Western governments seek to lock down 6G before it even exists

A group of Western governments has launched a fresh bid to shape 6G before it's even standardized, unveiling a set of security and resilience principles to bake supply chain controls and cyber safeguards into the next generation of mobile networks.

The announcement, made at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, marks the formal debut of the 6G Security and Resilience Principles under the Global Coalition on Telecoms, a bloc comprising the US, UK, Canada, Japan, and Australia, with Sweden and Finland now joining the club. 

Nothing here is mandatory, but the coalition wants a say early. It argues that 6G will underpin too much of the economy to be treated casually, and says the security model can't simply be inherited from 4G and 5G.

The coalition flags the wider attack surface that comes with disaggregated architectures, heavier software layers, embedded AI functions, and integrated sensing features. It calls ...