Italy is scrambling for ways to keep Chinese 5G tech under check out of security concerns and to appease the US administration, who was been piling pressure on its allies to do away with it.
Ideally, president Donald Trump would like to see allied nations ditching Chinese companies much like he did; that is, wishing them away through an executive order. Trouble is, he can – American law allows him to circumvent competition legislation – whereas Italy (as well as most European countries) cannot.
The issue is primarily legal, as a qualified source from prime minister Giuseppe Conte’s entourage explained to Formiche.net. Essentially, if Italy were to ban Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE, it would ignite an endless legal battle grounded on competition laws, with no certainty of victory for the State’s legal department.
Therefore, the Italian government must tackle the problem in roundabout ways. The strategy is two-fold: the “cyber perimeter”, a technical oversight system capable of enforcing digital security, and the “golden power”, which is the State’s right to intervene in the dealings of private companies.
As for the first solution, it’s still on paper. The “cyber perimeter” strategy has earned praise from the European NIS Directive (Security and Information) Cooperation Group. However, the perimeter’s oversight centres are yet to be built and the team is still being assembled – meaning that oversight duties are outsourced to private companies for the time being.
Still, the Department of Information Security (DIS) is closely monitoring the perimeter’s development and actively reinforcing digital defence initiatives, signalling the government’s prioritisation of these matters.
With regards to the “golden power”, it involves a committee of technicians who evaluate tech acquisition contracts. As anticipated by Formiche.net, they have readied a series of guidelines that will make it more costly and burdensome for private companies to work with non-European (and especially Chinese) tech companies.
However, those guidelines are “borderline with regards to competition law” according to an expert lawyer we reached out to.
Meanwhile, time is of the essence, as the Italian 5G infrastructure is still under construction. The cyber perimeter will not be operational until late 2020 or early 2021, and despite the red tape placed around Chinese 5G tech, the latter was widely used in the construction of the nation’s 4G network.
More still: by the time that the possible Chinese threat is eradicated, the matter might be obsolete. As an anonymous source from the government told us, the standard duration of a technological cycle is 6 years: we may be discussing 6G (sixth-generation telecoms infrastructures) by then.
Telecommunication company Telecom Italia (TIM) offered a rare show of awareness in early July as it refrained from inviting Huawei in its tender to build its 5G networks in Italy and Brazil. In doing so, it sough to anticipate the government’s indecisiveness at the time.
Now, the government seems to have taken a clearer stance. It all started with the pressure from the parliamentary commission on information security (COPASIR), led by Raffaele Volpi from the right-wing League party (which is leading the opposition). In December COPASIR released the watershed report outlining the security risks associated with Chinese tech.
The historically Sinophile Five Star Movement has now sided with the pro-US Democratic Party, its governing partner. Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Five Star and foreign minister, has highlighted the need for a European solution capable of heeding the US’s requests.
Defence minister Lorenzo Guerini and European affairs minister Vincenzo Amendola, both Democrats, have pushed for the application of the golden power on 5G matters, continuing the work initiated by the League in the figure of its second-in-command Giancarlo Giorgetti.
Seeing as the cross-partisan consensus on the 5G strategy is now reality, the roadblocks to a secure 5G network seem to be “merely” technical. These roadblocks still risk disadvantaging Italy by slowing down the development of 5G networks even as the Western world transitions to 5G.
