The South Asia Democratic Forum conference held on October 11, 2012 featured a talk (delivered in the form of a video) on the pernicious effects of the certain proposals before WCIT 2012. The talk is here.
The ITU publishes an annual ranking of ICT development, with ICT access and use being given 40 percent of the weight each and a sub-component known as skills, made up of education indicators, given 20 percent. Of the SAARC countries, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are not covered. Of the six that are covered, Maldives and Sri Lanka hold on to their 72nd and 105th places, showing no improvement nor regression. Bhutan falls back one place to 118; India three places to 119; Pakistan two places to 127 and Nepal brings up the rear at 137th place (a regression of 3 places from 2010). It is not that their scores have not improved.
It was just two years ago that Bangladesh was elected to the Council of the International Telecommunication Union. One would think that Bangladesh would be treated with added respect as a result. However, it appears that it has been excluded from the ITU’s annual compilation of the ICT Development Index for 2012. It is not completely absent, being included in the comparisons of price baskets. But on the main index, it’s absent.
Behavioral economics has brought to the fore the power of the default. As big data makes it easier to understand people’s actual behaviors and guide their choices, the power of the default is beginning to be fought over. Interestingly, it’s Microsoft versus the rest. Next came an incensed open letter from the board of the Association of National Advertisers to Steve Ballmer, the C.E.
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 server farm in Northern Sweden.
Thought-provoking piece, based on company-survey data, about how place is becoming irrelevant to work. BTW, the tax principle that Bangladesh is praised for was implemented in Sri Lanka maybe five years ago. The online work is already changing how some governments think about labor. Last May the government of Bangladesh decided to classify online work as export-related commercial income, free of taxes, instead of as a taxed offshore remittance. The idea, Mr.
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 the past years by providing funds for building out the infrastructure. As can be seen from the Figure above, the rapid growth that led to the elimination of the persistent waiting lists in Sri Lanka commenced in 2002-03. It was in this same period that the government liberalized the international telecommunications market, issuing multiple external gateway licenses. The inflow of revenues from the accounting-rate regime fell sharply. Yet connectivity exploded.
Technocrats (and people like us who emphasize the rational) would prefer a rational, integrated solution. But we rarely get greenfield opportunities. In almost all cases vested interests dominate. So the reform that gets done is imperfect and messy. This is the message P Chidambaram, Minister of Finance seems to be giving to NYT.
We’re playing around with some ideas about connectedness. We want to use big data to see what real (as opposed to administratively mandated) communities are. Using Facebook’s analytics page, did some surface analysis of SAARC and ASEAN. It is very clear that India is the center of SAARC, being the country that most Bhutanese have friends in (value of 5 given) and the country with the second-largest number of friends for Bangladeshis, Maldivians, Nepalese, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans (value of 4). I guess the only surprise there is Pakistan.
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.
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.
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.
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.