When reading some of the nonsense constituting this initiative occurring in Washington, one wonders what planet the proponents live on. It is like peering through some perverse wormhole back to a 1990s Washington view of the world that saw “the internet” as some salvation for all the problems of humankind. For a world now focused on rolling out 5G virtualization infrastructure and content-based services and meshed devices, the challenges of cybersecurity and network-based harm to society, the initiative makes the U.S. Administration seem utterly out of touch with reality. Simply goofy.

First, there is no such thing as “the global internet,” much less a future for it. It was essentially a Washington-based political-economic construct of the 1990s to leverage a profoundly broken connectionless messaging technology from a quarter-century earlier across some network infrastructures that was perceived to advance U.S. interests at the time. While some U.S. political-economic interests were arguably advanced in the short term, they pale in comparison to the price paid in terms of significant, exponentially expanding cybersecurity vulnerabilities, cybercrime, massive propagation of disinformation, and societal dysfunction enabled among society’s marginal despicables and by foreign adversaries.

Second, the global internet construct is based on the bizarro notion that the nations of the world are willing to abrogate and discard 170 years of public international law along with the sovereignty over their communication networks and the traffic and services on them. No rational nation is ever going to do that. Indeed, the U.S. government itself, over the past several years, has been exercising its sovereignty in malignant ways - busily banning equipment and service providers on its own domestic networks from countries that fall out of favor. Legally, the existence of a “global internet” construct is a non-starter even among friendly nations.

Washington should instead be following and substantively collaborating in the considerable existing global dialogue in the worldwide ecosystem of venues developing the virtualized 5G global communication network infrastructures, services, and provisioning requirements of the future. It has been largely absent and becoming increasingly insular. Living in a failed fantasy internet world from decades ago serves no one except a legacy Washington lobbying community. It misdirects needed focus and resources from activities that provide sustainable future benefits. The behavior also continues the dismaying international ineptitude of the previous U.S. Administration.