The 2012 UN e government survey is out. Sri Lanka is still second in the South Asian region, behind the Maldives. But its world ranking has slipped even further. Now it’s 115th. It was 111th in 2010.
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. organisation like ITU. Internet and infrastructure have to be in the hands of expert organisations with proven experience.
After some time, we at LIRNEasia are beginning to engage again with e gov, which I like to say is an acronym for effective government. So I came across this new service provided by the government of Saudi Arabia where male guardians are sent an SMS by the govt when their wives leave the country. Earlier, it had been necessary for permanently dependent females (i.e., all females) to carry with them a “yellow clip” wherein the guardian had consented to their departure.
This is a battle that was brewing. Mode 1 trade in services is when the supplier is in Country A, the buyer is in Country B and the transaction occurs over some means of communication, usually electronic. Given the costs of telecom these days, it really does not make sense to open warehouses/server farms in every country. So you have centralized means of delivering services that cross borders electronically (Google, for example) and one-way by post (e.g.
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 the Secretary General: While the ITRs were a compromise at the time, they turn out, in retrospect, to have been instrumental in facilitating continuing privatization and liberalization of telecommunications markets. These trends were further facilitated by agreements made in the Global Agreement on Trade in Services in 1994 (Annex on Telecommunications) and in 1996 (Reference Paper on Basic Telecommunications Services). The ITRs contained a key provision in Article 9, Special Arrangements.
Internews is a US based organization that engages in hard work of helping the producers of news and information do their jobs better. Not in the space that LIRNEasia occupies, so our interactions have not been many, but my impression has been of people who are trying to make a difference by working at ground level, quietly. Therefore, I took seriously the op-ed written by its CEO on Myanmar. Here is an excerpt. For now, the reforms and the apparent end of censorship have unleashed a veritable media gold rush in Myanmar.
UNESCO and ITU have formed the Broadband Commission. Now in an unprecedented intervention the UNESCO’s Director for Freedom of Expression and Media Development, Professor Guy Berger, has warned ITU that the amended ITR will not only “threaten freedom of expression” but may also “incur extensive public criticism that could impact upon the UN more broadly.” In his letter to the Secretary-General of the ITU, Dr Hamdoun Touré, Professor Berger points at Article 5A.4 of the new ITRs which says that member states must “ensure unrestricted public access to international telecommunication services and the unrestricted use of international telecommunications, except in cases where international telecommunication services are used for the purpose of interfering in the internal affairs or undermining the sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity and public safety of other States, or to divulge information of a sensitive nature.” Professor Berger has voiced UNESCO’s concern about the words “information of a sensitive nature”, arguing that this designates a new criterion for limiting access to services that was not recognized in the older rules.
There were lots of political fireworks when Bangladesh got elected as one of the Council Members in ITU two years back. I welcomed it cautiously. Because, I am aware of the institutional incompetence of Bangladesh in contributing as a Council Member in the ITU. I kept asking the officials in BTRC and MOPT about their activities. All I heard was the travel plans of attending various meetings and workshops across the globe.
The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has condemned ETNO’s proposal to implement a mechanism for online content providers paying the cost of carrying their traffic over telecom networks. Based on its own market analysis in terms of net neutrality, BEREC said it would be inappropriate to include such rules in the ITR. Strictly speaking ETNO is advocating an “interconnection philosophy” based on transmission services being provided across the Internet all along a defined path between endpoints, much like the connection-oriented circuit switched “old generation” PSTN networks and voice services on which ETNO members built their businesses. This is fundamentally at odds with the principles of connection-less packet switched networks underlying the success of the Internet to date, based on decentralisation and simplicity. BEREC believes that the benefits of a connection-less network risk being unravelled by the widespread adoption of connection-based practices on the global Internet.
Several Canadian and Sri Lankan organizations held a workshop in Peradeniya on Oct. 15 to provide an introduction to and basic training in the use of free and open source software (FOSS) to enable agricultural community groups and individuals to implement and use easily-accessible tools for communication, information collection, knowledge sharing, data visualization, and interactive mapping. Participants were introduced to four Free and Open Source software platforms that are in wide use around the world: FrontlineSMS and FrontlineSMS:Radio for text messaging, Freedom Fone for creating small scale interactive voice response systems with telephones, and Ushahidi for creating and curating interactive maps with geo located reports from mobile devices (i.e., crowdmapping).
In light of growing talk of a new divide that is emerging, this time a broadband divide, two indicators are beginning to assume greater importance: Internet users/100 and broadband subscriptions/100. Not all Internet users have Facebook accounts, but all Facebook users are, by definition, Internet users. Some people may have multiple Facebook accounts, but not as many as those who have multiple SIMs. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the number of a country’s Internet Users exceeds the number of Facebook accounts from that country. In October 2012, there were 1,448,160 Facebook accounts from Sri Lanka.
I like to point out in all the talks that I give on broadband that it’s the slowest link that defines the experience, as in the strength of the weakest link is the strength of the chain. Here is an excellent illustration that uses an example that is close to home (or in the home of most people reading this blog): A number of Internet service providers, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., have recently upped the maximum speeds of broadband they offer residential customers to as much as 305 megabits per second. And Google Inc.
Rebecca MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief in Beijing and Tokyo for more than a decade. She has cofounded Global Voices Online, an international citizen media network. Her first book, “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom,” was published in January 2012. Rebecca fears the proposed revision of ITR by ITU threatens the freedom of press. Take, for example, a basic requirement for media organisations: the ability to reach and grow their audiences.
Deyata Kirula or “Crown of the Nation” is an annual showcase of the achievements of the Government of Sri Lanka. For the second consecutive year, the Ministry of Skills Development is presenting the skill standard for solid waste operations assistants. In 2012, Deyata Kirula was held in Anuradhapura in the North Central Province. Over 170 solid-waste workers representing the 26 local authorities in the province were awarded for solid-waste operations assistant National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) Level 2 certificates. In 2013, the exhibition will be held in Ampara in the Eastern Province.
Google has released a new version of Chrome fitted with WebRTC. It is a collection of real-time communications protocols that includes everything to turn the browser into a high-end communications system. The browser-based calls will be clearer than mobile phone, as the former is equipped with built-in high-definition audio codecs. Mozilla and Opera are Google’s partners in this open project. Ericsson and Telefonica have already endorsed it.
The pre-auction era of 3G licenses in Europe can be dubbed as the Stone Age of telecoms. Vendors, operators and policymakers launched a notoriously misleading campaign about mobile Internet. Making mobile video calls and watching TV in mobile phones were central to Europe’s 3G hype. It made the governments rich from auctioning the 3G spectrum at billions of dollars. But the industry went broke and innovation was stalled.