America's attempt to build an impenetrable wall around Huawei should be replaced by a new approach
. Whoever controls the global digital infrastructure controls the world. That is why America is so worried about China’s rise as a technological superpower. It also explains why it is going to such lengths, even using European-style industrial policy, to rein in Huawei, China’s leading maker of telecoms equipment. The company leads the world in, the next generation of mobile networks, which are expected to become the central nervous system of the global economy.
Yet by any measure America is losing the fight against Huawei, along with what President Donald Trump, steeped in zero-sum thinking, calls the “race toin China continues apace; and most of America’s allies have so far ignored its entreaties to ban Huawei gear entirely from their nationalnetworks on security grounds. Even so, the Trump administration seems intent on doubling down on its strategy.
Mobile networks, long dominated by specialised hardware, are becoming defined by software. On April 8th Rakuten, a Japanese online giant, launched the world’s first fully “virtualised” mobile network, built using general-purpose hardware and lots of software . Other mobile carriers will follow suit.
Admittedly, virtualised networks will not solve all security problems, and the underlying standard, called Opennetworks. It will take years to roll them out fully and the covid-19 crisis has done nothing to speed up the process. So there is time. The Trump administration and other governments should do all they can to accelerate the development of virtualised networks by subsidising research and perhaps even mandating the use of technical standards that allow mobile networks to be virtualised. All this may sound far-fetched at a time when America’s government appears stuck in the past and incapable of coming up with a coherent strategy. But as in many other domains, covid-19 creates room for new thinking.
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