LIRNEasia has been vocal against the feudal doctrines of ITU and ETNO on dwarfing the Internet. The duo has staged a Twitter Storm on October 10. They have, predictably, failed to justify the command and control of Internet. While responding to LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, the ETNO chief Luigi Gambardella said, “We know that today Internet economic model is not sustainable” (Click on the thumbnail at left).
Dennis Weller and Bill Woodcock have recently coauthored a new OECD report, “Internet Traffic Exchange: Market Developments and Policy challenges.” Excerpts are as follows:
- Every day one Exabyte of data is said to travel over the Internet – enough data to fill 300,000 of the world’s biggest hard disks or 212 million DVDs.
- If the price of Internet transit were stated in the form of an equivalent voice minute rate, it would be about USD 0.0000008 per minute—five orders of magnitude lower than typical voice rates.
- The existing Internet model works extremely well, has boosted growth and competition and brought prices for data down to 100,000 times less than that of a voice minute.
- A survey of 4300 networks, representing 140,000 direct exchanges of traffic has found that 99.5% of “peering agreements” were on a handshake basis, with no written contract and the exchange of data happening with no money changing hands.
2 Comments
sharanga
I’m not following this. How does the OECD report link to what Luigi Gambardella said? You haven’t made the connection.
Abu Saeed Khan
The first bullet tells the size of Internet. Luigi has been preaching the reversal of subsequent three bullets. Sending party doesn’t pay in today’s Internet. Luigi says it’s not sustainable. I hope it’s clear to you.
Sri Lanka at WAIC 2026: Aligning with a More Inclusive Vision for Global AI Governance
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026 was held in Shanghai from 17–20 July and brought global attention to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), as well as the increasingly important question of who gets to shape the rules governing it. This analysis examines the alignment between Chinese President Xi Jinping’s speech and Sri Lanka’s Deputy Minister of Digital Economy Eng.
LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager Merl Chandana at NewsFirst Sri Lanka’s Face To Face Programme
LIRNEasia Senior Research Manager and Team Lead for Data, Algorithms, and Policy (DAP), Merl Chandana, was interviewed on NewsFirst Sri Lanka’s Face to Face programme on 9 August 2026. The interview focused on the wonders and dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), covering a recent cybersecurity incident where an experimental agentic AI model developed by OpenAI was manipulated to execute multiple attacks on Hugging Face.
More Than a Wheelchair: The Case for Mobility That Actually Works
The economic exclusion faced by people with mobility disabilities in Sri Lanka is substantial. Although Sri Lanka has made genuine investments in this area, yet, for many wheelchair users, the journey to work, school, university or a vocational training center remains difficult.
Links
User Login
Themes
Social
Twitter
Facebook
RSS Feed
Contact
9A 1/1, Balcombe Place
Colombo 08
Sri Lanka
+94 (0)11 267 1160
+94 (0)11 267 5212
info [at] lirneasia [dot] net
Copyright © 2026 LIRNEasia
a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank active across the Asia Pacific