I was invited to speak on “Political Changes in Asia: Are We Better or Worse Off?” at the Asia Liberty Forum in Kuala Lumpur. Since Asia is a pretty big place and people understand principles better when presented in terms of concrete examples, I decided to focus, first on Sri Lanka, and then on trade policy debates. The presentation is here. The key point I wanted to get across was that informed citizens and policy intellectuals have a responsibility to engage in policy reform; it is not enough to sit back and expect the political leadership to drive the reforms alone.
When I was presenting some of the findings from our Myanmar survey, someone from the audience raised a question about how much poor people were spending on smartphones. The implication was that it was a luxury. Here are some insights and stories pulled together by the World Bank. If you look inside the bag of any refugee on a life-threatening boat trip to Europe, you see a few possessions that vary from one refugee to another. However, there is one thing they all carry with them: a smartphone.
Our survey caught these trends last year. But the stories are good too. “The Myanmar market has K30,000 smartphones on offer, but people want using phones to be easy,” he said. “The cheaper phones don’t have good touch-screens and can’t store a lot of data compared with K200,000 handsets.” “Now mobile phone users are going online, using apps,” he said.
Helani Galpaya was the lead for LIRNEasia on the major policy/regulatory issue recently decided against Facebook’s Free Basics by TRAI. In her reaction piece in the Council on Foreign Relations blog, she has some interesting comments on the role played by evidence in the debate: But for many, this “Free Basics as an on-ramp to the Internet” argument wasn’t enough to mitigate the perceived danger that users (particularly the poor, who have never used the Internet) might think Facebook is the Internet and never venture outside Facebook’s walled garden. It seemed that no amount of evidence could convince them. It turns out that the poor are using the text-only version of Facebook on Free Basics to save money by using it as a substitute for voice and SMS communication, like many African countries, and therefore saving money. Detractors also didn’t seem convinced that merely using Facebook could increase democratic participation as in Myanmar, where whole campaigns were conducted on Facebook, or allow people to exercise their right to freedom of assembly.
BSNL has been favored child, being fed enormous subsidies and fees by different governments in power in India. But it appears the hunger is insatiable. BSNL and MTNL have not been compensated by the government for the spectrum they surrendered three years ago. The Forum has also demanded that a payment of Rs.1,250 crore be made to BSNL, a sum already sanctioned in lieu of the discontinued subsidies and the Access Deficit Charge (or ADC, envisaged as a cross subsidy by private mobile operators for use of landline services run by BSNL), which was discontinued in 2008 on a recommendation by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Daniel Solove’s work forms the basis of our recent analyses of big data privacy. It is impressive that he pulls together a comprehensive analysis of the implications of the passing of Justice Scalia for the third-party doctrine within a day. Justice Scalia’s opinion in Jones actually provides very little protection against government location tracking. Only the physical affixing of a GPS device to a car violates the 4th Amendment according to his view. But under the third party doctrine, the government can readily obtain GPS data from third parties that provide GPS services without a physical trespass to the car.
More evidence of Myanmar leap-frogging, thanks to entering the game at a later time. The Norwegian telecoms operator’s fourth-quarter results show a net subscriber growth of 1.9 million over the past three months. This equates to a SIM market share of around 37 percent, the company said. International competitor Ooredoo has yet to announce its Q4 results, but counted 4.
We only have the work of our MIDO colleagues in the realm of dealing with hate speech. Everyone knows it’s bad, but one man’s hate speech could be another’s free expression. But here is an approach, untested as yet. I am sure Phyu Phyu Thi will be interested in any responses. Counter speech was the main topic when Ms.
This may be realistic, but somehow disappointing. Google India boss Rajan Anandan thinks 50 percent of Internet use in the future will not be interactive. I wonder what the people who campaigned against Free Basics and access to the “full” Internet think of this. While some people make the case that cost of data in India is among the lowest in the world, Anandan pointed out that you had to look at it in terms of the overall income. In the US, the cost of data is 0.
The International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the United Nations in 2006 according to the universal declaration of Human Rights and international conventions on human rights. Sri Lanka has signed the convention in 2007 and the proposal made by S.B. Dissanayake, Minister of Social Empowerment and Welfare, to ratify the convention for the benefit of Sri Lankan disabled persons, was approved by the Cabinet of Ministers. Link to Cabinet decision.
Today, Sujata Gamage made the main presentation at the memorial event in honor of Dr Sunil Gunaratne. Her presentation was based on more than 12 months of engagement with the ongoing effort to reform Sri Lanka’s electoral system. One of the key recommendations is for the development of an interface where political parties and interested parties could see how they would be affected by the various reform options. I was thinking we missed the opportunity of the Code 4 Good organized by Internews a few months back. But perhaps, it will still get done.
Consultations are underway for devising a new Constitution for Sri Lanka. One of the contributions to the discussion, published under the heading of “A new Constitution: What’s in it for young people?” had this section: According to the latest statistics there are over 2.8 million internet users in Sri Lanka. The Internet should not belong to only 2.
Helani Galpaya, CEO of LIRNEasia presented ongoing work on “Open Data & Agriculture” at the “Workshop on data system processing”, held at Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute (HARTI) on 29th January 2016. The meeting, chaired by the Minister of Agriculture, Hon Duminda Dissanayake, was organized under the National Food Security Program. The main objective of the discussion was to bring stakeholders with interest on providing ICT based solutions to Agriculture into a common platform and to avoid possible duplications of work. LIRNEasia was invited to present their work along with Department of Agriculture, the Coordinating Secretariat for Science Technology and Innovation (COSTI), University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Dr. Athula Ginige-University of Western Australia, GIS solutions (PVT) Ltd, Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), Salasine Organization and Agricultural & Agrarian Insurance Board.
After cannibalizing the hardware businesses – may it be phones, laptops or network equipment – the Chinese Internet outfits are breathing on their western counterparts’ neck. Alibaba has greater reach than Amazon: Chinese are happier to buy online than Americans. Ecommerce accounts for about one-tenth of all retail sales in China compared with about 7 per cent in the US. Tencent’s WeChat messaging and calling app has more than 650m active monthly users and is catching up rapidly with Facebook’s WhatsApp, which has just passed the billion-user mark. Facebook is blocked in China, which has allowed microblogging website Sina Weibo to amass more than half a million users who not only post but use Weibo as a social media site similar to Twitter.
They are aiming to go to 95% from the present 60%. This poses an interesting question about what to base coverage claims/targets on: geography or population? The commitments made by Telenor and Ooredoo were in terms of geography. But as shown by MPT, population is what makes intuitive commercial sense. Myanmar’s MPT aims to cover 95% of the population with its 3G network by the end of March.
As befitting an article on BIG data, the writer of this piece, done for Center for Internet and Society, is liberal with superlatives. A colossal increase in the rate of digitization has resulted in an unprecedented increment in the amount of Big Data available, especially through the rapid diffusion cellular technology. The importance of mobile phones as a significant source of data, especially in low income demographics cannot be overstated. This can be used to understand the needs and behaviors of large populations, providing an in depth insight into the relevant context within which valuable assessments as to the competencies, suitability and feasibilities of various policy mechanisms and legal instruments can be made. However, this explosion of data does have a lasting impact on how individuals and organizations interact with each other, which might not always be reflected in the interpretation of raw data without a contextual understanding of the demographic.