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.