Born free Internet will breathe its last once the authoritarian governments-led ITU-members sign a revised ITR at 1330 GMT today at the end of fortnight-long WCIT 2012 in Dubai. United States and its West European allies along with Australia, Japan, Philippines, Poland, Egypt, Kenya and Czech Republic are, predictably, not signing this controversial treaty. It will give the ailing ITU a monstrous power to regulate Internet the way it governs international phone calls. This phenomenon is feared to damage the digital economy. Yet the control-freak governments are tightening their grips over the net in the name of national interest.
The big unspent piles of cash in the Brazilian and Indian universal service funds are well known. Less well known are the under-performing funds in small countries. Nepal is one. Having the money extracted from mostly poor customers in one of the poorest countries in the world, an LDC, is particularly offensive: While he vowed to break the trend that prevailed so far, Jha also said he has already started groundwork to utilize Rural Telecommunication Development Fund (RTDF) for expanding fiber optics network so that everyone could have access to broadband Internet service and none remain deprived from benefits of advancement in the field of telecommunications. According to the officials, NTA presently has Rs 5.
I am all for the issuance of new licenses in Nepal, a country with a population of 30 million and fewer mobile operators (officially) than its South Asian peers. But the justification is novel. Seems to solution the described problem afflicting Nepal Telecom is some kind of program to reform it, including, but not limited to, privatization. But anyway, good that something is being done. Of course, there is many a slip between cup and lip.
The most important work will get done in the early hours of the last night, as was the case in Melbourne. Lots of countries are lining up to speak on Article 6, the one that has been our focus. Also unresolved are some important economic issues. Perhaps the most potentially game-changing aspect here involves language that would replace the end-to-end principle (where network operators agree to carry all traffic from its origin to destination without discrimination) with a “sender-pays” system. (You may remember similar issues coming up in the United States during the net neutrality debates.
I keep being asked by journalists why well-meaning people like ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure are supporting the “access charge” proposals, that are warmed over ETNO rejects. I really do not know. I can only speculate. It may be that he has spent too much time in the rarefied climes of Geneva talking to CEOs of European telecom operators and participating in their “Twitter Storms,” and not enough looking at research on what is actually driving Internet use among the poor in his continent and mine. My colleague Alison Gillwald heads RIA which conducts such research.
The government’s negligence has deprived Bangladesh of joining the second submarine cable consortium way back in 2006. As a result, the country has wasted a rare opportunity of directly accessing the transpacific link to the United States of America. Officials behind compromising the country’s competitive edge have never been investigated. The private sector has been crying foul for resilient international connectivity ever since. It remained unheard.
Mobile termination prices have always been low in South Asia. S Asia also has among the lowest retail prices for mobile in the world. Therefore, the substance of the policy brief that had formed the basis of a successful intervention by our sister organization RIA to the Parliamentary Committee on Communication has little relevance to this region. However, the exemplary use of comparative data and analyses of company annual reports in relation to media pronouncements in this policy brief is worth a look. Congratulations to RIA on a job well done.
It is not that South Asian telcos are not moving in this direction, but I have not seen as good a description of a comprehensive solution to the “pain point” of international data roaming from them. I invite them to submit links if such descriptions exist. Telecom New Zealand has announced that, as of December 21, 2012, customers will have a simplified global-roaming charge rate that will dramatically cut the costs for using data while overseas. The rates for post-paid customers start at NZ$6 per day for data if travellers are visiting Australia or Christmas Island, or NZ$10 per day for the US, UK, Canada, China, Macau, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia. For the rest of the world, the rate varies between NZ$2.
The civil society advocates attending the WCIT 2012 in Dubai have jointly protested the lack of opportunity to effectively participate in the conference process. In a letter addressed to the ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré, they have identified three urgent matters: the lack of any official standing to the public comments solicited prior to WCIT at the ITU’s invitation; the lack of access to and transparency of working groups, particularly the working groups of Committee 5; and the absence of mechanisms to encourage independent civil society participation. The letter, which is co-signed by nearly 20 other organizations, says: Unfortunately, the ITU has provided no mechanism for inclusion of the public comments in the WCIT working papers. They are not made accessible through the document management system (TIES) in the same manner as proposals submitted by members, nor are any of the comments reflected in the numerous working drafts reviewed by WCIT delegates. As a consequence, delegates appear entirely unaware of these comments, and the diligent work of civil society organisations that accepted the ITU’s invitation to participate through the public comment process is in danger of being lost.
It appears that previously expressed hopes for a good law on telecom emerging from the recesses of Nay Pyi Taw were overly optimistic: Information-technology experts and entrepreneurs have proposed amendments to Myanmar’s telecommunications bill that was made public last month. Khun Oo, president of the Myanmar Computer Federation, said the information and communications technology sector could develop rapidly, but it could also decline because of the new law. Ye Yint Win, president of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association, said: “According to Section 4 Article 7, every telecommunications services will need a licence. Web-development businesses, e-commerce businesses and individuals who want to sell their applications will also need licences. So [the law] needs to separate and identify the services that need licences and those that do not need licences, as it can harm freedom of creation and small enterprises.
Moscow has claimed Cairo’s partnership in its plan to command and control the Internet. Nashwa Gad, a department manager at Egypt’s Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT), has, however, flatly denied: Our name was associated to this proposal by mere misunderstanding. Egypt has always been supporting the basic Internet principles that … the Internet should remain free, open, liberal. We do not see that the ITU mandate deals with the Internet. If the veil of diplomacy is removed, Egypt has officially accused Russia of cheating in the global stage.
For more than a year, we have been writing about the possibility of a Putin Putsch at the ITU, that there was no effective counter narrative, and that gullible characters like Sarkozy were being sucked into these plans. Now journalists are making reference to the events that we blogged about: The Russian move comes shortly after Moscow’s new domestic legislation that will allow it to block content deemed “extremist” and a year after President Vladimir Putin told ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Touré, “Russia was keen on pursuing the idea of establishing international control over the Internet, using monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the ITU.” ITU Secretary General Toure has been denying he wants to take over the Internet. But it appears that there are others who want to give the Internet to the ITU. The December 3-14 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, could collapse if Russia does not back off from its proposal to bring the Internet under the control of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), thereby subjecting the web to inter-governmental regulation.
Bangladesh delegate, led by BTRC chairman Mr. Sunil Kanti Bose, left for Dubai on December 2, 2012 late afternoon to attend WCIT 2012. On that very morning the telcos and ISPs were invited to “Consult” the stance Bangladesh would take on the revision of ITRs. Different links pertaining to the conference were emailed but nothing related to the government’s standpoint was shared. LIRNEasia was also invited to this meeting.
I have been studying how to make Internet affordable and resilient across the developing Asia. Excessive reliance on submarine cable is the bottleneck. My study shows how to overcome it by deploying fiber across the continent, exploiting the transcontinental highways. But the control-freak governments, attending WCIT 2012 conference at Dubai, have deepened the crises of Internet. James Cowie of Renesys Corporation has categorized the countries being vulnerable to different levels of Internet shutdown risk (Click on the map).
The Gulf News, a leading publication in Dubai, interviewed both Hamadoun Toure, the Secretary General of the ITU and me on December 4th, on the second day of the WCIT conference. One of the resulting articles very clearly sets out the causes of divergence between the Geneva-based UN specialized agency and the Colombo-based regional think tank that I head. First, let us look at the ITU’s position. The objective is that of getting broadband to the next billions. No disagreement on our part.
Syria has plunged into cyber darkness, as the Asad regime has pulled the plug on Internet gateways. Yet, the regime blames the “terrorists” for sabotaging the connectivity. Three submarine cables have landed in Syria (Click on the picture). The country is also plugged with Turkey through a terrestrial link. Therefore, even a drunken vagabond would not believe the Syrian minister of (mis)information.