Trump’s 2020 campaign manager calls for 5g nationalization
There’s a lot of danger and short-sighted thinking when it comes to this notion of centralization/nationalization. The short-sightedness is pretty easy to point out: there’s no reason to believe whoever gets 5G first will immediately be the one everyone else has to copy. R Street Institute’s Paul Rosenzweig wrote in January just how divergent network technology is across the globe.
“The argument underlying the leaked proposal is the idea that if China develops the networks and devices first, then China sets the standards which the US will have to adopt, which could theoretically have security vulnerabilities to the benefit of the maker. This seems to be the driving force behind the references to “security”: by building out 5G first, the United States sets the standards for what the networks and protocols look like. That seems highly implausibe. In the first instance, even if China were to develop a set of 5G standards there is no reason that the US (and other western countries could not, preferentially) adopt their won protocols. Today, as I travel the globe, my handset switches back and forth from Global to CDMA to LTE, etc. In other words, the premise that a single standard will define the network seems to me to be a weak one.”
