IGF 2019 – Day 1 – Raum V – WS 41 Tech Nationalism: 5G, Cybersecurity and Trade

>> MODERATOR: We'll be getting started in a couple of minutes just waiting for one Mr. Speaker to come.

>> MODERATOR: Is that Ambassador Feakin, come on up here and join us. We've been waiting for you.

>> MODERATOR: All right. I think there's a few seats up here in the front row. A couple over there. Come on -- come on in.

So, welcome, everybody. This is the panel on Tech Nationalism: 5G, Cybersecurity, and Trade. Sounds like a mouthful. But all of the concepts and issues are very closely interrelated. We have a good panel here today to take on what's become at least in my country become a very controversial issue, frankly, there's too many people spouting off their positions without dialoguing with people in different positions.

So, we thought we'd put together a discussion in which we brought together many different sides of this issue.

Tech Nationalism is a term that we at the Internet governance Project have been using for a couple of years now. As we noticed for the tendency for cyber security and government issues to become more and more intertwined with national security issues. Some -- both Bill and I come from an area, a policy domain we spent 20 years liberalizing telecommunications industry and introducing free trade across borders. Now we're seeing the gains reversed or challenged by the rise of what we call tech nationalism. You want to add anything, Bill?

This is a co-moderator, Bill Drake and he's a professor at the University of Zurich. There's a long and complicated name of your department. I am a professor of the School of Public Policy, a simple name, at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

There you go.

>> MODERATOR: Milton and I have been friends for 30 years and have never tried to do anything together because we violently disagree 20% of the time.

So, this is a maiden voyage, so this will be fun for us.

Anyway, welcome, everybody. Yes, I'm Bill Drake. He's Milton Mueller. A few thoughts I would make about tech nationalism to start. The concept has a long and not very illustrious history and no political system is immune from tech nationalism. We had in the cold war, you know, the whole tech nationalist fervor around sputnik being raised and then the missile gap, etc.

Americans were all alarmed about that.

Canadians had a lot of techno nationalist debate around the need for sovereign telecommunications in media, for example. The French had discussions around the need to combat IBM by building up national champions in the computer industry.

There's a long history to techno nationalism. What's new is it's no longer just a domestic defensive posture, it's become a very much expansionist approach tied to power politics and geo-economics. And we've seen it extend beyond the realm of hardware where it used to be focused to issues like services, applications, clouds, and especially data, which is a sort of new turn.

So, when Vladimir Putin says whoever controls AI in the future will control the world, he's giving you precisely that sort of a tech nationalist vision of control via data and manipulation of data, etc. Rarely people who are tech nationalists say they're tech nationalist. There's no consensus about what it means in the social sciences or anywhere else. So, it's a deeply contested concept. And one which therefore allows for a lot of back-and-forth about exactly what counts as tech nationalism, what doesn't. Is this an appropriate term to be levying in this particular case, etc.

It will be interesting and a robust and interesting discussion. You want to introduce the panels?

>> MODERATOR: Yes, I will. We haven't practiced this. For the sake of time, what their names and their positions if I can get that right. And then when they speak, we're going to have a structured presentation of this concept. So, going from your right to left, we have ambassador Tobias Feakin from Australia. He's the official Cyber Ambassador for Australia, as I understand it. We have Jan-Peter Kleinhans. He's with a research foundation in Germany focusing on 5G and internet of things technology. We have here Jyoti Panday, she's been writing about data sovereignty and 5G policy-related materials.

Then on our left over here, we have Mr. Morrissey, the Washington, D.C. lobbyist for Huawei. And I have to say, I have been trying to get actual official representatives of Huawei involved in these conversations for some time. I think typical of Chinese companies they have preferred to stay under the weather --

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: That too.

>> MODERATOR: It's great to have someone openly speaking about that position. Let's turn to Bill now to tell us what the first round is about.

>> Going to go -- how we're going to go about it.

>> MODERATOR: We're going to go to three rounds of questions, I will take lead on the first, Milton the second, and cob spire on the third.

I want to point out in the back of the room, if you're happy where you are, that's fine, but there are a lot of seats sprinkled in the front if you want to take them and sit down, it's your call.

In the first segment, we're going to talk about the nature of technonationalism, what is it? How is it manifested and so on? There's no singular definition about it. But there's a number of different elements that we can point to. There's usually another that can dominate or threaten the security of us in the state action without a foreign threat, technonationalism doesn't seem to work as a discourse. It's a status project, a state building project that binds social actors to the state via various levels of support, protection, restricted choice, and so on. And gets intimately bound up with notions of national sovereignty, which the state, itself, is positioned as the only actor to defend.

Unless the state will build and operate the technology itself, there's usually a politically connected set of businesses that would benefit from the redirected resources that would occur if you pursue a technonationalist policy. Social interest behind it. It works well in concentrated political systems where power is not defused over multiple different domains.

It works as well best when you have third parties that are willing to give voice to the discourse, who are credible thought leaders or as the Russians would say, useful idiots who would send the ideas throughout the political system. And it works best when it's unilateral and non- reciprocal. If everyone else is technonationalist too, it's much more difficult and a source of conflict.

So, it's a very interesting sort of domain. And it's very much bound up with a lot of the current kinds of discussions we're having now about tech-lash, data panics, arrangement syndrome, which I think is pervasive, and it's stimulated by the transitions between multi- polar or perhaps heteropolar world order in the international political system.

So, let's start with the question of what is technonationalism? And how widespread is it in the industrialized and developing worlds. I would like to hear thoughts from the panelists along that line. In whatever order, would you like to start, Ambassador? Do you --

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: I think they're all on. Good stuff. What is technonationalism. I'm sorry of being a government rep and explaining where I came from. It helps in a bit of reflection of the position over the three years and what we have seen.

In 2016-'17, this was put in place by the Australian government as part of a cyber security strategy to represent the fact that cyber issues were becoming a strategic policy part of the strategic policy discussion for leaders, for senior ministers, for business leaders. It was felt as an Australian government needed a senior figure head we wanted to achieve as a country in the cyber sphere and project that to the international environment. You can see the beginnings of that change. I come from outside of government in. So before I was in government, I was looking at trends already and how it evolved.

That's where the position began. I don't think I could have predicted how things had developed over the last three years. Because if we thought this kind of position was important three years ago when we were talking about cyber space and the importance of, you know, law norms, security principles, human rights on-line, and the kind of economic benefits that we wanted from cyber space, well now we find ourselves in a time where technology is front and center of geopolitics. As you said rightly in your introduction. More than ever, there's pressure on positions like this to engage not just with other governments who are taking, if you like more and more broad or strategic tech policy decisions and you're seeing that wherever you look in the world now. And I think a lot of governments now are stepping back and thinking, well, what is it that we want out of technology. What is it that you think about the grand strategy for technology.

It's interesting. I keep trying to scratch my head and think of a good historical example where you can bring together the multitude of different maturing, emerging, critical technologies. And point to a similar time in history where you had quite so many technologies maturing at such a similar rate that will have such a profound impact on the way our economies run, the way our national security is delivered, and maintained. And, also, how our societies actually evolve from what they look like in the future.That's profound questions as policy makers, well, how do we ensure that we're engaging in the right way internationally to ensure and I'm not a -- afraid to use these terms, our values and our principles are there. It means what does tech nationalism mean -- I would not say Australia is a tech nationalist we're taking a more strategic view of how we look at the technology space and what it is that we want out of that in our national interests and societal interests, that, in itself, would indicate the centrality of the issues to any country level it might be.

Obviously, we're not a major superpower. It's not like we're the main tech hub that will be developing a lot of these technologies. But we see that as being a profound role for us to be speaking about these issues, to be trying to assist in the shaping of the environment in which these technologies absorb into our societies and we'll probably get to the conversation in the course of this. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: That was very helpful. Jan-Peter, what do you think?

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: I focus on technology and 5G security. And I would like to talk about concrete examples that I think explain why quickly when we talk about IT security, we end up at national security and in the worst case, in tech nationalism. And in the example of 5G, it's pretty much straightforward. Why is that? Well, if you look at today's ITC systems or the telecommunications networks, you can exploit those in two different ways. You can exploit a vulnerability or a vulnerability in a configuration because of our systems being so complex, we're talking about hundreds of millions of lines of code.

So, there's always a vulnerability somewhere that someone can exploit. That's not the only way. Because against this, we kind of know what to do. We set up requirements from a government perspective. We define security requirements that have to be fulfilled for a particular vendor operator. But then the second way to exploit the network is through legitimate access. Because of highly complex systems, the vendor and operator always need to cooperate to maintain the network to fix vulnerabilities. Typically, the government has a close relationship with the national operator depends on the foreign equipment vendor that might have to oh bide by foreign laws. And that creates the national security dimension. No matter how many security requirements and technical specifications I release as a government, at the end of the day, my operator has to rely on the vendor to not exploit the network.

And, in this dimension, trustworthiness plays a role. I think the Snowden revelations was the best example. What happened in the Snowden revelations was that Europe and China realized because of the technological leadership, they exploited infrastructure for surveillance purposes and law enforcement. That results in a lot of trust in Europe which meant a lost revenue for the U.S. club providers. Then the lobbying started, and we saw open letters from Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and others who asked for government reform. There's a rich ecosystem of technology think tanks in the U.S. who all work on surveillance policy reform. We have apple and other companies bringing the U.S. government in front of the court to fight against breaking encryption, to fight against handing over data.

If I compare the first 1 1/2 years of the debate after the Snowden and the first half of the year around the quality debate, you can see why it matters, the origin of technology matters, because the regulatory environment of a vendor has impact on its perceived trustworthiness.

So, for me, the question is to avoid tech nationalism, it's not about companies like you said, it's about countries, figuring out how to deal in an increasingly softer defined world based on usually reached criteria and how long it will take specifically for China to realize that the Chinese regulatory system has a detrimental effect internationally on its company's trustworthiness.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Very interesting. We'll dive into the 5G case more detailed in the second round of questions.

>> MODERATOR: At this point, we're trying to get on the table a core concept, is tech nationalism a meaningful term, is it worth talking about in this way? Do you have thoughts about that, Jyoti?

>> JYOTI PANDAY: Thank you, Bill. I look at how platforms are shaping the geopolitical order as well as domestic policies. In India, there's been a rise of technonationalism, both in terms of the strategy that is guiding technology policy and also in terms of a larger policy aimed when cooperating with other states or building relationships at an international order. There are several factors that have contributed to India's position. Firstly, the rise of China has proven to technonationalists that it's possible to actually have a technonationalist agenda and use it as development policy. And while doing that, you can also avoid the western led institutional order in place. This, over the years, added support to these ideas. Not that these ideas didn't exist maybe a decade back. They've come to the forefront because of China's stupendous rise in standards, development, in design of equipment and IP, especially, which is ambitions that India shares with the east Asian countries as well as China.

We also have -- we do see India exercising restraint in its policies -- if not in the policies, but certainly the positions of how it demonstrates or talks about this agenda. Because it has to balance its domestic capabilities and the needs of the markets and the kind of cooperation needed to actually bring services to people and meet their demands as well as with the growing agenda to actually be technology leader.

So, we see, for example, on 5G, India has not really come out with a clear position on whether or not we will be participating. But at the same time, it's continued to stress the idea of technology sovereignty, in not just 5G related issues, but also on data and platform governance issues.

We've also seen in telecommunications itself, certain companies that receive backing where policies are favorable to them if not deliberately done but have certainly suited their particular position in the market. And work to consolidate them as leaders. You also see a rise of lobby groups and domestic industry groups that have been pushing forward the idea of tech nationalism. For example, on e-commerce, India has gone back and forth on allowing foreign companies to invest in the market.

So the idea of technonationalism is not just to one kind of policy, it's spread across a wide variety of verticals but it's also evolving in a context that's specific to that particular technology because the markets and the demands and the reality around that technology are at different stages of development.

Between those we have quite interesting and complicated tech nationalist agenda in India.

>> MODERATOR: India is having interesting debates around these issues. Your thoughts?

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: No one accuses us of being practical, withe do day-to-day business in the practical real world. So, looking around at tech nationalism, you can see looking around the world, it exists in several forms. You have technology bans and restrictions, technical security reviews, requirements and technical, you have export controls, international trade agreements, ownership limitation, and data localization requirements and adherence through the domestic data status.

All these, if you look at the framework that exists today, they all interact in a locus of international security, cyber security, and a third category which loosely defined is innovation trade and industrial competition.So, all these forms some might label technonationalism interlace at that.

There are many reasons for states to enact one or more of these. One could argue it's technonationalist. At the same time, it's a reaction to a market need that said we're worried about data privacy in this sovereign territory. There's a balance. Sometimes it goes over one way or the other. So, the trick here is to look at the each of those categories at the loci of the three-main forces, still looking at what the proper balance is.

For Huawei if you look at it, we looked at end-to-end validation, third party validation of security as well as getting it right from the start.But end to end from core to peripheral. If you look at cyber security and trade and innovation, you need a road map. If you're going to best strike the balance between the three loci over which tech nationalists exists. I would headline several categories, one, you have to set security baselines globally, locally and globally. You have to manage the security in your development phase this, is for private companies as well as government. You have to have third party inspection, evaluation and certification. And you have to manage security vulnerability s which will always exist. And you will have to have operation s for management in the operations of in the net and for Telco operators and transparency and accountability of security.

If you take the basic guideposts, there's a lot of ways those are operationalized.

Those are really just the headlines.

If you along around the world, particularly Europe and in the U.S., and Australia as well, there are good news of cyber spaces going in the right direction, sometimes in the wrong direction at the same time. For example, the AS defined with 3GGP gives you the beginnings of looking at credibility in terms of both the vendor products as well as the operational and the networks.

So, you have the beginnings of that likewise in the U.S. The U.S. passed the milestone of the security bill related to procurement last year. It's a good first step. It outlines the criteria. You have what I consider the wrong steps, the balance between the three, national security, cyber security, and innovation, can build a fort. For example, in Congress, two bills passed by the respective House Congress committees which essentially say we want to develop 5G defined as those countries that are mutual of the United States. To quote Barack Obama, hello 1980. Well, is that going too far? Well, in some parts. In some parts of the bills, they say we should have mutual testing facilities and mutual development of innovation, that's good. But if you combine that to a cold war framework for those members in or out, that may be -- if you get to that extreme, which was in the initial draft of one of the pieces of legislation, then you may be striking an imbalance between the three loci.

>> MODERATOR: Very interesting. When you said GDPR could be used as techno nationalism, I saw eyes going up. That might be fodder for discussion when we get to the Q&A. We will try to save 20, 30 minutes at the end for open discussion.

>> MODERATOR: I think we got too far in the weeds. To my mind, the essence of tech nationalism is the perception of technology as an instrument or secondary benefit of national competition. In the globalized market we tried to create with telecom and liberalization of trade, we had companies competing to serve markets which were global and now that concept is being reversed to the extent that we're seeing states define themselves and their power as the object of competition and not so much the consumers and the civil society.

And so, I think the concept of tech nationalism has to be linked to the resurgence of other nationalism, everything from the restrictions on immigration as you see as a backlash in the United States and Europe, you see the trade protectionism and the use of tariffs this, is all part of the same deal. It's the extension of that, the nationalistic logic to the technology sphere.

>> MODERATOR: Fundamentally, it's kind of a statist reaction to technoglobalism.

>> MODERATOR: Exactly. The bad word in Trump's America now is globalist. That's not what you are not supposed to be. What is the internet? It is, you know, inherently global in the sense that it's a standard that is universally applicable for data in the world. So, if you're not in favor of globalization, you're probably questioning the interconnectivity of the internet protocols.

>> MODERATOR: I want to say going forward, we should try to be concise and limit our initial comments two to three minutes so we can make sure we get through all of the questions and leave enough time for people to discuss.

One last question I want to ask in this opening bit and turn it to Milton to lead us to 5G.

There's been in recent years a sub species of technonationalism that you might call data nationalism in which data is viewed as essentially a national resource to be protected by the state. Speaking of India, I have here on my head, the wonderful book, data sovereignty, the pursuit of supremacy, written by four lieutenant generals in India, and three other people tied to the Hindu nationalist government, which basically makes the argument in very strong and floral language that data is the collective property of the people and the voice of the people is the state. Therefore, the state should be involved in data and it's the appropriate function of the states to battle against the forces of technoglobalism and assert its authority over data. How do we view this question? The extension of the technonationalist rationale to the realm of data is an interesting one. Ambassador, do you have any thoughts on that that you would like to share?

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: It sounded like we were pointing it to an Indian perspective.

>> MODERATOR: No, all of us.

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: Data localization, it's one of the top agenda items a conversation about data localization. Where does the Australian government stand on this? We're all about the idea of free flow of data. There are parts of data holdings that we want to have on shore, and long may that remain. But acutely aware that if you're using a really good cloud service provider, the kind of security provisions you would be given with that cloud security provider will be infinitely better than potentially having to deal with all of the data holdings yourself. But, in the international environment, it's becoming used as a very I would say kind of nationalist position, which is while the data is stored here, it's therefore much safer because it's stored here. And in many cases, that could be a misnomer, misleading. Because the kinds of security that is actually provided on shore. And I'm not going to go to name s of particular countries that I'm talking to on that front will not be near what that decent cloud provider can give you.

So, the danger there is you start to make economic decisions that lead you down a bit of a rabbit hole and lead you to worse consequence than if you were looking at the border solutions.

>> MODERATOR: Can I ask you for a clarification. People in Australia say there's certain kinds of data that should remain offshore, if they had guaranteed access to the data offshore, would the location of the data actually matter? Does it matter where the server racks are if you have guaranteed access to the data whenever you need it?

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: I'm talking about a highly classified environment. That is different and it's off the table for discussion. It's a different discussion. But more broadly in government, we adopted a cloud service provider and comfortable with the way that operates and works and the data access that we have to that is stored, it's that we're comfortable with that equation. So, what I'm talking about is the incredibly classified world. And I think everyone would understand why you would want to if you can provide high levels of assurance which you would do for that kind of data, it's obvious why you keep it --

>> MODERATOR: Okay. Jan-Peter?

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: I think the issue is we have to separate between ICT security and privacy and data protection. IT security is an engineering challenge. Data protection is about law. And protection of human rights. In that sense, we have the interesting situation that a company, a cloud provider, whoever, can be stellar in IT security domain, but can be questionable in the data protection regulation. And that's why speaking as a European, I can fully understand that things like GDPR happened. They happened for a reason. Simply because it's not so much -- not so much about the physical location. Of course, it doesn't matter if a server is not the most secure in Munich than in Berlin, but it's about the jurisdiction and the laws that apply to this particular server. So, we have to square the circle that, yes, there's free flow of at an at an on the internet, but, no, jurisdiction still matters. And that, then, leads again quite quickly to tech nationalism and the false argument that data is more secure in a certain location, no, of course, it's not. But it's about the jurisdiction and the -- the legal regime that applies to the data if it's store in a particular location.

>> MODERATOR: Is it a value chain by a global corporation? Is that the collective property of the Indian people that should be protected by the Indian state?

>> JYOTI PANDAY: A cording to one of the policies that was issued in India, it is. But the policy is at the draft stage and there are discussions that are going on. But we need to step back for a moment and with the caveat I'm not pro data localization, there are certain -- India is not the only country that is contesting how these boundaries or rules should be drawn up for data. Data governance is a concern with countries that are industrialized or developing. In India's context, it's been driven, these data localization of data, sovereignty-based approaches are driven by two big arc which is as you know data is really important for all sorts of industries and not just the high technology sectors. And as it gets integrated with the economy, you know, obviously, the kind of control that governments want over -- it has expanded, proportionately. The data in are flowing back to a few countries, companies, and, you know, regions.

And rightly so, India wants to negotiate its place in a more -- in a manner which kind of benefits it a bit more than where it stands to benefit if it continues with the status quo. I would urge people to look at it as a negotiation tactic and not a technology stance that's not open to derision or deterministic.

>> MODERATOR: So, it's a Trumpian move, in other words.

>> JYOTI PANDAY: That's my feeling.

>> Aisle be brief. We have to go through the various markets. We're aware of the jurisdictions, a very important part. As a vendor going forward in the past, you have to look at all vendors, you uh should have third party evaluation of how data is accessed if it's accessed. In Huawei is only accessed at the permission of the customer and strict guidelines. We're not a data holder but vendors have to come under that kind of scrutiny as well. With transparency and third-party verification of who has act says to the data.

>> MODERATOR: Let's drill down to 5G and Huawei and all of the fun things going on.

This is a particular interest to my colleague, Milton, take a lead on this?

>> MODERATOR: I will. So, I don't know about other countries but uh in the United States, there's a tremendous amount of hype about 5G as is it were, I think somebody said, you know, the movement from 3G to 4G, from a donkey to the horse, and 4G to 5G is from a coal engine to a steam engine. I'm aware of all of the G's and what kind of advances they brought. If you add that hype, we are told in the United States that if we are not leading in 5G and China is leading that we will be in trouble. China will have more power than us and take over our country, it's not clear. Then you get into the foot that -- the fact that one of the vendors of the 5G core network equipment is a Chinese company, which is a by all measures a private company. And you get it around whether it's such a company that's private and whether it's really an agent of the state, the Chinese state. And another tech nationalist narrative about it's not really about Huawei or the cyber security of Huawei, it's about the U.S. versus China. The U.S. is going around the world trying to convince every country it can to shut Huawei out of its markets as we have done in the United States.

With that framing, let's turn -- I believe Australia is one of the companies that have banned Huawei from the national network, I think.

I would like to know, you know, what's going on with that? What do you think is being accomplished? Do you view Huawei as an arm of the state? Begin with that?

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: Probably understand that I'm not going to get drawn into that exact kind of conversation. So, what I will do is I'll frame it my way and also and the way the Australian government uses it. You understand the basis. We are reform for making robust decisions on who may or may not provide core backbone infrastructure and rightly said from our national broadband network back in 2012, we made strong decisions about who could provide equipment into the core of our national broadband network, so we have form in this. In terms of the 5G decision, firstly, I'll say it over and over again in this panel, this is as far as I'll get, a vendor agnostic, country agnostic decision we made around sets of principles where we disagree with the framing of this, the 5G is one of the most fundamentally game changing pieces of infrastructure our country will ever introduce. So, you have a requirement as a policy maker to make it clear about who's going to build that infrastructure and have access to that infrastructure. That's the process that we then proceeded to go to.

It's a long-term decision. This is not making one for the next near-term political cycle and if you're going to get voted in or not. When we made the decision in August of 2018, ahead of anyone discussing this issue in the depth we find ourselves in. I don't avoid any kind of 5G discussion, it's always on the agenda. We were well ahead of the pack on this. One of the reasons for that is we had telecommunications firms demanding market certainty.

We said, we'll go ahead and do what we think is right for our business, unless we get direction from you and prefer market certainty to make the right investments for ourselves, our customers, and for Australia. So that was a big impetus to push the decision along.

>> MODERATOR: Certainly, if I were a telecom equipment or an operator in Australia, I wouldn't want to go out and buy a bunch of equipment that the government told me two years later I had to rip out and get rid of.

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: Absolutely not. It makes bad economic sense, doesn't it? And that was a core part of our consideration as well. Whilst it's being framed, it's not the case. Five, ten years down the track when we have a mature 5G network, if we don't have certainty of the provider of that network, we lose our own economic certainty. And all of the risks that we perceive that can be in that network are there, then it doesn't give us good economic certainty as well. How can we trust the underpinnings of our own economy if we feel we have a high-risk vendor wherever they might come from, supplying that backbone infrastructure. So that's the beginning of the conversation. And we can get into some of the intricacies of core, periphery, you know, 5G network and the mitigation approach ifs you want.

>> MODERATOR: I would like to get the Huawei representative involved. I have seen particularly interesting article that circulated in Australia from somebody from Huawei saying your national broadband network is a failure. That is one of the reasons it is is you didn't allow one of the most efficient vendors into the market. Let's hear from you on that.

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: I haven't seen that article. But the sentiments I can agree with. One of the issues is the issue of trust as mentioned before. That is an issue of trust in the country of origin. The problem you have here and you see in the United States as well, when you're looking at other vendors in the industry, where is there global supply chain. If you look at our the competitors, they're a global chain too aside from the depth and breadth of it looks the same as Huawei's, about a third of the United States, about a third from China, about a third from Europe and Taiwan.

So, the opportunities looking at country of origin or headquarters for a specific country is a fallacy. The opportunity by mischief by a sovereign agent or government occurs in that supply chain regardless. So, where do you look to for security. You look at the authorization and methods and the third policy the challenges to both the integrity of the product, the integrity of the operations and the system.

Looking at country of origin doesn't get you far when you look at as quoted by the FCC commissioner, 40% of the U.S. Telecom networks have Chinese products in them. They're not Huawei, I guarantee that. Okay? So, you have to get at an increasingly evolving and faster evolving the acceleration of evolution in terms of technology applies a tougher standard which Huawei has applaud and work s for very hard.

>> MODERATOR: To Jan-period, one of the things we can hear, this will sound crazy but I can point you to the speech where this is said. So, when we buy Chinese high technology equipment, China is they're all agents of the Chinese state and exporting authoritarianism when they buy us.

Turn that question around. When China buys the Swedish Ericsson or Nokia, would we be able to export European liberalism to China if they bought the boxes from Ericsson? What do you think? Do you think we're trading values when we trade these pieces of equipment?

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: I'm not a political scientist. I'm certainly not a China expert. But one thing is for sure, since humans design technology, there are social values in technology. More concrete policy debate around 5G is actually ripping out Chinese equipment out of network does not make you more insecure. It makes you more independent from China, but you still have to do all of the legwork to secure your network. All of the security requirements to improve the personal state of IT security and mobile networks. But ripping out Chinese equipment addresses one particular tech vector.

That's the chance that the Chinese government coerces one of the vendors to compromises a foreign network that uses this equipment. Theoretically, any government has this chance because the company has to follow the laws of the particular jurisdiction, right?

>> MODERATOR: That's the point. That argument works both ways. So, it would apply to Apple, for example.

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: Here's the thing but --

>> MODERATOR: It would apply to Google.

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: Yeah, here's the thing.

This is why I said before that there are similarities or there's benefits to compared to this debate. Then you identify the difference in government. Frankly speaking, we're 1 1/2 years at least into the Huawei debate. In 1 1/2 year after Snowden, we've seen public officials from the U.S. government talking openly about U.S. government reform of surveillance practices. Two or three years ago, we had the head of the NSA giving us information about how the NSA is infiltrating networks. The reform of the U.S. patriot act. We have a substantive debate about transparency of surveillance measures.

So --

>> MODERATOR: So now --

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: One more minute.

>> MODERATOR: Give you a fact there. All of those things you talked about talk about the domestic citizens of the United States.

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: There was also the reform of FISA. So that's not quite right, but anyway, it's about the level of government transparency towards certain practices and legislation and being open about how the government interprets the type of regulation.

Now, just compare this to the Chinese government and what they did in the past 1 1/2 years regarding the Huawei debate. That makes pretty clear that we talk about different types of government, we talk about different -- very different political systems, and these simply have an impact on the perceived trustworthiness of the vendor. They're not equal because they come out of different regulatory environments. So now the ball is, I think, in the field of the governments to have a hard look at their own regulation and accept that the national regulation impacts the competitiveness of their companies abroad because of trustworthiness. And if everything is sovereign in the future, IT security and trustworthiness will play a role in almost every aspect of our lives.

>> MODERATOR: That's one of the key issues here is indeed the equation of the vendor with the state from which it is exported. I think if we can't create a separation between them, then when they really are headed to a world of tech nationalism, because it means that China definitely doesn't trust the United States government. It would be difficult to tell a Chinese person let Google or any vendor set up and own networks in China. We've been fighting this issue since the 90s whether foreigners can own Telekom equipment, telecom facilities in China. They're saying, no, we can't do that. So how do we get out of the box of bordered national systems and bordered national vendors if we accept that logic that we can't trust the state and therefore we can't trust the vendor, even though the vendor's entire business depends on global marketing and sales of its equipment.

>> MODERATOR: Can I ask you, are you asserting China itself has never done this?

>> MODERATOR: No, I'm totally down with the idea that China is very much in to surveillance. They're a little more focused on their own domestic population and their immediate region, but my point is, we know the U.S. has done it.

>> MODERATOR: Talking about keeping foreign companies out of the market. Google, Facebook.

>> MODERATOR: That's what they do based on the same rationale that is now being offered to the United States. That's what I'm saying, we're headed to a logic of tech nationalism if we take that argument too far.

By the same token, I think I want to turn back to Morrissey here, what, you know, can you say to people who talk about the software dependency of 5G and the constant need for updates, and the intimate relationship between a software vendor and the operations. What can you say to reassure people as to why they should trust somebody so connected to the Chinese state?

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: We're not connected to the Chinese state. We're a private company in China. It's proudly a Chinese company and obeys the law s of the country it's in and all of the markets it's in as well. But when you get to the idea, there's a popular perception that when you talk about just in the network area that a patch comes in much as an update comes to your device. That's not the way it works. The ethos of the security system is owned by the operator and they test and retest before any matches go in. That gets more complicate in a 5G world, but that gets back to issue of how do you set up the structures for your security baseline, manage that baseline, and manage the software and manage both the procedures by the operator or the ecosystem, and the inputs from all of the vendors. Recently, a few months ago, the department of defense official said we're looking at a zero-trust network. We would not disagree with that. The head of our global CSO once said he used years ago this to coin a phrase, A, B, C -- accept nothing, believe no one, check everything.

When you get granular, that gets complicated. But in that regard, you take a framework, Huawei has experience like no other vendor. If you look at the centers we opened up in Germany and Brussels, they are methodologies to address the sovereign concerns to give risk assurance and provide avenues of risk mitigation for those questions that come up.

>> MODERATOR: What we hear again and again -- going to ask you one more question. But what we hear again and again is Chinese law requires any company subject to Chinese sovereignty to turn over data and cooperate with the security apparatus of China. What's the firewall --

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: It gets back to the question of whether there's a law they pass or a simple statement, could the party make Huawei do something maligned to the benefit of the customers and those customers' consumers, okay?

The answer for Huawei is no, first of all, he said he would shut the company down before he did anything to hurt his customers. Number two, what is the reach? Our quest and our efforts over the many years has been to take that decision away from Huawei in essence. If you have a strategy whether it's -- well, it should be global, but if each sovereign area, each market, third party verification of the product, third party verification of the operating systems, then you don't -- then you lessen that -- you don't eliminate all risk, because you can't do that. But then you lessen that risk to the manageable.  That would be our answer. We have trust through verification. And that can be done by several parties and we've embraced that in several locales -- embraced that in several locales.

>> MODERATOR: And Jyoti, I imagine the Indians have been shut out. I imagine the Chinese are actively promoting their services in India. How is India in the middle of all of this.

>> JYOTI PANDAY: The main concern with 5G -- that's different aspects of 5G in the technology. You have your design and IP development, your manufacturing of semiconductors or service or standards development. Across that, there was a task force created by the government and it came up with a report on its road map or vision for how 5G should develop in India. And it demonstrates the acceptance of where it stands. It recognizes that in certain areas, Huawei will be indispensable for the cost efficiencies for a country like India that can't afford more trustworthy but more expensive vendors.

It also recognizes that there's a need for cooperation between economies who have managed to break the U.S.-China monopoly on this. And chart its own way forward. But India and China do have history going back years and national security is also an issue that has kind of gained importance in our technology policy making.

So, not just across, you know, policies that are guiding technology development, but the idea that we need to protect our borders. For something like 5G, you uh know, those concerns would be prioritized in my opinion with what needs to be -- what is needed for the domestic market, what the -- and balancing sit not an easy task which is why you can see it's not been a very clear position that's developed because you know, there's security. You can't ignore those aspects and our relationship with China. But the fact that we are a really big country with many citizens, and we need to provide efficient services at low cost to them. So, yeah.

>> MODERATOR: Two ideas I'd like to follow up on here. We only have a few more minutes on this topic before we move to questions. One of this is the business that the Huawei equipment is less expensive. This is a debate in the United States, we have companies that would like to buy Huawei and the federal communications commission has prevented them from doing that through the restriction of the use of Universal service funds. Maybe this is cheaper because the Chinese are subsidizing it as part of the grand conspiracy to take over the world.Is that true? Would anyone like to weigh in on that?

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: I put it a little too comically. But seriously, how much of the cheapness is really efficiency and subsidization.

>> DONALD MORRISSEY: It's not, if you talk to the operators in the U.S. who purchase the equipment, they're attracted to the price, but for the small rural operators who have low budgets. But when you talk to them, they tell you it's the quality of service and the quality of the product. That attracts them. It's some of the Huawei success, customer service focus.

We continue to give to the government back as far as 2012 in the House Intelligence Committee investigation the documentation of all of the MOUs, the finances, all of the bankings we have, including the Chinese banks, a third of the relationships we have global ly with banks. We listed out specifically where the MOUs were utilized, and some could characterize a subsidy.

If you look at the period between 2007 and 2012, Huawei -- they had $100 billion in MOUs with Chinese banks. Less than 2% of that, over a market that we sold about $145 billion worth of KIP, okay? Where a Chinese bank gave credit to the customer, not to Huawei. The issue subsidy is off of the table. We gave the documentation and easily third party verifiable.

>> MODERATOR: Any industry on this, Jan-Peter?

Ambassador?

>> JAN-PETER KLEINHANS: I feel we're jumping around the different issues of the debate. It's got very different dimensions for each, you need different people at the table.

If we're worried about the security, the feature set of the particular vendor of a price point of a particular vendor should not be of a concern. Because we talk about ICT security.

If we talk about from a European perspective, strengthening the ecosystem so 10, 15 years in an emerging technology such as 5G, we still have skin in the game, I want to remind you there's a thick that we want to kind of jump ahead with Cloud providers ten years too late. But if we want to have skin in the game with five, ten year, we talk about trade, we talk about the issue there's no reciprocity in the Chinese market. Opened in 2012, an anti-subsidy and anti-dumping investigation against Huawei. It was dropped after two years of negotiation it was dropped because one found a bilateral agreement with China to have a watchdog to be more transparent in the Capex market, none of it happen. This is the trade dimension of the issue because Chinese players will be able to use economies of scale if that I have a $1 billion customer market. That's not a shortcoming of China or this is just a strategic advantage, right? If this is protected, there are indicator s it is, maybe it's a disadvantage for the vendors. That the trade issue.

If we're worried about national security, we have to talk about, well, how do we measure the trustworthiness of a country and do we end up to state and policy papers that are in regulation that we only buy equipment from NATO airlines or like-minded countries or from rule of law countries or whatever. That's the national security. The tricky thing, the public debate conflated all of this. They jump around, yeah, they're cheaper, there's no reciprocity, when actually you need different people in the room to tackle the IT security issue and the different people in the room to talk about trustworthiness and national security. And you need people in the room to talk about the trade dimension and industrial policy. For governments, looking ahead to emerging technologies, the challenge will be to figure out processes how to find this balance inside of the government across different ministries and bring the right people together.

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: Can I come in as well. Something important on the price point issue when we were thinking through this in Australia as well is essentially the way the 5G network functions, we felt that actually if we felt that trust equation is not present, and because of the nature of, you know, 5G networks are not a traditional cyber security issue, not about defending your networks against adversities coming from outside in, it's about panhandling over the keys to the car and being comfortable with that. So that kind of trust takes an enormous amount of trust in order to do that.

And also, the feed of the high-functioning elements to the network for, you know, driving autonomous cars, it's not like you can allow at any point those signals to drop out.

So, the kind of investments that we thought we would have to make in security was essentially like pouring money down a drain. When we looked to the mitigation strategies that we could put in play in a mature 5G network, not talking about 5G network when it gets established but five, ten years down the like where it's ubiquitous, no core network identified, we felt that the financial investment in trying to provide assurance and security was off of the scale, off the chart. So, for us, the principle of it's low cost, whoever the vendor is, becomes null and void because of the kinds of investments we would have to make for assurance and security off of the back of that. Without any actual real 100% assurance you would provide any level of security at the end of that.

>> MODERATOR: Because of all of the virtualization and software in a 5G network, cyber security concerns are heightened regardless of who the vendor is, we all agree on that, right? And what you're saying is that the origin -- nobody is denying if China is intent upon hacking your network, they will try to do so regardless of who the vendor is. Indeed, the United States has many sorts of famous hacks from the -- from China, which we attributed to China, none of them involved Hauwei equipment or any kind of Chinese vendor flaw or back door.

But what you're saying is the increment of mistrust added by the origin of the vendor was enough to say it's easier to lock them out of the market completely, is that right?

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: The trust equation is key. But actually we did -- we looked at a whole range of mitigation strategies that you could use regardless of who the vendor was and actually none of them worked.

>> MODERATOR: So, you shouldn't have 5G.

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: We should have 5G. We have to have trust. If you can have trust in that vendor, you're in a better position. No one is going to be stupid enough to say you can have 100% security and certainty in anything in life, let alone the tech space, right? So, it's that trust equation that's key.

>> MODERATOR: An impertinent question. It says William Drake said it, not me. So there. Take it away. Bill.

>> MODERATOR: I want to make three quick points. Milton and I are both in agreement that tech nationalism is a growing and highly problematic thing in a world of global value chains and integrated internet-based global electronic commerce. We don't want to see the world moving strongly in this direction at the same time. In this particular case, I'm a little more agnostic than you are. I'll mention three things.

First, you know, let's posit Huawei has gotten where it is by producing cheaply and forming alliances with lots of countries around the world, they're deeply integrated to the value chain of all kinds of companies. That's part of the challenge. So, fine, that's there. Usually if I said at the outset, technonationalist strategies argued by government s often had the packing of private-sector players that there was a real desire, almost a mercantilist desire to sort of use international trade relationships and so on as leverage to benefit the particular companies.

In this case, the American companies are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all of one mind on this. You don't have in the United States a simple situation where the whole technology community got together and said to the trump administration, hey, try to block Huawei, far from it, many have been demanding waivers and getting them. They're so deeply intertwined. It's costing American companies billions.So, you can't attribute this case -- and it's not clear what the glide path to success for American-based suppliers would be if Huawei is locked out and other, like Qualcomm or somebody else is able to step forward. It's just not as obvious to me that the private sector aspect is a strong argument.

With regard to national security aspect, you and I talk about this, I get the feeling that because of various types of people have made these arguments and some of them are ludicrous, therefore everybody is ludicrous. The fact that the trump administration and Peter Lavaro are anti-China doesn't mean that the positions of the intelligence community are ill informed or subject to nativism. I am not a network engineer. I'm not in a position to know for sure. The Brit s have come to a different assessment. But there are other players with other interests.It's not a simple thing to make this judgment as to whether or not they're a national security risk of not. Certainly, pointed out to a lot of people with no offense to you that Huawei has been reported to be helping various authoritarian governments in Africa and elsewhere to surveil their own dissident populations. These things don't help. I don't know how true the story is, but it's out there.

>> Same could be said about Cisco 15, 20 years ago.

>> MODERATOR: Where Cisco comes from, we don't usually nail people to the wall. Okay, one last point I want to make -- we have all through -- and you referenced, we were involved in the debates about liberalization and so on. Here you have a situation where you have one company with enormous market power. And one does have to ask the question, do you want a situation where with a technology as crucial to the future as 5G is, I think it is, do you want to have one company. Why are the kinds of concerns we normally have about monopolies and market power that we used to argue for opening up the markets to competition through regulatory action. Why are those not relevant here? Why are we not concerned about that?

>> If you're not sure what 5G is, you find a host of vendors, Qualcomm, Samsung, Samsung is dominant in antennas, Huawei is more dominant in the router, the core network boxes. Others will be dominant in handsets.

>> No.

>> Yeah. What are you basing your evidence on. My concern is actually not that the Huawei issue in my mind, you talk about the military, that's where my concern comes from. The whole issue of technology development and competition is being subordinated to a military agenda in which the United States thinks that it can maintain its global dominance by subordinating an any count ry or company that might develop the economic clout that we once had.

This is turning into a cold war on which technology development is the -- is the perceived battleground.

>> MODERATOR: If that's the driver, why is it only directed at Huawei. Why isn't that going in all markets with everything American supremacy.

>> MODERATOR: They're starting to do that. They're talking about TikTok being a threat to national security now. It's taken to that point. Again, I would recommend you read the statement by Christopher Lord from the state department in which he says every Chinese vendor of every form of IT equipment is exporting Chinese authoritarianism if we buy it.

>> MODERATOR: We should open it up --

>> MODERATOR: Yes, we should.

>> MODERATOR: You have strong feelings about this. I imagine you do too. We have 17 minutes. Maybe we can stretch it a little more. I ask you to be relatively concise and say who you are prior to making your intervention. If it's a question to a particular person, please be sure that you're directing -- (iindiscernible)

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Daniel, I work for the German security affairs. One perception and one question. The conceptual is the external of -- (indiscernible) that came up a few times, would like to hear more from you on that. It can be a domestic policy but it has a dimension for some states. And there was mentioned China too, we may not like it, but for some in these states, technology is projecting power to others.

In a way, what I would say is we're witnessing now the emergence of two competing spheres of influence. We've long been accustomed to a world in which many states, companies, and individuals were dependent on technology from the U.S., and now we see China rising.

In that, TikTok is interesting. I don't get what it's about. The first time we have a Chinese social network being so successful.

And then a question for Huawei, I read reports that Huawei sued three critics in France over the remarks between the link between Huawei and the Chinese state so basically saying these statements are wrong and that's why we're suing you. Can you comment on that?

>> MODERATOR: The defamation case, yes. Can I make a suggestion? We want to get all of the questions first. A lot of hands.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: We're a small think tank focusing on China. Simple question, but a broad impact. It goes to the geopolitical dimension. It's about decoupling, right? We haven't addressed the decoupling. Would the world be better off if the decoupling proceeds? The scientific, technological trade? Or if it doesn't succeed as we might feel from the trump administration?

>> MODERATOR: Good question. You take that side, aisle take this side.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Looking back to the Smith report in the European parliament, 2001 on the Echelon network. They put forward some pragmatic issues like the mandatory source code disclosure, that the European commission should do more to produce open door solutions in order to create transparency to inspect source code for the wider community. We see a bounce back. With the GDP and the Mexican-Canadian agreement, like old provisions about preventing mandatory source code exposure by governments. Like a zombie demand by the end of the '90s. My question is it a smart thing to do to lay open source code? Not essentially open source but create source coat transparency to open trust that we need insofar as the software is concerned.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. Some of you would refer to me as a useful immigrant. It's not that I'm a Hindu supreme cyst, it's not that I love my nation more than the people of other nations.

If you consider it in the context of the globalism, you have to think of nationalism as imperialism, especially in a technology in modern technology. The tech nationalist approach is called statist. But I would like to emphasize it's a response to the efforts of the state in the WTO and others to entrench the status quo of the concentration in individual markets. If we constitute ourselves as a nation and want our representatives to so, then things about technology that secure our economic future, I don't think we should be called bigots for it or regressive for it.

I also like to say that we've seen the -- given to a few technology entrepreneurs in the U.S. has privatized American democracy and a lot of us in India have seen it happening to our own democracy, including through Hindu supremacy. So we don't want to happen. For which we need policies in our own countries, we need space. We need less restrictions through the WTO and other mechanisms for us to be able to determine our own future.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Next?

>> Professor Chi from the communication University of China. I want to thank you for the discussions and very exciting. There are many elements in this discussion. We need an evidence-based approach. My question can be perhaps direct ed to can we have a multi-holder solution to a multi-dimensional issue?

>> MODERATOR: One would hope so.

>> MODERATOR: You go over there and I'll come around. These two ladies have been waiting for a while.

>> MODERATOR: So has he. You want to take one on that side?

>> I'm at the University of Italy. and I agree. We know the main target of nationalism is not just globalism but the set of rights and minority rights and fundamental rights. Since the 5G networks is based on the -- in the infrastructure, what about the de facto constitutional principle at the end to end argument and net neutrality. What about these?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning, I'm from China. My question is I think it's a bit of thought rather than a question. It's that let's go back to the original. Why it becomes an issue of politics. Before that, we have 4G, Window s operation systems. And China is good with it. We adapted. All from the U.S., according to many viewers that we should consider more in adapting it. But they're comfortable with it. When it comes to 5G, everybody starts thinking because there's this -- national security issues and other issues, the -- I want to discuss why the 5G issue is becoming political? And my personal opinion is let's keep technical things technical. 5G is just a technology. And I don't think that -- and there was ambassador from the Australia, he noticed that the tech companies from Australia they don't want uncertainties from the market. The uncertainties are from the government's decision.

And I want to know why Australia is taking 5G in such a manner? And what's their real concern? Thank you.

>> TOBIAS FEAKIN: Can we start answering those? We're getting -- I think really important on that last question. I do have to go, a hard stop at 2:00. And thank you for your question. I think sometimes it can get lost in the way the media cycle works. I won't say my way, I'll say Huawei. They have a thriving business in Australia. We fully support that. We think that's an excellent part of market diversity. Even though we made strong decisions in 2012 about the national broadband network, whatever Milton might think about that, we still have Huawei provision in our telco sector and in our internet division. It's a fundamental different nature of what a 5G network is which we've been through which led to a fundamental different set. That's that the basis of the decision was made at a technical level.

In the modern world, you cannot now -- look at the journey we've been -- we had to drag cyber security to struggle to get visibility to the top level and struggle to get the job done because they weren't getting the institutional support and the finance for it. Now it became a strategic issue that had to have a policy context, a political context as well. That's the nature of government decision making. So, therefore, it's impossible to separate the two. I've seen that evidence.th it's overprivileged. Very technical. But clearly, you have to have a whole range of elements to any policy decision and key amongst those is your risk appetite. That’s going to have an element in the risk appetite in the political sphere. So sometimes that granularity is lost in terms of the Australian market setting.

>> MODERATOR: Let's let the others do their response and then take the last couple?

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'll try to speak quickly. One thing I've heard you guys touch on a little and I was hoping you could speak a bit more. The concern that I think a lot of the issue is just a company like Huawei installed back doors. That has never been proven, found, there have been some efforts. More of an issue, the company this time Huawei based in a country they have no legal choice but to cooperate and share on a level that their rivals do not. Is that something that we can work with? I'm more worried about mapping infrastructures is something they spend months doing in a network. All that would happen theoretically would be the Chinese government would request Huawei to share that information and share that with an attacker. No one knew there was a participant or where it came from. It would be damaging for the users.

That level of really unknown and how far it's been taken I have not heard discussed much in the public sphere. So, I would appreciate your insights.

>> MODERATOR: I think, one more.

>> MODERATOR: Sorry.

>> MODERATOR: She's been waiting.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm from an organization called IT for change in India. My question is for Jyoti. You were talking about the whole debate on governance and using it to substantiate the struggle between technonationalist perspectives and technoglobalism, right? So my question is we look at the cross border, data flows, what goes as the data globalism position, that's been a position that's further the interest of one economy in the world, the United States, like, for example, the principles made with the office and the silicon valley companies and the data globalism that pushes just like one protects one economy. Why is that not technonationalism but what African union countries or what India is trying to do, why is that technonationalism?

>> MODERATOR: We have very little time left. We want to give you a last word. Ambassador, anything you wanted to pick up? You had a hard stop. Let's go down the line with the rest of you.

>> I'll make it quick. So decoupling, it hurts first and foremost, innovation. And we know that ideas are getting harder to find. To maintain the same level, need more resources to achieve that. That's a natural argument for more collaboration than for less. And I'm pretty much worried we will see a lot of decoupling happening in the American ICT sector.

Regarding source code analysis, open source would be nice for many different reasons. What the UK is doing, that holds together a good understanding of the general quality of a software of a vendor. But it's the wrong tool if you're worried about vectors, simply because of the level of complexity. It's less and less meaningful in lines of code. So, depending, source analysis might be an answer, but not back doors. Regarding the end-to-end argument. What you were asking. Well, the reason is the different history of the telecommunication network and the internet. We don't have end-to-end encryption in the mobile network because historically, the state wanted to have access to communication networks. This is why we have wiretap laws. By definition on the standard level, we had exception al experts for agencies and that makes the network less secure by definition. So there's a very good argument to make in the 5G world maybe we need to adapt a telecommunication network more to the security and to the internet which means don't trust anybody, don't trust foreign networks, take off your security at the end point of the network. We're not doing it right now.

>> JYOTI PANDAY: I'll take the question on spheres of influence. The Indian government's policies, some argue, have been favoring one operator, a random example. In the past few years, there have been certain regulatory decisions that have been taken that inevitably end ed up giving impressions in the markets and advantage in the marks.

That's where the domestic choices are being created where the idea that if it rises, the sheer size and number means India is rising because it's a company equated with the national power and capacity, right? Going back to an issue that we discussed earlier, there are other Chinese companies involved in different layers of technology development and deployment. For example, in India, we have Zeti. They have close links with reliance Geo. Also integrated to our state's broadband, the BSNLs networks. Why is it not the issue of contention? Is it because it's got closer relationships with companies that have being heavily backed by states? These conversations are not clear. But it's a great point that the balancing between the national spheres of influence, they have to be balanced. It's a difficult task for any government to do.

On the question of why these policies on data location are technonationalist and why the benefit s so long flowed back to a few countries or companies is not technonationalist. I think a large part of that answer situated in history of why those countries or certain technologies had an advantage, it's just -- it so happened that these technologies develop in the U.S., you know? The government backing into a -- the investment to developing these technologies. It did happen the U.S. put in a policy saying if you're using U.S. technologies the data must stay in India. It did not draw boundaries around the users of technology. In the same, it's important to acknowledge that India, too, or other countries are now adopting a very technonationalist agenda, whether it is investing in their own capacities, the India stack. We have our local alternatives for payments networks, identity solutions. The historical fact that value flowed back to a few countries and companies should not be confused with strategies to expand a country's influence and question the status quo. That's where the nationalism come in to play.

>> Remember, the Kafar are not the only companies involved in used data. We've run out of time. He'll answer a question personally.

>> MODERATOR: --

>> MODERATOR: To respond to the Chinese professor, can we do more through dialogue? Yes, quite clearly the government s left to their own devices in consultation with the private sector are not having the dialogue that would lead us to a really productive solution. So, I think one of the things we do need to do is think about what is to be done in this space and trying to open up more opportunities for multi-stake older dialogue, like we tried to scratch the surface a little bit with here would be useful.

I want to point out before I let you go that Milton and I also have a session tomorrow at 3:00 to 4:30. Call ed digital sovereignty and internet fragmentation which will touch on the same kinds of issues and different perspectives, etc.

>> MODERATOR: I would like to say that I wanted to do a little advertisement for the internet governance project, the co-sponsor of this session. We have a little brochure up here if you want to know what we're about. We are at the Georgia institute of technology public policy and focused on tech nationalism and globalism and sort of defending the global nature of the internet. I would like to thank our panelists, right to left, ambassador Feakin, sorry we held you up. Thank you for participating, Jan-Peter, Jyoti, yes. Everybody gets a handshake!

[ Applause ]