When I gave a talk a few months back at RMIT in Melbourne about how we engaged governments with policy-relevant research, a senior person in the audience said that we seemed to be having greater success in getting the government of Bangladesh to pay heed to evidence than they did in Australia. Proving him half right, the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission has convened a stakeholder meeting to obtain input for the country’s position at WCIT in Dubai. Now if the government actually votes against the ill-thought out proposals by the Arab and African states to impose access charges for Internet content, my Australian colleague will be proven 100% right. A recent report on the subject in Daily Star. Abu Saeed Khan, a senior policy fellow of Colombo-based think tank LIRNEasia, said the Bangladesh government has ignored the ITU’s directive that instructed it to consult the ITR issues with its citizens.
Internet sprouts innovation and steers growth. Mankind has never been so passionately generous and caring for any technology. Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Salman Khan and others gave away their precious achievements to enrich Internet for universal good. Primarily a cheaper option to communicate has now become the unmatched driver of prosperity worldwide. Internet is the oxygen of global trade and commerce.
From months back LIRNEasia’s focus was on the economic aspects of the WCIT proposals, specifically the mad proposal floated by ETNO to impose access charges on data flowing into a network, the sending-party-network-pays principle. This is the real debate in Dubai according to even early apologists for the ITU. More energy is expected to be spent on how companies make money off the Internet. In one submission to the conference, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, a lobbying group based in Brussels that represents companies like France Télécom, Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia, proposed that network operators be permitted to assess charges for content providers like Internet video companies that use a lot of bandwidth. Analysts say the proposal is an acknowledgment by European telecommunications companies that they cannot hope to provide digital content.
The ITU hobnobbing with ETNO in a joint Twitter-storm during early October had been a mystery until the WCITLeaks’ recent disclosure of a “confidential” document. It reveals that ITU’s senior management went for a two-day “retreat” at the pristine Domaine du Château de Penthes in Geneva during early September. That was exactly one month before staging the Twitter-storm. Besides assembling its entire hierarchy from worldwide, the jumpy ITU also invited (of course on hefty payments) professional public relations heavyweights to strategize its counteroffensive against the defenders of Internet. The leaked document, with typographic error in the second question bellow, nicely captures ITU’s high-speed of heartbeat: On the basis of the outputs of the preparatory process, which includes preliminary inputs from the regions, we can address the following questions: Where do we stand regarding the substance?
For too long, the Internet of Things was something that was talked about in hyperbole at conferences and then forgotten. Now, finally, it is being operationalized. This particular account is of developments at GE. At Mount Sinai, patients get a black plastic wristband with a location sensor and other information. Similar sensors are on beds and medical equipment.
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.
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.