Trustworthy Networks Start With Trustworthy Societies

In 2018, the University of Oulu launched the world’s first dedicated 6G research programme. The same year, Finland ranked among the top three countries on earth for rule of law, press freedom and absence of corruption. That may be less of a coincidence than it looks.

Tuija Brax has spent much of her career asking what makes societies function honestly. Finland’s former Minister of Justice, now Director of the Rule of Law Centre at the University of Helsinki, she visited the University of Oulu earlier in April to talk about democracy, data and disinformation.

The data she brought told a consistent story. The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2025 found rule of law weakening in 96 countries against improvement in just 46. The V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026 puts average global democracy back at 1978 levels, with 74% of the world’s population now living under autocratic rule, up from 48% just a decade ago. Freedom House recorded the twentieth consecutive year of declining political rights and civil liberties. Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2025 found only 31 of 182 countries had significantly improved since 2012, and 122 now score below 50 on a scale of zero to 100.

Finland sits near the top of all four. Third in the WJP index, behind Denmark and Norway. Joint top of the Media Literacy Index 2026, alongside Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands. These rankings don’t describe the same thing, but they do describe the same underlying conditions: institutions that are trusted because they are genuinely accountable, legal frameworks that actually constrain power, and information environments where citizens can, most of the time, establish what is true.

Those conditions shaped the 6G Flagship. Marja Matinmikko-Blue, the 6G Flagship’s Director of Sustainability and Regulation, who moderated the event, has spent years making the case that regulation and governance aren’t added to a network after the engineering is done. They’re part of the design. “How the values that drive technology development and use are aligned with societal structures and regulations, varies between countries.” Her work, including the white paper connecting 6G development to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, starts from the premise that a network’s social and political context shapes what it can and cannot deliver. As a concrete example, regulations defining who gains access to spectrum, determines in practice who the technology serves and how. Brax was making the same argument from a different direction.

Brax quoted Barack Obama’s 2022 Stanford address on how modern disinformation operates. The goal, Obama argued, is not to convince people of false things but to generate enough noise that citizens lose confidence in their ability to know what is true. That strategy runs on infrastructure. It ran on the networks already built, and it will run on whatever replaces them.

6G will be deployed into all of the environments Brax described, not just the ones that look like Finland. What that means for how the networks get designed is a question nobody has cleanly answered yet.

Tuija Brax spoke at the University of Oulu on 9 April 2026. Her presentation drew on the WJP Rule of Law Index 2025, V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, Freedom House Freedom in the World 2026, Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, and the Media Literacy Index 2026.