<![CDATA[About 5G, we should all learn more and argue less]>
Most ideas we have are wrong, says Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. When it comes to 5G, something about which many people hold strong opinions, especially in relation to Huawei Technologies, a Chinese telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer, I would go further: most of our opinions are not even wrong.
So I sometimes seek enlightenment from Anthony Rutkowski, a US lawyer, engineer and scholar who had headed groups under the International Telecommunication Union and World Trade Organisation drawing up technical and regulatory protocols during the early years of the internet. He now writes some of the most informative, if highly technical, analyses on 5G development at www.circleid.com.
"All the changes now occurring under the aegis of 5G are so significant and occurring so fast, that everyone, including the security services, cannot deal with it all," Rutkowski told me. "The nervousness is understandable. The resources being deployed in the industry collaboration venues are beyond the ability of governments to participate. You can do patent scans and R&D development scans [and] what it reveals is an enormous '5G dark matter universe' of developments that constitute the technological equivalent of a big bang."
Washington is exploiting the public's technical ignorance to paint a false picture about 5G and network security. "What is occurring is that Chinese vendors have planned ahead and are devoting significant resources to the pursuit of and involvement in these developments. They learned from what the Western research labs did two decades ago and scaled it all up. Meanwhile, most of the Western research labs have disappeared," Rutkowski said.
"There is the insanity of the Trump administration that involves a handful of people who are clueless and bent on destroying collaborative international institutions while pushing misguided sense of jingoism with a gloss of xenophobia. The result is a kind of 5G perfect storm of paranoia and protectionism."
In CircleID, he wrote: "The multiple global industry bodies are developing and specifying ... the architectures, services, interfaces, radio links, and capabilities that constitute 5G. Given the enormous continuously evolving complexities, all 5G knowledge is an approximation at a point in time, a constantly evolving continuum.
"Unilateral actions undermining public international law like banning a vendor's hardware because of its place of incorporation are not only unlawful but utterly delusional and counterproductive.
"Simplistic portrayals of 5G are low-hanging fruit for a world challenged by understanding even the basics of how a smartphone work."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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