Tag Archives: WCIT
With four days to go Bangladesh government consults on WCIT
When I gave a talk a few months back at RMIT in Melbourne about how we engaged governments with policy-relevant research, a senior person in the audience said that we seemed to be having greater success in getting the government of Bangladesh to pay heed to evidence than they did in Australia. Proving him half [...]
The real focus of WCIT is access charges. We have company
From months back LIRNEasia’s focus was on the economic aspects of the WCIT proposals, specifically the mad proposal floated by ETNO to impose access charges on data flowing into a network, the sending-party-network-pays principle. This is the real debate in Dubai according to even early apologists for the ITU. More energy is expected to be [...]
India’s government hears from stakeholders defending multi-stakeholder model
Just a sample: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), which represents the $100-billion IT and BPO industry, has strong views against the Internet governance model of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN), but favours self-regulation. Its president Som Mittal says: “NASSCOM does not favour oversight by an existing U.N. [...]
What contributed most to the telecom efflorescence of the past two decades?
I had treated the claims by the Secretary General of the ITU that the ITU had facilitated the telecom boom with mild amusement. But in the context of the upcoming Dubai WCIT, amusement is not perhaps the best reaction. Let us begin with the actual claim on the ITU website, more nuanced than that of [...]
Attracting investment and encouraging innovation: why sending-party-network-pays proposals before WCIT are wrong
My comments at the Main Panel session at IGF 2012. Question 1: What does it take to attract investment in infrastructure and encourage innovation and growth of ICT services, including mobile technology and how can these technologies best be employed to address development challenges? Indonesia is a success story in Internet use. In a six-country, [...]
Warning: ITU and ETNO asking Internet to sleepwalk backwards
John Kay cites interesting Q&A with a Russian planner who visited the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union: A perhaps apocryphal story tells of a Russian visitor, impressed by the laden shelves in US supermarkets. He asked: “So who is in charge of the supply of bread to New York?” The market [...]
All the reasons for not extending the ITU’s scope to the Internet at WCIT12
The Center for Democracy and Technology has been in the trenches of Internet policy from the 1990s. They played a leading role in expanding the debate over the various proposals to extend the ITU’s scope to include the Internet at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) in December 2012. Here in their latest [...]
Pakistan pulls back from possible violation of GATS commitments?
The termination of voice calls is a form of trade in services which is in many countries, including Pakistan, governed by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The buyer of the service is the company abroad that wishes to terminate voice calls in Pakistan. The seller is the international long distance operator in [...]
LIRNEasia at Internet Governance Forum in Baku, November 6-9
We’re irregular visitors to IGF (Helani went to Rio and Hyderabad; I went to Sharm el Sheikh, . . . ). But this year is kinda exciting, with the WCIT sword hanging over the multi-stakeholder model. I will be on a main panel, talking about the enabling environment. This session is on the 7th of [...]
Facebook users and Facebook servers
Something to think about. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it had 1 billion active users. Of that, 81 percent were said to be outside the US and Canada. The top-five countries in ranked order at this time are US; Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico. Last year, there were lots of reports about Facebook building a [...]
What connected people, termination-rate revenue or liberalization?
Sri Lanka Telecom Growth 1992-2010 The validity of the proposition that extending the existing accounting-rate regime for international voice to Internet traffic in order to provide additional revenues to increase the build-out of broadband infrastructure in developing countries rests on the claim that the accounting-rate regime contributed to the extraordinary increase in voice connectivity over [...]
Op Ed in South Africa points out ill effects of plans to change payment arrangements for Internet
If the ETNO and related African group proposals to charge the networks sending information to Africa go through, those who will suffer will be users in Africa, particularly those with limited budgets and no internationally accepted credit cards. The European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO), representing European telecommunication companies, is proposing that the “sending party [...]
Access network operators subsidizing our broadband use?
For two days, I’ve been immersed in debates around WCIT, here in Accra at the African preparatory meeting. The delegate from Egypt, who had control of the text, was the most committed advocate of imposing a form of accounting-rate regime on data flows. According to him, the data are a burden on the network, they [...]
Harm caused by ill-thought out WCIT proposals to developing world
I just completed a paper that summarizes the key arguments I have been making against the ETNO proposals to impose sending party network pays principle on the Internet. Here is an excerpt from the paper: ETNO wants the ITU to designate Internet content providers as “call originators” and subject them to a “sending party network [...]
Indian government’s support for bringing ITU into Internet governance challenged
Having voted on behalf of the government at ITU forums, I can imagine the discomfiture of Indian officials when their decisions to go along with proposals to bring the Internet under the authority of the ITU are questioned by powerful domestic stakeholders. Opposing the government’s decision of having a global body to regulate Internet content, [...]
Recent Comments