China does not need to beat America in every lab or factory to gain a lasting technological advantage. Sometimes it only needs international bureaucrats to bend the rules of the road in its favor.
Americans tend to think of global power in terms of aircraft carriers, semiconductor fabs, and missile systems. Beijing takes a broader view. The Chinese Communist Party turns technical standards, global regulatory bodies, and obscure treaty conferences into instruments of statecraft. A handshake deal reached in shadowy bureaucratic backrooms can reshape billion-dollar markets.
That is why the World Radiocommunication Conference, scheduled for Shanghai next year, deserves far more attention in Washington. The conference will bring together the world’s telecom regulators to debate the future of wireless communications. One of the fiercest fights will take place offstage, as American and Chinese officials work the hallways trying to pull other countries toward our conflicting visions for the 6 GHz spectrum band.
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Here in the United States, the first Trump administration unlocked that band to unleash faster, more reliable Wi-Fi for consumers and businesses. In China, the CCP has kept the band locked down for the exclusive use of party-controlled wireless carriers.
The question for the world is straightforward: Will countries follow the American path and open 6 GHz for Wi-Fi? Or will they follow China’s path and reserve it for cellular networks?
The answer will shape a massive global market for telecom hardware.
America made the right choice in 2020, when President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission appointees opened the full 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi use. That decision reflected a core American instinct: let innovators compete, let consumers choose, and let new technologies scale without forcing every connection through a government-favored gatekeeper.
The results are already visible. Recent analysis from ABI Research quantifies how enterprises are moving rapidly toward next-generation Wi-Fi because their networks must carry more devices, more data, and more mission-critical applications. Hospitals, factories, schools, warehouses, and office buildings need capacity and reliability — and are finding it through 6 GHz Wi-Fi networks.
The FCC’s prescient 2020 decision also helped keep U.S. companies at the forefront of the global Wi-Fi economy — an equipment market dominated by American names such as Broadcom, Amazon, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Expanding 6 GHz Wi-Fi abroad gives these innovators more room to chase sales and grow.
China’s preferred outcome would massively boost Huawei — the CCP-aligned global telecom giant whose equipment is banned in the U.S. as a threat to national security. Every nation that reserves 6 GHz for cellular networks expands Huawei’s potential market. Every country that allows Huawei into its core communications infrastructure gives Beijing more leverage in future geopolitical fights — and more potential access to snoop on sensitive network traffic.
American policymakers must resist the temptation to treat spectrum policy as inside baseball for telecom lawyers — or as just another domestic fight between competing industry segments. The U.S. cellular carriers that opposed the FCC’s 2020 6 GHz decision are still lobbying to overturn it; they’d prefer that federal agencies repurpose a big chunk of the band for licensed cellular use instead. But this self-interested agenda risks sending mixed signals abroad at exactly the wrong time. As China works to convince other nations that 6 GHz should belong to cellular networks, the U.S. cannot afford confusion about where it stands.
Encouragingly, Trump administration officials are sticking to their guns on 6 GHz. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr expanded unlicensed use of the band earlier this year, while National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Arielle Roth has put the world on notice that the U.S. will fiercely defend our 6 GHz Wi-Fi policy in Shanghai.
That clarity must be a unanimous national position, not merely an agency sound bite. Foreign governments need to hear the same message from Congress, the White House, agency leaders, and the American private sector: the U.S. opened 6 GHz for Wi-Fi because it fuels free-market competition, innovation, and growth. We are not turning back — and we are certainly not giving up and following China’s lead.
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Republicans and Democrats should have no trouble agreeing on this. Conservatives in particular should recognize what is at stake: America prospers when open markets, private innovation, and limited government create room for entrepreneurs to build. China prospers when the state bends global markets toward the party’s national champions.
WRC-27 in Shanghai will test whether Washington understands that distinction. The U.S. should arrive with confidence, discipline, and unity. The message should be simple: 6 GHz Wi-Fi is an American success story, the world should follow our lead, and we won’t surrender a strategic technology advantage to Huawei or the CCP.
George Landrith is the president of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and the author of Let Freedom Ring… Again: Can Self-Evident Truths Save America from Further Decline?