Two years ago the New York Times reported that global internet traffic has been increasingly avoiding the United States. It means the US intelligence establishments were increasingly losing control over the other countries’ cyber data. That was the twilight of George Bush 2.0 era.

Now the US and 39 or more countries are secretly negotiating a new global agreement called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

The objective of ACTA is suspected of exporting the flawed US Digital Millennium Copyright Act worldwide. ACTA fanatically favor only the copyright holders more. It legally forces the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to act as de facto “copyright cops” and be made responsible for “disabling access” to web sites deemed by various unelected and unaccountable vested interests to be carrying counterfeit or pirated content. Digital right adviocates and Technology companies have criticised this secretive move.

Rob Pegoraro wrote in the Washington Post, “This proposed agreement is what I thought it was: an intellectual-property land grab that would cement some of the uglier aspects of American law, export those provisions to other countries, possibly import even worse provisions back into the U.S. and, in the bargain, spawn a new and largely redundant international bureaucracy.”

“And you thought the notion of ‘world government’ was just a figment of the imagination of brain-fevered right-wing Republicans? Seems not,” explained Martyn Warwick in Telecom TV.

Let’s see how the public policy stalwarts fight it back.

One of the most controversial of the recommendations that came out of this work is that which said one should go gentle on regulating quality. The main reason we said that was because we believed that the poor needed access in the form of different price-quality bundles; that if high quality standards were imposed by fiat, the only victims would be the price-sensitive consumers who would get priced out. While we did not take an explicit position on net neutrality those days, we now have to, based on what we have learned. We do not believe net neutrality is appropriate for emerging economies, especially for the BOP.

Major decision has come down from the US courts on the Obama appointees’ attempt to mandate net neutrality by law:

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that regulators had limited power over Web traffic under current law. The decision will allow Internet service companies to block or slow specific sites and charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users.

The court decision was a setback to efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to require companies to give Web users equal access to all content, even if some of that content is clogging the network.

Chief among its goals, the F.C.C. wants future broadband investment to be focused on the areas where gaps in service remain. It will direct this investment in part through the Universal Service Fund, a program for telephone and Internet access, costing $8 billion annually, paid through a phone bill surcharge. Over time, the subsidies for Internet will increase and those for phone will dissipate, with the knowledge that people can make online calls.

“Some of the details are lacking, particularly on Universal Service Fund reform,” said Dan Mitchell, a vice president for the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association, a group that represents rural providers and worries that the proposals to change phone carrier costs will curtail the providers’ abilities to expand infrastructure.

The FCC is asking broadband and smartphone users in USA to use their broadband testing tools to help the feds and consumers know what speeds are actually available, not just promised by the nations’ telecoms, reports wired.com. Starting yesterday (March 11), netizens can go to the FCC’s Broadband.gov site, enter their address and test their broadband speed using one of two testing tools.

Broadband connection testing isn’t new, and is freely available online, but this might mark the first time that individual tests help to lead to informed policy making, says the writer Ryan Singel.

That is not correct Mr. Singel, as nothing is new here. LIRNEasia has been doing it for at least one and half years.

Broadband users in Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka and New Delhi could have used our own broadband test application AT-Tester, from www.broadbandasia.info the same way now the US broadband users will do. They could even enter that information to our central database, which can be then analysed.

That’s not all. Just read the following para from the same report. Don’t you find anything familiar?

Crowdsourcing this data is a brilliant move, given that telecoms have long fought against telling federal regulators what areas they cover and at what speed, arguing that information will be used by competitors to poach their customers. The data can also be used as a way to prevent telecoms from over-promising and under-delivering on upload and download speeds. If you listen closely you might actually hear the telecom companies hitting the backspace key to revise the speed numbers on their promotional fliers.

Isn’t this exactly what we have been doing?

FCC,  welcome to the club!

Read the full story in wired.com here.

Here are few more news reports on FCC’s move.

FCC releases Internet speed test tool – Reuters

FCC Unveils Speed Test - Bloomberg Business Week

FCC Launches Broadband Test Site for Consumers – PC World

For example, will Washington offer tax breaks or other export incentives? While businesses may clamor for them, these would be a setback for freer trade — after all, for years it has been America that has been hectoring other countries to end their subsidies to exporters. Will Washington try to pick winners in the global marketplace, like green energy? More often than not, this kind of industrial policy wastes money, fosters inefficiency and creates few permanent jobs.

So, let’s assume the government does its part to break down barriers and open more foreign markets — what can our businesses themselves do to improve their performance? First, no company should assume that its services can’t be exported. Today’s technologies allow us to do things that were unthinkable just a decade ago. For example, surgeons are using high-speed data connections and robotics to operate on patients thousands of miles away.

The inaugural Mobile World Cup, hosted by the South Korean cellphone maker LG Electronics, brought together two-person teams from 13 countries who had clinched their national titles by beating a total of six million contestants. Marching behind their national flags, they gathered in New York on Jan. 14 for what was billed as an international clash of dexterous digits.

To ensure a level playing field, LG handed out identical mobile phones — one with a numeric keypad and the other with a keyboardlike QWERTY pad — weeks in advance for practice. The basic rule of the competition: copy phrases streaming across a monitor correctly, with the required capitalization and punctuation, as quickly as possible. Whichever language players chose, words were selected so that each would type the same number of characters.

We pointed out that LIRNEasia’s recommendation about imposing contention ratios of 1:20 (Business) and 1:50 (Residential) had been adopted by the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), with minor changes.  TRAI mandates contention ratios of 1:30 for Business and 1:50 for Residential.

The advertisement also presented “models to emulate”:  India and Singapore.  Even though the two countries have set different parameters, they exemplify good regulatory practice.

We also compared value for money in Sri Lankan broadband in relation to Canada and the USA.  This clearly demonstrated that Sri Lankan users get less value for their money than the North American users, in contrast to the situation with regards to mobile telephony.

The advertisement also invited users to download the free AT tester software from www.broadbandasia.info.

The advertisement.

As neither we nor most of our readers do not have access to the thread it was posted, we like to continue the discussion here.

__________________________________________________________________

Hi people,

I come from one of the ten largest economies in the world, with nearly 200 million people, 8.5 million km2, and 5.564 municipalities, where 94% of the people do *not* have access to any form of broadband – the “B” in the famous BRIC acronym.

I am just coming out of the IGF workshop “Expanding broadband access for a global Internet economy: development dimensions”. I left the workshop a bit shocked with the concepts expressed, not by the AT&T representative (who not surprisingly said AT&T subdsidiaries countries other than the USA should be considered local companies because they employ local people), who as usual is just doing his job in defending the so-called “market”, but by other speeches which seemed to completely ignore that, in most of our contries, there is a de facto monopoly or cartel situation regarding the telco infrastructure, and that public policy ought to centrally take this into account if the aim is to universalize broadband access with quality to all families.

One of the speakers (from LIRNEasia) said that “lower prices require lower costs” and therefore one should just “phase out universal access levies and rationalize taxes”. I retorted that pricing per Mb/s of ADSL broadband in São Paulo might be 65 times higher than the same price charged by the same company in London — and therefore no amount of levies or taxes would justify such scandalous pricing difference, not to speak of the much lower QoS.

I suggested that, instead of eliminating the universal service funds (whose levies are a very small portion of price composition of broadband), we should insist on reforming policy regarding the use of these funds. The reply I heard was that it makes no sense to keep funds that are not used or are squandered (!!). Impact of the fund’s levy in Brazil is just 1% of the price of the fixed line telephone connection — its impact in the price of broadband (a separate bill even if the service is not unbundled) is zero.

There was also a recommendation that we should be “gentle on QoS” to facilitate things regarding universalization of access — fascinating. Again, examples abound in which telcos guarantee only 10% of the nominal contracted rate, and in practice this might be even less. Should we just agree with absurds like this in the name of “it is better to have something than nothing”???

And then there is the crucial question of unbundling, central to the policy debate in the developed countries as it directly impacts universalization through an effective reduction of prices for the final user. It is a major challenge for broadband public policy in developing countries, where regulators are usually in the hands of the telco cartels. The word was not mentioned (not a single time) by anyone in the panel, as if irrelevant to the development dimensions of broadband.

The speaker also mentioned that the “need” to reduce costs for the big telcos would require reduction of international bandwidth costs. One of the two big carriers in Brazil, a Brazilian conglomerate, owns redundant fiber running from Brazil to Miami in rings passing through countries in the Caribbean and Central America. They own their own international link, in summary. So do the other carrier in the de facto duopoly — a major operator from Europe. This does not make any difference in pricing for the final user, although it does contribute to their profits in Brazil being far higher than in Europe for example.

Finally, the fascination with mobile. Of course the AT&T speaker started his talk by waving a fancy iPhone to the audience — mostly natural for a commercial wireless giant. But the infoDev representative and others mentioned mobile as a “solution” for the poor, and not even bothered to separate the discussion in the two main topics here: first, the mobile phone as a connectivity device to enable the user to fully use the Internet through a friendly human-machine interface, be it a common PC or special equipment for people with disabilities; second, the phone itself as *the* alternative to the full user experience that a PC or similar might provide. It seems the agency bureaucrats are satisfied with having two castes of users: a small minority of the ones who can fully use the Internet as it evolves requiring more and more multimedia capabilities on both sides (server and client), and the ones relegated to a small device on which it is barely possible to type small messages.

In the first regional LA&C preparatory meeting for the IGF, in 2008, a representative of a major telco said we should not worry about bringing the next billion to the Internet — they have cell phones, so they are connected already, problem solved. I wonder if this executive would take the place of a carpenter looking for a job, who has to compose and send by email his CV together with images of letters of recommendation to his would-be employer, and had nothing but a cell phone (smart or not) to do it. Not to speak of comparing the executive’s thin-fingered hands of a pianist with the big callous hands of the carpenter.

fraternal regards

–c.a.

Hundreds of daily updates come from friends on Facebook and Twitter, but do people actually feel closer to each other?

It turns out the size of the average American’s social circle is smaller today than 20 years ago, as measured by the number of self-reported confidants in a person’s life. Yet contrary to popular opinion, use of cellphones and the Internet is not to blame, according to a new study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

In fact, people who regularly use digital technologies are more social than the average American and more likely to visit parks and cafes, or volunteer for local organizations, according to the study, which was based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,512 adults living in the continental United States.

The study found some less-than-social behavior, however. People who use social networks like Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors and 26 percent less likely to provide them companionship.

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

To add more salt to the wound, in reality the throughput to a local server in North America is what should be compared with throughput to an international server for South Asia. (given what the respective users access most) This will further widen the gap.

There is good news too. Quality has improved in terms of jitter and packet loss – most within acceptable ranges – and RTT is not that bad. North American latency levels are certainly more acceptable, but South Asia has come a long way since the days we have started.

Real Mobile Broadband testing has to wait for few more months as the applications are still being developed, but simulations using PCs (probably this will be the last time we do that) the performance levels were promising.

The full report can be downloaded from here

Anybody could have guessed this. It is unimaginable that entire world will go through a recession simultaneously. Not everyone can be losers for too long. There should be winners somewhere. For example, what would the US firms that find their human resources costs, logically do? They outsource to Bangalore. So the BPO industry in India grows. Peter’s loss becomes Patel’s gain.

The Economist today presented the evidence.

MOODY’S Economy.com has mapped the geographic spread of the worst global downturn since the Depression. All of North America is in recession now. In Europe only Norway, Slovenia and Slovakia have avoided a similar fate, although Moody’s reckons these countries are on the brink of a downturn. Emerging Asia looks cheerier, although the small export-led economies of Singapore and Hong Kong are shrinking, as are Malaysia and Thailand. Even the BRICs are looking a bit diminished, with downturns in both Brazil and Russia. At least India and China are growing (the latter at a pace that is causing worries about overheating). Data for Africa are spotty but the continent’s biggest economy, South Africa, is in recession. The IMF expects global GDP to shrink by 1.4% this year, with rich countries’ economies contracting by around 3.8%.

THE special cellphone, set on vibrate, begins to whir. Throughout North Carolina, anonymous teenagers are texting questions to it about sex.

“If you take a shower before you have sex, are you less likely to get pregnant?” asks one.

Another: “Does a normal penis have wrinkles?”

A young girl types: “If my BF doesn’t like me to be loud during sex but I can’t help it, what am I supposed to do?”

Within 24 hours, each will receive a cautious, nonjudgmental reply, texted directly to their cellphones, from a nameless, faceless adult at the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, based in Durham.

After the United States, the ranking found that Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway rounded out the five most productive users of connectivity. Japan ranked 10, and Korea, 18.

And while wired and wireless broadband networks used by consumers lagged other countries, the United States ranked No. 1 in the world for technology use and skills by consumers. (This was measured by comparing countries on five measures: The penetration of Internet use, penetration of Internet banking, wired and wireless voice minutes per capita, SMS messages per capita, and consumer software spending.)

To see the full methodology, look at page 38 in this report.

Lirneasia’s senior research fellow Payal Malik had published the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) – the index for market concentration – in the telecom markets of South Asian countries, last year. Lower the HHI, higher the competitiveness in a market.

India’s turned out to be the lowest at 2000, as compared to Indonesia’s 3400 and Thailand’s 3900. Among the western markets, USA’s stood at 2529 and UK’s at 2309. In fact, India’s competitiveness is close to the US anti-trust guidelines’ threshold for market trustworthiness – a HHI between 1000 and 1800.

“With that level of competition, the assumption that price cut by one telco will be followed suit by all its counterparts in the market is valid,” Ms.Malik said. “So, it can be expected that RComm’s move will mark yet another nosedive in our mobile tariffs.”