There are many arguments that can be made against the ETNO proposal to import the international accounting-rate regime from voice telephony to the Internet. Here as a PDF is an argument about its impracticality from ISOC. ISOC also agrees with my main point that the ETNO proposals will result in the marginalization and exclusion of the developing countries, especially their poor who are just beginning to join the Internet economy: Because the bilateral model of sending-party-network-pays or “sender pays” that is common in traditional telephony or mobile-settlement systems does not readily accommodate the Internet’s multi-party transit network system, it cannot be mapped to the Internet as we know it. Simply said, retro-fitting a “sender pays” settlement regime to the Internet is not possible without extensive changes to the infrastructure of the global Internet. In addition, the “sender pays” model could adversely impact the technical and commercial environment in developing economies that need to grow their networks.
Upon consideration, we at LIRNEasia have decided to join as signatory the letter to ITU re the proposed amendments to the International Telecommunication Regulations. The letter originates from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a group I had worked with while living and working in the US. Critical analysis by the Center for Democracy and Technology on the pernicious ETNO proposals to upend the present Internet business model: Internet users in less developed countries could find their access to the global Internet more limited or more costly if proposed changes to the International Telecommunication Union’s treaty are adopted. ITU Member States are meeting this December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) to decide whether and how to extend ITU regulations to the Internet. A group of European telecommunications companies (the European Telecommunications Network Operators or “ETNO”) is proposing radical changes to the ITU’s underlying treaty in an attempt to wrest more revenue from providers of Internet content and applications.
Rohan Samarajiva regularly writes in the Lanka Business Online Choices column. In this weeks’ article by bringing examples of recent Internet hypes (Bill Clinton’s speech on Barack Obama) he talks about the government, Internet and the control over the content. Once the governments get involved, there will have to be controlled gateways, like they have in Bangladesh. Will the government charge for its services? You bet it will.
I’ve been becoming increasingly concerned about the need to improve the international backhaul segment of Internet connectivity. There is plenty of good news like the cables landing along the east coast of Africa. But now there is bad news too. The European telcos have ganged up with ITU, trying to reimpose the discredited settlements regime on the Internet. So it looks like we’ll have to shift the focus from promoting good things to preventing bad things I was asked to talk about high-priority areas for ICT policy research at the recently concluded CPRafrica 2012/CPRsouth7 conference in Mauritius.
CPRsouth seeks to encourage evidence-based interventions by members. It was a happy coincidence that an op-ed by a paper-giver at CPRsouth7 appeared in print while she was at the conference in Mauritius. She had written it up based on the paper delivered there: The diagram shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010 in the number of Facebook users among the top five countries on Facebook and the largest increase was recorded in Indonesia (793 percent). Using web analytics, it was found that Facebook was a popular upstream site that online users visited prior to their visit to official government websites. Over 70 percent of Facebook users in Indonesia access the social media site through their mobile phones (Facebook, 2011).
Having a customer-centric sector seems a good idea. The Ministry seeing its primary function as that of taxing operators a tad problematic. What is a public switchboard telephone network? But this is what is trickling out of Myanmar. “The Department of Posts and Telecommunications will be coordinated by the Ministry of Communications, Posts and Telegraphs, which will tax operators,” U Kyaw Soe said.
LIRNEasia is the administrative partner of CPRsouth, an entity that seeks to build ICT policy intellectuals in the South. As with most of the administrative activities we undertake, we treat CPRsouth as a research project too. The heavy lifting is done by LIRNEasia’s Human Capital Research Program headed by Sujata Gamage. The slideset that was prepared based on her research and presented to the Board at its meeting on September 7, 2012 showed that for an inter-disciplinary group, CPRsouth was making rapid progress in the transition to a real network. One of the most important slides showed that the average ages of paper-presenters and young scholars were 34 years and 29 years respectively.
Ayesha Zainudeen, Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia, spoke at the recent expert meeting of the UNESCAP in Colombo. Below is a long quote. There is more at FT. Other than voice, it’s mostly SMS use, along with missed calling. Voice connectivity is almost ubiquitous.
At LIRNEasia, we do not focus solely on ICTs. For some time, we’ve been looking at demographic structure as a factor. Both the recent Afghanistan and Bhutan Sector Performance Reviews contained sections on demography. The demographic time bomb, the increase in the aged population before a country has had time to get rich and establish a safety net is less written about than the good stuff, but is perhaps the more important. Here is a senior official from China talking about it: Since 2004 the shrinking supply of — and increasing demand for — labour has led to wide labour shortage and rapid inflation of wages.
Bangladesh has been ranked 55th among the 61 countries globally and very last in the Asia-Pacific region in the 2012 Web Index. India was ranked 33, Pakistan 44 and Nepal 52 among the South Asian countries. The index has, however, excluded Sri Lanka for unknown reason. It has been compiled by the World Wide Web Foundation, which was launched in November 2009 by the father of Internet – Tim Berners-Lee. The ranking is worked out by considering each country’s web usage in terms of the percentage of web users within the country and the content they have available.
Establishing causal relationships is tough in social science, a field defined by open systems and knowledgeable agents. It is extremely difficult with regard to policy actions and outcomes. In 1998-99 when I was the public face of telecom reform in Sri Lanka, I used to get lots of invitations to speak at business events. In these talks I had to maintain a delicate balance, between giving the then government and its predecessor the right amount of credit for the incredible outcomes that were becoming visible. The government in power had been in place for four years and had partially privatized the incumbent operator and given its management to a Japanese investor, among other things.
The agriculture research done by LIRNEasia included a study into the knowledge and information gaps in the Sri Lankan rubber supply chain. Members of the research team, Sriganesh Lokanathan (Senior Research Manager) and Nilusha Kapugama (Research Manager) were invited to share some of their findings with the consultants involved with the finalization and validation of the Sri Lanka Rubber Industry Master Plan, funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) under the City Cluster Economic Development Project. The discussion, held at the rubber secretariat in Colombo, revolved around the creation and sustainability of farmer associations among rubber smallholders. The consultants were particularly interested in a successful rubber smallholder association in Pandeniya, Sri Lanka. The LIRNEasia researchers spoke about the factors that led to the success of the smallholder association in Pandeniya such as financial and technical assistance to set up their operations, ability maintain control of the quality of their rubber and above all the leadership and commitment exhibited by their members.
The Tokyo Olympics marked the inflection point in the adoption of color television. Will the London Olympics of 2012 be remembered as the inflection point for hybrid wireless networks? The service, which was used by a half million people during the Olympics, was initially free to all consumers. Starting this month, it has been available for a fee to other mobile users. Virgin plans to lease its Wi-Fi underground network to competitors.
Apparently a gap that cannot be bridged has opened up in smartphone sales thanks to sub USD200 smartphones from Huawei and others. let us be thankful the gap is only in smartphones. Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more widespread. This year, China will account for 26.5 percent of all smartphone shipments, compared to 17.
CPRsouth is LIRNEasia’s principal capacity building vehicle. It has, from the beginning, been shaped by research on networks. It is also an object of research for the Human Capital Research Program at LIRNEasia. We were therefore pleased that a research paper looking at the metrics of CPRsouth performance was accepted at the 40th anniversary conference of TPRC, September 21-23, 2012 at the George Mason School of Law, just outside Washington DC. Link to paper.
The above is a paraphrase of a eye-catching title of a paper being read at TPRC 2012, on September 22, 2012, by LIRNEasia Research Fellow Faheem Hussain. Congratulations to Faheem on getting his paper accepted at the oldest ICT policy research conference.