and beyond communications.
Trustworthycommunications. The privacy, security, and resilience of communications has emerged as important for individual users, organizations, and governments due to the critical role of digital infrastructures and data for modern society and its functions. The embedded or inbuilt trustworthiness of communications has thus become a value of its own for mobile communications for all its users. Moreover, as the amount of intelligence will increase in mobile communications and will increasingly be used in mobile communications, the functioning of the systems should be explicable, transparent, accountable, fair, safe, oversighted, and controlled by humans. We therefore argue for trustworthycommunications as a human right.
Strategic autonomyand sovereignty. Sovereignty is enabled by strategic autonomy in terms of capabilities, capacities, and control regarding the economy, society, and democracy. In the context of 6G and beyond, sovereignty is enabled and ensured in part by trustworthy communications. Digital technologies as a battleground for global competition are a source of geopolitical tension and threats against societal resilience and diversity; thus, autonomy and sovereignty are required to maintain competitiveness and sustainability via innovation policies and regulations. We therefore argue for the recognition of the role of sovereignty as a basis for fair and legitimate 6G and beyond mobile communications.
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