Open RAN’s governance vacuum: why architecture without accountability fails

Open RAN arrived with the gravitas of a manifesto. Telecom’s liberation theology - righteous, overdue, and rich with promise. A modular future where operators could finally shrug off the hegemony of monolithic vendors. Flexibility would reign. Innovation would thrive. Sovereignty, long diluted, would be restored.

Because this wasn’t just about radios and code. It was about control.

The power to choose. To shape. To secure.

And it wasn’t irrational. In a geopolitical world increasingly defined by digital borders and infrastructural trust, Open RAN offered a chance to diversify supply chains, protect national interests, and break the stranglehold of a few incumbents. The old model may have delivered stability - but at the cost of dependency, opacity, and diplomatic vulnerability.

So Open RAN became more than a technology. It became a statement. A declaration of independence in a landscape long ruled by dependence.

But declarations are not delivery. And Open RAN, for all its sovereign pageantry, harbours a silent Achilles’ heel: no one is actually in charge.

Because while the architecture may be open, the accountability is anything but clear.

Integration, once derided as vendor control, turns out to have had a darkly beautiful virtue: responsibility. In the old world, a problem had a face. A fault had an owner. You could scream at a rep, invoke an SLA, or - in the nuclear option - change vendors entirely. There was lock-in, yes. But there was also clarity.

Today, that clarity is gone. Open RAN fragments the stack - and with it, fragments the chain of blame. Each vendor handles a slice. Each module behaves on its own terms. But when performance degrades -when latency spikes or handovers fail - where does the operator turn?

The radio vendor says it’s a software glitch upstream. The cloud team points to misaligned protocols. The systems integrator, if there even is one, shrugs somewhere between Jira tickets and ambiguity.

It’s telecom’s version of the Spider-Man pointing meme - except instead of superheroes, you get finger-pointing and downtime.

This is not just a technical inconvenience. It’s a governance crisis in disguise.

And herein lies the great paradox: the quest for sovereign control has created a sovereignty vacuum.

A network of many parts and no master. Everyone integrated - and yet no one accountable.

It’s easy to cheer the end of monoliths. But nature abhors a vacuum - and telecom abhors ambiguity. What good is vendor diversity if it results in decision paralysis? What does sovereignty mean if no one can act decisively when the system breaks?

Open RAN is not simply a technology shift. It is a constitutional experiment. A rewiring not just of base stations, but of responsibility itself.

And today, we are failing that test.

This is not a call for retreat. The dream is real, and the old regime was no paradise. But unless we build governance as deliberately as we disaggregate infrastructure - unless we craft new institutions of accountability, new standards of coordination, new rules for responsibility - then we are not sovereign.

We are stranded.

So before we toast the triumph of openness, we must ask the unglamorous, essential question:

When it breaks - who, exactly, is on the hook?