When government goes online, what happens to citizens who are not? This was central to our thinking when we designed e Sri Lanka. That is why such importance was placed on voice access, on the government information center. But it looks like it has not been fully thought through in the US, according to this NYT story. “You often hear people talk about broadband from a business development perspective, but it’s much more significant than that,” Mr.
Ever since Harvard Forum II, Randy Spence and I have been kicking around Amartya Sen’s notion that ICTs have a net positive liberating potential. I have been the skeptic. But evidence is adding up in Randy’s column: For some of the protesters facing Bahrain’s heavily armed security forces in and around Pearl Square in Manama, the most powerful weapon against shotguns and tear gas has been the tiny camera inside their cellphones. By uploading images of this week’s violence in Manama, the capital, to Web sites like YouTube and yFrog, and then sharing them on Facebook and Twitter, the protesters upstaged government accounts and drew worldwide attention to their demands. A novelty less than a decade ago, the cellphone camera has become a vital tool to document the government response to the unrest that has spread through the Middle East and North Africa.
Talk about coincidence. Just yesterday, on the train to Brussels, I just finished answering a series of questions sent by Voice & Data, the leading ICT industry publication in South Asia. This included a question on whether it would be possible for Indian telcos to do business in China. My answer was “China is a market that is still heavily controlled by the government. I see possibilities for Indian equipment/software/apps suppliers to enter, but believe it is premature to think of Indian operators entering the Chinese market like they have entered African or South Asian markets.
Nokia is big in emerging markets, very big. But marginalized in the smartphone segment. Now the long shot to change that: abandonment of Symbian and adoption of Windows. Why not an open system, one wonders. Microsoft’s operating system software dominates the PC industry.
LIRNEasia has been working on agriculture since 2007; our consultant lead economist Harsha de Silva since 2001. Our focus has not been on the core concerns of agriculture experts, such as high-yield crops and fertilizer, but on how markets can be made to work better, how producers can get more for their labor, how consumers can get lower prices and waste can be reduced. Our colleagues at the Rural Technology and Business Incubator at IIT Madras have been working on a broader spectrum of these issues. It is good to see the key questions getting the attention they deserve in the media. And rural India has far too few temperature-controlled warehouses that could help farmers and the nation build up reserves as a hedge against poor growing seasons.
Gyanendra’s Law states that a government that shuts down its entire national telecom network does not survive. The resignation of Hosni Mubarak affirms the law. Named for the last King of Nepal. Could have been called Jaruselzki’s Law, but Nepal could do with some visibility one thinks. And it is a toss-up which tyrant’s name is harder to pronounce.
How many Internet providers does your country have? If five your government can do a Mubarak. However many you have, if they all go through one or two choke points as in Bangladesh, easy. The big lesson of Egypt may be less the danger of overmighty government than what it shows about how national authorities can (and can’t) close down the internet. The authorities there simply told internet service providers (ISPs) to switch off their computers.
I found it interesting that President Obama’s plans for broadband rest on wireless access. This meshes with our narrative re the path for our people to the Internet. Now come the details. Billions will be spent; but billions will be earned too. “It’s about connecting every corner of America to the digital age,” the president said.
In most countries in the early stages of liberalization, I get asked about the profits operators make and how they should be monitored. I tend to say that the priority should be on monitoring investments (not committed, but actually made) and that it’s not a bad idea for the regulator to have some knowledge about profits. The reason I give priority to investment is because that is what drives performance. If investment declines, the regulator can expect problems. Profits are relevant for two reasons: first, if they are below the norm (more on this below), investments will most likely be affected negatively.
In 2005, we were approached by citizens and professionals to help raise awareness about the dangers of “an inland tsunami,” dam breaches. With the help of committed professionals, a small grant of around LKR 700,000 (around USD 7000) from the local initiatives fund of CIDA, an extremely generous partner in Vanguard Management, and the active involvement of community leaders including many from Sarvodaya, we conducted a participatory research project that remains to this day one of our most successful and rewarding efforts. The end result was a USD 71 million plus World Bank soft loan to help repair 32 of the most endangered dams. If not for that initiative, one wonders whether things would be worse than today, where we are suffering the effects of multiple small tanks breached, but all the big ones safe, so far. I wrote about the need to pay more attention to dam safety and maintenance, after the first flood of 2011.
Our research on the rubber growing industry has taken us into a terrain where there are many government services, not optimally provided, and suggestion about more government services that could be provided to further one or another objective. In this context, the article just published in Ground Views has relevance, as shown by the opening para below: There is little value in simply reiterating complaints about government service delivery since there is an over-supply of dissatisfaction. Instead I seek to provide a set of conceptual tools that can be useful in understanding what government services are essential and why government over-extends itself in service delivery, doing too many things badly. Hopefully, this will help us structure our thinking and expectations relating to government services. The incentives of politicians and bureaucrats are to always do more things, irrespective of need and efficiency.
Telephone networks were shut down when Lech Walesa was leading the workers of Gdansk against the Polish government in the early 1980s. King Gyanendra shut down the mobile networks of Nepal a few years back. It is not the first time that telecom networks have been shut down by governments with their backs to the wall. Reflections on the Egyptian shut down should be read in this historical context. The key difference is that Egypt was perhaps at a qualitatively higher level of ICT use when they hit the kill switch.
LIRNEasia celebrated Sri Lanka’s 63rd anniversary of Independence by discussing how to bridge the information and knowledge gaps in the rubber and pineapple value chains in the country, based on the extensive value-chain research conducted by LIRNEasia researchers led by Sriganesh Lokanathan over the past six months. In addition, we initiated research planning for value-chain research in Bangladesh, India and Thailand that will constitute the Knowledge-Based Economies module of LIRNEasia’s current research cycle. Participants from Bangladesh, India, Korea, Nepal and Thailand participated in the rich discussion. Experts from within Sri Lanka included agriculture and demand-side research specialists. The summary report will be posted shortly.
The NYT reports a possible alliance that appears to be a reaction to the rise of Android. Shares of Nokia, the mobile phone market leader, climbed for a fourth day on Thursday amid speculation that the company may be poised to announce a software alliance with Microsoft designed to revive its struggling U.S. smartphone business. Nokia’s shares have risen more than 4 percent since Monday when an analyst, Adnaan Ahmad of Berenberg Bank in Hamburg, urged the Nokia chief executive — and former Microsoft executive — Stephen Elop, to form an alliance that would put Microsoft’s Phone operating system on Nokia’s advanced smartphones.
Looks like it’s not enough to shut down the Internet. You got to shut down all the mobile networks too. Unedited, raw, anonymous and emotional, Egyptian voices are trickling out through a new service that evades attempts by the authorities to suppress them by cutting Internet services. There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.
Much of Asia’s Internet traffic transits through Egypt. So far, no collateral damage from Mubarak’s attempt to silence his people. We would also note that there appear to have been no significant disruptions to other countries’ traffic passing through Egypt on fiberoptic cables such as SMW-4 and FLAG FEA. As we’ve noted before, the majority of Internet connectivity between Europe and Asia actually passes through Egypt. The Gulf states, in particular, depend critically on the Egyptian fiberoptic corridor for their connectivity to world markets.