LIRNEasia » Harvard University

Incentives not intervention

Rohan Samarajiva — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 10:51:36 +0000

That is the phrase I brought back from Harvard Forum II that I attended on behalf of LIRNEasia a few weeks back. In 2003 they held Harvard Forum I (which, among the LIRNE.NET group only Alison Gillwald attended). One of the results was the funding of organizations like LIRNEasia that seek to remove policy and regulatory barriers to the use of ICTs.

This time the focus was on “what next.” Implicit was the question whether we need to now focus on applications since the access problem had been solved. In my first intervention I used data from Burma/Myanmar to show that the access problem had not been solved everywhere (interestingly this resonated with Amartya Sen who had spent his youth there). Many more interesting things were said particularly by the other Nobel Laureate in the room, Michael Spence (I have a LBO column coming based on that discussion), but still the phrase that stuck in my mind was that of Laurent Elder: incentives, not intervention.

Here is what Hernan Galperin of DIRSI had commented. He has included all the links to the real-time blogging and commenting that Ethan Zuckerman did.

Burning down Myanmar’s Internet firewall

Tahani Iqbal — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:08:16 +0000

Asia Times Online

Most Internet accounts in Myanmar are designed to provide access only to the limited Myanmar intranet, and the authorities block access to popular e-mail services such as Gmail and Hotmail. According to the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint research project on Internet censorship issues headed by Harvard University, Myanmar’s Internet-censorship regime as of 2005 was among the “most extensive” in the world.

The research noted that the Myanmar government “maintains the capability to conduct surveillance of communication methods such as e-mail, and to block users from viewing websites of political opposition groups and organizations working for democratic change in Burma”. An ONI-conducted survey of websites containing material known to be sensitive to the regime found in 2005 that 84% of the pages they tested were blocked. The regime also maintained an 85% filtration rate of well-known e-mail service providers, in line with, as ONI put it, the government’s “well-documented efforts to monitor communication by its citizens and to control political dissent and opposition movements”.

Myanmar’s technical censorship capabilities were also reputedly bolstered by the regime’s procurement and implementation of filtering software produced and sold by US technology company Fortinet. According to ONI’s research, the regime was as of 2005 continuing to seek to refine its censorship regime, which showed no signs of lessening and could worsen as it moves to more sophisticated software products.

Questioning ICT Myths

Indi Samarajiva — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:58:21 +0000

At an ICT policy consultation meeting in Dhaka, organized by the APC (http://www.apc.org/), two participants prompted a much needed reality check for a room full ICT4D professionals. Mridul Chowdhury, a research affiliate at the IT Group in the Berkman Centre, Harvard University also a director of D.Net, kick-started the discussion with a presentation that questioned some of the key assumptions that that form the premise to much work in the ICT4D space. For instance, a lack of community information can be resolved by building a telecenter; poor governance can be solved by introducing ICT systems into governments; a lack of market information can be solved by building e-commerce portals. Chowdhury stressed that certain underlying factors had to be taken care of first; the information gaps that we’re really trying to solve need to be identified; the governance process needs to be reformed before throwing ICTs at it, etc. ICTs cannot solve all the world’s problems, and before one tries to throw ICTs at it, one should really assess whether ICTs are really the optimal solution. Nalaka Gunewardena, Director at TVE Asia Pacific continued the discussion in his aptly titled presentation, ‘Rhetoric vs. reality.’ He raised a pressing question: do good policies necessarily imply good implementation? His response to this was not necessarily, and often, not. The overarching issue is that unless certain conditions are fulfilled and critical issues resolved (for instance infrastructure bottlenecks), ICTs alone will not solve the problem at hand (even if it is at all the optimal solution) and even good policies will not achieve the desired outcomes. It therefore appears that many of the common assumptions, which are the premise of many ICT4D projects, to which much hope and funds are pinned, need to be scrutinized if development goals are to be reached.