Recently, I had to explain my aversion to Intellectual Property law, despite my PhD work being on copyright law and policy. I said it was the most inelegant and dishonest branch of the law. The central dictum is “ideas are free, only expression is protected.” Yet, even lists of addresses and telephones numbers were protected by copyright (this was subsequently changed in the US). There just did not seem to be an intellectual foundation; just a series of post hoc rationalizations.
LIRNEasia exploits the wisdom of the crowd, or at least of the informed crowd. Its launch, back in 2004, was at an Expert Forum that brought in knowledgeable regulators, policy makers, stakeholders and researchers to discuss seeds of research ideas and give ideas for new research. Keeping with that tradition, we brought in a number of experts to discuss some initial cuts on papers being developed in the context of the Ford Foundation funded project, “Facilitating and enriching policy discourse on increasing broadband access by the poor in India”. The meeting was attended by senior officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Chairman Dr Rahul Khullar and Advisor Mr Sudhir Gupta. The topics covered included regional specificities of broadband development, contributions that could be made to an improved investment environment by licensing policies, the opportunities presented by the “digital dividend” repurposing of frequencies for broadband development and metrics to assess efficacy of broadband policies.
Robert Pepper is the vice president for global technology policy at Cisco. He has elaborated “a grave threat” in ITU’s “fatally flawed proposals to update” the way Internet would be regulated. While analyzing the impact of revising International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), he said: It could break the global Internet into unconnected islands of national or regional networks, extend telecommunications regulations to computing, or lead to onerous government regulation of the Internet……….. Some proposals for the WCIT would control the routing of Internet traffic in the name of security but would balkanize the Internet and threaten Internet freedom.
One may wonder if the Afro-Asian thinkers are crying wolf while addressing SPNP doctrine of ETNO. They should listen to J. Scott Marcus, an accomplished researcher and consultant: “The interconnection proposals that are publicly known, specifically including the ETNO proposal, are ill-advised and should be rejected.” Marcus further said: Turning to the interconnection proposals in general, and the ETNO proposal in particular, we think that they are particularly ill-advised, both in terms of what they are seeking to do, and in terms of their likely consequences. The Sending Party Network Pays (SPNP) principle put forward by ETNO is likely to negatively impact social welfare, and not “just” by hampering innovation.
African scholar Dele Meiji Fatunla is respected beyond Africa. He has slammed ETNO’s proposal as a threatening element to the economic future of Africa as well as the developing world. And LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva’s analysis on ETNO’s doctrine shines, along with OECD’s researcher Rudolf Van Der Berg, in Fatunla’s arsenal. A report, written by Rohan Samarajiva, former Director General of Telecommunications for Sri Lanka and CEO of Lirne Asia, an ICT think-tank, predicts dire consequences for the development of the internet and Africa’s prosperity if governments do shift to a “sending party network pays” model. The report says that a global agreement to move to a “sending party network pays” policy would have a detrimental effect on regions by providing a blank cheque to providers to raise prices for consumers.
Most people have heard of the Internet of things, where devices such as refrigerators would communicate with other devices or with people. But this is about sensors embedded in cows talking to the mobile phone of the farmer. When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes.
LIRNEasia has raised alarm after two camps have ganged up behind the ITU to command and control the Internet. It immediately drew the attention of Africa and CEO Rohan Samarajiva was invited to Ghana. There he explained how the authoritarian governments have planned to put fingers on the Internet’s on/off switch. And ETNO, a club of European state-owned telcos, foolishly aspires to be the robber barons of Internet. It received wide media coverage and we have posted them in this blog accordingly.
I recently presented LIRNEasia‘s methodology on measuring broadband quality of service experience (QoSE) at the Expert Group on Telecom/ICT Indicators (EGTI) meeting held on the 23rd & 24th of September 2012 in Bangkok, Thailand just before ITU’s annual World Telecom/ICT Indicators meeting. The methodology suggests tests are carried out on multiple times of the day and on multiple days of the week to account of peak / off peak variances and that throughput, latency, jitter and packet loss are measured. In addition to the proposed method, ideal and minimal requirements (such as the number of domains being tested, locations, operators, broadband plans etc.) were also presented. The use of a diagnostic tool (software) as opposed to equipment that sits on the network was proposed.
Hutchison Global Communications (HGC) has predictably bagged the first “permission” to provide international data and voice services with “an authorized representative” of state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). The HGC-MPT partnership dates back to 2007. Brushing aside the western sanctions, HGC kept transporting Myanmar’s overseas voice and data traffic using the Sino-ASEAN terrestrial link named GMS Network. And HGC has proudly publicized it. Now the government of Myanmar has blessed the corporate wedding of HGC and “an authorized representative” of MPT.
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 network pays” principle be written into an international treaty. This proposal would force content providers to pay local telecom operators for the delivery of user-requested data. Users from countries not seen as having large revenue potential could even find themselves cut off from some content. Alternatively, attractive content may have to be moved behind paywalls, making them inaccessible for those without credit cards.
The spectrum refarming process is picking up speed in the US. The auction process will have three parts. In the first, the F.C.C.
We’re celebrating 25 years of the Montreal Protocol. I was in Ohio when the Treaty was signed and I wasn’t too hopeful it would work. The whole thing had started with a research paper published in 1974, just 13 years before the treaty. It’s very hard to get an international treaty. Even harder to make one that actually work.
Ghana’s Communication Minister Mr. Haruna Iddrisu said his government “will not allow any economic cost or value to the internet that will limit access” and ubiquitous access to Internet is a “nonnegotiable” issue. In a stakeholder meeting Idrisu also said, “One ingredient that had helped Ghana to enjoy the stable and peaceful economy was access and use of ICT and that the Government would not interfere in what its Constitution has guaranteed.” The government’s statement came within few days after Ghana News Agency ran a story based on LIRNEasia CEO Rohan Samarajiva’s article, “A Giant Step Backward or the Way Forward? An Analysis of Some Proposals before the WCIT.
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 cause harm to the network, and the access network operators are subsidizing them. His views extend to content: he believes that the content is in some cases inappropriate. I could understand this attitude from an executive of an old style unreformed voice telephony company, longing for the good old monopoly days when the network was operated for the benefit of the managers and employees and the customers were an annoyance to be tolerated.
When I was asked by LMD about barriers to growth in the ICT sector, I mentioned parents who are not open to their children becoming entrepreneurs. Here is a supportive story from India. In Bangalore, a city at the forefront of many social changes in India, the young are leading a vibrant start-up culture that has taken root over the past few years, much to the dismay of a generation of parents. According to these elders, respectfully called “Aunty” and “Uncle” in India by the younger generation, the natural progression after college is to work for a short time, to get an M.B.
Earlier this month I was asked by a panel moderator what the most critical factor was in accelerating broadband use. My answer was mobile apps. If people have interesting things to do with their devices, they will upgrade to smartphones, they will pay the usage charges, etc. This is also why I decided to put some effort into beating back ETNO’s misguided effort to squeeze the Internet into a dysfunctional accounting-rate regime. So where are these apps coming from?