Saturday, March 2, 2019

Trump proposal for a government nationwide 5G network internet utility serving everyone is back!

It's a funny thing about socialism. It crops up in the middle of policy proposals from those with fascist learnings.

It might come as a shock to many, but the real Trump people are advocating government intervention in creating a government utility system to allow for sharing the 5G airwaves on a wholesale basis with wireless providers.

Politico tells us "President Donald Trump's reelection team is backing a controversial plan to give the government a role in managing America's next-generation 5G wireless networks — bucking the free market consensus view of his own administration and sparking wireless industry fears of nationalization."

The proposal is supported by Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale and adviser Newt Gingrich. In fact Gingrich wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek If China Dominates 5G, It Will Control the Future in which he noted:

    China and the West are locked in a struggle for control of the future of communications technology, the next generation internet, and the flow of information.
    The next two weeks may well prove decisive in deciding who wins the future. The Chinese know it and are acting with speed, decisiveness, and commitment. The American government and American companies are far behind and just starting to play catch up.
    By contrast, the Chinese are moving with the urgency and sense of purpose needed to prevail.

In two previous posts 5G Technology: it may start a world war, it won't be available to all, you don't need it, it is important to corporate interests and government. Why is that? and The U.S. "China threat" disinformation industry. It's ramping up agitation for a war with China in East Asia which America cannot possibly win! the basics of 5G issue and "what really has American undies in a bunch" are explained.

Finally Business Insider, a significant member of the U.S.business media, offered an extensive article on the 5G issue Here's why the US is terrified of one Chinese company controlling the world's 5G networks which observes:

    Rotating chairman Guo Ping took to the stage on Tuesday morning to talk up Huawei's 5G business to a cavernous auditorium filled with telecoms executives and journalists.
    His speech took an unexpected turn about halfway through, when he fired a shot at the US government, turning claims that Huawei spies on behalf of China back on America.
    "PRISM, PRISM on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?" Guo said onstage, in reference to the PRISM surveillance system used by America's intelligence agency. "Huawei has a strong track record in security in three decades. Three billion people around the world. The US security accusations of our 5G has no evidence, nothing."
    Behind him, a slide appeared in his presentation with the statement: "Huawei has not and will never plant backdoors." There was even some muted laughter from the audience.
    Security experts with ties to the US government said America's lobbying efforts are about more than just protecting the West's nascent 5G networks from potential Chinese spies.
    Joseph Campbell, a director in the global investigations and compliance practice at Navigant Consulting and formerly assistant director of criminal investigations at the FBI, says the Huawei fight is a proxy for bigger US fears about China's ambition.
    "Whoever gets to dominate 5G infrastructure will become the owner of the next generation of the world's telecoms infrastructure," [Ang Cui, CEO of security firm Red Balloon,] said. "If you look back 30 years, [the US Defense Department] funded... what became the internet. US companies provided a lot of the technology and infrastructure."
    "Whoever gets to dominate 5G infrastructure will become the owner of the next generation of the world's telecoms infrastructure," he said. "If you look back 30 years, [the US Defense Department] funded... what became the internet. US companies provided a lot of the technology and infrastructure."
    Cui added: "The internet turned out not to be perfect, but the world doesn't suspect that the US runs a pervasive surveillance mechanism."
    Still, Huawei did play on fears that the US does carry out wide-ranging surveillance with its reference to the PRISM system, and the newly introduced Cloud Act, which would force Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech providers to hand over data.
    Campbell, the former FBI staffer, said it came down to differences in the legal approach by the two countries.
    Actually obtaining data under a law like the Cloud Act, he said, involves many layers of authorisation and back-and-forth between the FBI, the Attorney General, and a further judicial process.

The problem for the U.S. is that it isn't the country it once was. In the 19th and 20th Centuries - prior to the dominance of Ronald Reagan and his fellow Neoliberals - the railroads, the telegraph, the highways, radio, telephone, electricity, space exploration, and the internet initially were all controlled, facilitated and actively supported by the government.

We don't know what the Trump campaign folks level of commitment to government intervention really is. One obvious thing is that the private sector doesn't seem to recognize the public utility status of the internet and doesn't give a crap about the idea of universal service.

Since the grossly internet-underserved folks in rural America tend to vote for Trump because he at least suggests he might provide something they need, this might just be another meaningless campaign tactic. According to The Verge: "The campaign says that the plan is designed to 'drive down costs and provide access' to rural, 'underserved' parts of the country with faster internet access, according to the campaign’s national press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany."

As noted in the Politico article:

    The issue of government's potential role in 5G — which promises super-fast internet speeds seen as critical to U.S. economic and technology development — has already proven to be an explosive one.
    At the beginning of 2018, a leaked memo from the National Security Council, which envisioned the Trump administration building a nationwide 5G network to compete with China, faced immediate rejection from the wireless industry, every FCC commissioner and lawmakers of both parties, who were alarmed at the prospect of a heavy government hand in the sector.
    The White House at the time never explicitly ruled out the nationalization concept, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying "there are a lot of things on the table." But administration officials still scrambled to reassure the powerful wireless sector, holding a conference on 5G later in the year where [White House economic adviser Larry] Kudlow said "the White House is officially behind this free-enterprise, free-market approach."

This whole subject of the U.S. 5G rollout is fraught with technological complications as discussed in a previous post.  In an article The biggest 5G breakthrough may be this harmless, little plastic strip the problem to be overcome is described "Another of its big issues is an inability to get through walls -- even a leaf could theoretically disrupt the service. " The described "breakthrough" by Ericsson, the Swedish supplier of telecom equipment, sounds awfully similar to running wires around your house for an high speed Ethernet system. But I'm sure I'm wrong about that.

The most difficult part of this whole discussion is that this writer happens to think the government should build, or at least fund and tightly regulate, a 5G system that provides service to 97%+ of American homes and businesses. But then we all have socialist leanings, don't we Mr. President.

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