6G: From Connectivity Infrastructure to Guaranteed Digital Services
Sixth-generation mobile networks are approaching a structural inflection point. Five generations of vendor-led architecture have left operators dependent on platforms they cannot fully modify and artificial-intelligence inference layers they cannot audit. This article argues that 6G should reverse that trajectory by reordering five priorities: control first; customer outcomes before peak rates; business guarantees before megabytes; software-driven operations with governed agentic artificial intelligence; and technology in service of those priorities. Four contributions operationalize the thesis. The Control Compact is an own-federate-consume taxonomy that allocates architectural sovereignty by strategic value. The Guarantee Economy is a six-tier outcome-priced model aligned with IMT-2030 usage scenarios and converts operator control into enforceable service-level objectives. An operator-grade Network MCP Platform shows how autonomous agents could enter the service-based architecture through a governed tool plane with auditable hooks for identity, charging, lawful intercept, enforcement, and digital-twin validation. A standardization section states Rakuten Mobile's public position on AI-agent scope, radio access, migration, non-terrestrial networks, physical layer, core, and spectrum. The framework distinguishes operational evidence from national-scale cloud-native Open RAN and core network deployments, standards-grounded extrapolation, and forward-looking architecture and commercial proposals. A three-phase roadmap separates standards milestones from operator deployment targets and identifies validation gates and stakeholder implications.