Biden May Continue Trump Focus on 5G, Web Security, FCBA Told

Lusin urged industry to play an active role in the ITU World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in Hyderabad, India, starting Feb. 23, a little more than a month after the start of the new administration. Lusin urged broad participation in ITU’s World Telecommunication Development Conference in Ethiopia next November.

Authoritarian regimes are “promoting state-centric approaches to internet development and governance,” Lusin said. “There’s constant pressure from those who are seeking to advance more authoritarian approaches that do not respect human rights." The internet is possible because of “the diverse set of stakeholders who continue to develop the … technologies and standards” and the work of groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, Lusin said. The IETF is “the right body with the right expertise and the right experience,” he said.

Lusin highlighted U.S. work to promote “trustworthy” artificial intelligence technologies. The White House unveiled principles at CES in January (see 2001080067).

ITU and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project worked together to define what 5G will look like, said Andy Thiessen, division chief at NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences. ITU established the vision of what 5G is, focusing on three use cases, he said. “Enhanced mobile broadband,” he said. “Massive machine-type communications, lots and lots of devices,” he said: “Ultra-reliable low-latency communications, so edge-based computing.” 3GPP “basically took that vision” and then “defined the specs with the specific intention to try to meet what that vision was,” he said.

As 5G emerges, regional agendas “have started to pop up” in a way that didn’t happen during the start of 4G, Thiessen said. China is pushing “what they used to call new IP,” which “set off a lot of alarm bells in the West,” he said. “It was to basically look at fundamentally changing how the internet protocol worked,” he said: “We have been pushing back on this.” IP is “the domain of the ITEF,” he said: “For the ITU to undertake the idea that it’s going to redo how IP works is just nonsensical to me. You do standards work where you have the domain expertise.”

China has been pushing the ITU to work on 5G using satellite connections, Thiessen said. But the 3GPP is already working on “non-terrestrial networks,” the integration of satellites into the 5G ecosystem, he said. “It’s already basically being developed in 3GPP,” he said. Any ITU work would “ultimately be duplicative,” he said. “Nothing China has proposed yet, actually makes technical rationale sense,” he said. Some of what China is proposing seems to be aimed at state control of internet traffic of individual users, he said.

“It’s to everyone’s advantage if the standards process is open and fair and everyone is playing by the same rules,” said Mike Bergman, CTA vice president-technology and standards: “That’s not really the world we’re living in, unfortunately.”

Internet and 5G security work will continue under Biden, Lewis predicted. “The implementation will be smoother -- it would be hard to be less smooth,” he said. “They’ll be more attuned to business concerns” and “less ideological,” he said. Concern over supply chain security is one of the few issues on which Congress is unified, Lewis said. Lewis doesn't see internet fragmentation as a big concern. “They’re not interested in breaking the internet, they’re interested in taking it over," he said: "China's goal is an internet that's open for business and closed for politics. They have trouble making that work sometimes." China's embassy didn’t comment.