10. Sovereignty and 6G

In the EU, telecommunications privatization and liberalization since the 1970s and the general basis in EU telecoms policy since the 2000s of open liberal market economy thinking has led to a retreating role of the state, national interests, and security. Increasing consumer benefits have been delivered through economic legislation based on free trade in the EU internal market, but strategic autonomy has not been on the agenda, and neither has there been a strong role for national security. Past EU telecoms policy, as is still en vigueur, has been largely strategic autonomy-agnostic, except for telecoms security, which has been risk management-based (see above). Open-to-the-world thinking has also been dominant in the approach to EU and international standardization which, moreover, has been essentially fully left to industry without much government involvement—which is a cause of the 5G security problem, see below, and (Timmers, 2020)—and in the EU’s large R&D program in which, for instance, Chinese companies were also present.² The latter, by the way, did not come with corresponding opening-up of Chinese R&D programs. Again, all this lines up to confirm that at best strategic autonomy had been a risk management approach and even then, with weak risk management, This, however, changed from 2017 onwards, due to the 5G security debate triggered by concerns from the USA. Gradually, awareness grew of national security risks which also drew attention to the ever-growing market share of Huawei and ZTE and the related risk of marginalization of the European telecoms industry, notably Ericsson and Nokia. 5G security was raised to the top level and EU countries collaborated with the support of the European Commission on a 5G Security ‘Toolbox’ to assess technical and political risks of foreign vendors. What is quite remarkable is that, where the core of 5G security are national security concerns and where national security is explicitly excluded from the mandate of the EU (Art 41 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union), countries decided to collaborate precisely at the European level on this core issue! Moreover, though it took much more time, until 2021, EU policymakers realized the weakness of presence in international standardization, notably in telecoms. A strongly worded revision of EU standardization policy was then issued, which notably singled out the EU contribution to telecoms standardization to be brought under strategic autonomy control. Shortly afterwards, the EU and the USA in the TTC (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Technology Council) agreed to team up more closely in international standardization including in the ITU. We see the emergence of a strategic partnership approach. However, despite the push to move Chinese vendors out of EU telecoms infrastructure, by 2022 these still have a very substantial presence according to (Strand Consult, 2022).

In the USA telecoms restructuring of AT&T in 1984, dominant open market thinking, the appeal of opening-up to the emerging market of China and vice versa keeping the USA market open, combined with little government interest, led to the significant presence of Chinese equipment suppliers in the American market. Moreover, R&D telecoms expertise such as in Bell Labs and Lucent became acquired by foreign companies (in this case, European ones such as Alcatel, and later Siemens, and then Nokia). Telecom operators in the USA were a mix of USA-originated companies, T-Mobile from Germany, and on a smaller scale, Chinese operators. All in all, strategic autonomy was not on the agenda, neither from the cybersecurity perspective, nor from the economic security perspective.

With the rise of cybercrime, the general vulnerability of American telecoms to state-sponsored cyber-espionage, ransomware, and other forms of cyber-attack from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China, and notably with the rise of China as economic and military power, 5G and 4G have become top concerns for national security (in the USA the term national security now includes national competitiveness). The USA has clearly earmarked the further development of 5G and especially 6G as a matter of strategic autonomy, which at best, can be pursued in a strategic partnership and for which some politicians have even advocated for autarky. Further, ideas have been tabled on next-generation telecoms as open source, a take-over of European companies, and more recently in the TTC, teaming up with Europe, and a strong domestic Next G initiative (ATIS, 2022).

The political rhetoric on the 6G shows the strategic intent but a sense of realism is also present. Namely given the erosion of the industrial and research capability and capacity in the USA (an exception being the strong position in advanced semiconductor design for telecommunications) effectively 6G industrial initiatives are assumed to be open to at least a European presence. As is the EU, the USA is starting to pursue a strategic partnership approach. Make no mistake, however, to assume that strategic teaming-up means identical strategic intent. In international relations, there is fundamentally never an identity of sovereignty between countries. When push comes to shove, such as in a semiconductor supply crisis, despite partnership the US government will prioritize US industry. The EU is matching this in a much weaker form only, however, in the much softer formulated EU Chips Act.

In China, since the early 2000s, an explicit policy has been pursued to capture (mobile) telecoms as a strategic industry. China has managed to create space for its own 4G development and with significant state subsidies and impressive entrepreneurship and technical skills, companies such as Huawei and ZTE and China Mobile rapidly grew from minnows to world players. By 2015, these players jointly actually managed to capture the largest share of the world market including the European market and a significant part of the USA and Canadian and Indian markets. In the domestic market, they were overly dominant as access for European and other players remained difficult and relatively small. The EU and the USA for a long time underestimated the rise of these Chinese suppliers, firstly, not realizing what this did to erode their national competitiveness, and secondly, not seeing the influence of the Chinese state eroding their national security. In hindsight, China clearly and consistently pursued and continues to pursue—successfully—an autarky approach to strategic autonomy. China is explicit about its intention for dominance in 6G (China State Council, 2015) though the quest for autarky may for years be hampered by foreign dependencies (Rühlig, 2023).

Strongly related to telecommunications policy are cybersecurity, cloud, data/AI, IoT, and semiconductor policies. In most of these areas, in the EU at least, the approach to strategic autonomy has been based on risk management, which as mentioned above, is rather soft in terms of guarantees for sovereignty. Gradually, however, harder strategic autonomy elements have been appearing in at least some of these policies. For instance, in the ICT supply chain requirements for cybersecurity are being stepped up in the EU Cyber Resilience Act. These requirements are inspired by the EU 5G Security Recommendation and will imply stronger and independent controls on vendors, including those of IoT and other connected devices. Ensuring cybersecurity is thereby less left to third-country control. In addition, high-security cloud requirements are being developed by ENISA, the EU’s cybersecurity agency which may include a greater degree of cloud (and thereby data) localization and staff security scrutiny. However, the final form of these requirements was not yet clear at the time of writing.

Let’s spell it out. Today, we are probably closest to scenario I. Tensions between states are on the rise and technology is becoming increasingly weaponized. To keep this trend in check, we need to renew cooperation on 6G standards in a balance of countries, companies, the tech community, and civil society. We need new security technology and/or architectures in 6G that safeguard the core of government information and still enable global connectivity and secure end-to-end information flows. Who can do this? The core is a coalition of like-minded countries, companies, and academics (from the USA, the EU, Korea, and Japan) but with openness to include India and, in selected areas where they see a common interest, China.

We also see large corporates increasingly expanding from cloud and platforms into 5G and 6G, involved in a power grab on all the required technologies, from AI and crypto to cables and satellites, from the meta-verse to digital health, retail, and logistics. 6G risks becoming corporatized and fragmented into technology islands. To keep this trend in check, we need the global tech community to team up with innovative emerging disrupters and risk capital, supported by open-minded states to define open standards, make open tech available, and address global challenges with 6G.

What can we do today to best move toward scenario IV, a global open 6G in a global open world? The action must be to strengthen and expand today’s collaborations of the willing that subscribe to the two-track agenda of open global collaboration and open 6G. What are such collaborations? In the global R&D community, open collaboration used to be supported by the EU Horizon 2020 R&D program, in both telecoms and information technology. This has helped to create a global community of specialists in future technologies and in standards-setting with corresponding forms of global governance. On the telecoms side, the main long-running collaboration platforms for these communities are 3GPP, GSMA, and ITU, while more recently platforms have been emerging around open RAN. These platforms have got and still get their input from large-scale R&D projects (a long tradition pre-6G and continued for 6G, such as in the University of Oulu-led 6G Flagship and many projects co-financed by the EU), private and public–private deployment pilots, and regional but fairly open standardization organizations (ETNO in the EU). On the IT side, the main long-running forms of global governance likewise are still with us from the early Internet times, notably IETF, W3C, IASB for technical architectures and specifications, with the ITU playing a growing role in IT standardization, and ICANN in the management of the Internet domain name system. A plethora of other global alliances exist in the world of AI, cloud, IoT, and even secure computing, which are all potentially relevant for the future of 6G.

The default mindset in this broad community has been and still largely is to enable global open specifications for each generation of 3G, 4G, and 5G, as well as for 6G. Even if much intellectual property is protected by patents for commercial reasons, the assumption of a common global specification for 6G is still driving this ‘tech and business community’. One would say then that this broad technical and standards and business community is then the natural anchor for these collaborations of the willing who subscribe to the two-track agenda of open global collaboration and open 6G.

To assume the above will happen, however, would be naïve: these communities too are pulled into the maelstrom of geopoliticization. The growing concerns about sovereignty and strategic autonomy are also being felt in these forums. The suspicion of the hand of the state behind Chinese companies, which would steer their involvement in global standardization and international R&D collaboration has led to a pushback (Sheehan, 2021; Yan et al., 2019). Various studies document the growing influence of China in standardization, whether in 3GPP or in ITU (Baron & Kanevskaia Whitaker, 2021; Bruer & Brake, 2021). China indeed pursues a very active and comprehensive 5G and 6G leadership policy, as argued above. This is closely linked to its geopolitical ambitions (China State Council, 2015). The EU has become aware of the growing capture of its standardization efforts by foreign companies, and the state actors that are possibly hiding behind them and has come forward with a new approach to standardization that should better safeguard EU strategic autonomy (European Commission, 2022). The USA has been ramping up its involvement in global standardization and expressed willingness to team up with the EU (US & EU, 2022), while launching 6G R&D collaboration, the Next G Alliance, with a strong ‘American leadership’ ambition (ATIS, 2022). The EU’s Joint Undertaking on Smart Networks and Services states to ‘foster Europe’s technological sovereignty in 6G’ (European Commission, 2021). For national regulatory initiatives across the world, see (Serentschy et al., 2022) in this volume. The national and regional 5G/6G R&D and standardization initiatives are increasingly rivalrous. They are being complemented by trade and foreign investment restrictions that cast a dark shadow on the prospect for continued global collaboration. The realistic prospect at the time of writing is of increasing geopolitical tensions that are fueled by the Russian aggression against Ukraine and mainland China’s threats against Taiwan and by rising geopolitical rhetoric.

The international academic, technology, standards and business community must go through a self-assessment on how to best handle geopolitics if it is to stay relevant as a platform toward open global 6G. We accept the premise that social construction and technological construction are related, viz. (Cohen, 2019; Lessig, 1999; Timmers, 2022a). Therefore, this should not only be a governance self-assessment but also a technological assessment, answering the question: which 6G technical architecture(s) will enable global collaboration that respects geopolitical concerns about strategic autonomy? In this respect, lessons can be learned from 5G security, that clearly did not live up to this expectation. The issue is that, while 5G was already being rolled out, concerns were raised, initially from the USA, that working with Chinese equipment suppliers such as Huawei would pose a national security risk, due to possible influence by the Chinese state such as on the early stage technology development or on the actual 5G operation. The EU subsequently agreed on a 5G Security Recommendation that would enable to do at least a cybersecurity risk assessment. This experience shows that such security concerns were raised only at a very late stage of 5G evolution, probably due to the lack of earlier involvement of governments. 6G should not fall into the same technical and governance traps that led to this 5G security problem (Timmers, 2020).

A second collaboration that may contribute to open global 6G has been hinted at above. This is where policymakers of ‘like-minded’ countries (currently the USA, the EU, Japan, South Korea, and possibly India), despite potential differences of views such as on state surveillance (c.f., Voelsen, 2022), discuss aspects of 6G collaboration. Such discussions are happening largely in bilateral dialogues, sometimes with more concrete policy collaboration such as between the EU and the USA in the TTC. An international platform of these 6G policymakers does not exist, though. Provided these policymakers have a clear view on which parts of 6G are highly sensitive to sovereignty concerns, they can issue an open invitation to other countries to join efforts on those aspects of 6G that are not sensitive to sovereignty concerns. An example would be collaboration on pilots of global interest (e.g., global logistics, public health, climate change) provided 6G is properly technically architected. What does this mean? The 6G academic and technical community needs to urgently develop the characteristics of these parts of 6G. This would likely include compartmentalizing information which is of national security interest. Providing this assessment would be a very important contribution to the techno-politics as a recent and still-evolving perspective on international relations.

Digital technologies largely are constructed as if the world were without borders. From the perspective that social construction and technological construction are related, it is understandable that the until recently dominant paradigms (social constructs) of a global, open, liberal market economy, open research and innovation, academic freedom, and restrained states, have led to such technology. However, and importantly, there is rarely a technical reason that technology must be open, interoperable, uniform, and globally standardized. We can therefore also take technology here on a scale from fragmented to uniformed (on purpose written in this way, that is, formed to be non-fragmented).

This leads to four scenarios as in Fig. 10.1, which, for the purpose of presentation, we label in a somewhat sloganized way as: state-controlled global but limited 6G; fragmentation into political blocs and 6G technology islands; 6G controlled by mega-corporations; globalization in economy and technology, that is, a full, open, and global 6G.

One future may be that geopolitics leads to strong polarization between states (‘back to Westfalen’). Alternatively, global cooperation may win in the long run, perhaps under the pressure of the existential global challenges of climate change. In the world of technology, one future is that tech and service companies compete with largely proprietary monolithic solutions. It would be likely then that markets would be served by a few mega-corporations. Another technology future is one of global standards, interoperability, with many building blocks where companies compete through technological and service innovation and possibly disruptive new technologies.

Not all technology architectures will fit neatly with strong state control, e.g., non-permissioned distributed ledger solutions in telecoms. Conversely, not all state governance will allow for all technology architecture to develop unchecked. A global world that—hypothetically—would agree on strong fundamental rights including privacy, will wish to keep in check or perhaps even ban privacy-invasive network management architectures. Sovereignty, or more generally, the social constructs that we associate with states, are therefore also conditioned by the way technology is ‘constructed’, that is, put into technological architectures, specifications, and ultimately coded into hardware and software. Finally, this interplay is neither static nor completely known in advance. Anticipatory regulation is an approach to deal with both the dynamics and the innovation in this interplay (see Serentschy et al., 2022).

In quadrant I, we find a globally open 6G where states are on a knife’s edge. Telecom companies have been ordered by their governments to ensure global interconnectivity. Military experts exercise oversight in standardization forums. No information flows can be trusted and there is constant suspicion that implementation is vulnerable to intrusion, backdoors, etc. This necessitates new technical solutions to ensure end-to-end security. Companies will compete globally with extensive backing from their home countries. They will not shy away from using any means to make foreign government buy their gear. The telecoms business may flourish but overheads will be large. 6G strategic autonomy will be a ‘militarized’ strategic autonomy.

Fragmented 6G in a fragmented world (quadrant II) represents the failure of years of global telecoms and global collaboration in 4G and 5G. The telecom industry has limited markets and seeks value-added in diversification and application, stimulating thriving adjoint industries and entrepreneurship. There is rapid progress in technology within geopolitical blocs provided that these have sufficient scale. Where they do not have this, government subsidies must cover shortfalls. Governments will allow telecom oligopolies to have enough scale. Along the same lines, telecom companies are likely to be eaten by adjoint companies (e.g., cloud providers) to achieve economic scale and protect the state or coalition of states. 6G strategic autonomy means ‘fortress strategic autonomy’.

In the third scenario (quadrant III) 6G technology is fragmented, yet there is global collaboration between countries. Mega-corporations have de facto taken over telecoms sovereignty from states and created their own technology islands, likely integrating much more than a traditional telecoms infrastructure (e.g., also satellite systems and cloud platforms and proprietary large-scale AI-as-a-service). Government policies have little effect on these mega-corporations or are absent due to their power and their integration into governmental processes. The ‘6G strategic autonomy is void’.

A global, open, and full 6G in a globally open world (quadrant IV) is the continuation of the 4G global standards and assumes to counter the risk of security-induced fragmentation of 5G/6G. It requires a careful reflection on 6G architecture to combine openness and security. New security technologies, such as embedded quantum encryption and end-to-end system integrity control with blockchain safeguard the core communications of the state. This requires a new multilateral public–private organization for a balanced and trusted relationship between global 6G companies and governments worldwide, and an understanding that sovereignty battles are better fought elsewhere than in 6G. That is, hard power in other areas is balanced by soft power agreements in 6G, mediated by international diplomacy. Telecom companies will flourish but need to be extremely politically savvy. 6G strategic autonomy delivers a common good, namely ‘global 6G peace’.