Africa in Internet Governance and financing the Information Society
by
eric
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Africa in Internet Governance and
financing the Information Society
By Eric M.K
Osiakwan
Executive Secretary of AfrISPA
eric@afrispa.org
http://www.afrispa.org
Africa stands at a very unusual threshold
of the Information Society because it is the least developed continent and
seeking to use Information Communication Technology (ICTs) to advance its
developmental cause but at the same time caught in the web of ideas taking
position on not only Internet Governance but financing of the Information
Society. As an African I see the dilemma and seek in this final in the series of
papers to make some suggestion to our community on how we can sail this storm
because it is not an easy one. In my earlier essays namely; “the Net wants to be
decentrally governed” and “Open Access and Financing Principles for the
Information Society” I laid the foundation for this paper so you are better able
to understand my proposals if you read those first. However I would advance this
commentary by summing up the critical assumptions, linking them and
extrapolating for the benefit of Africa.
The modeling of the Internet as
opposed to the old telephone network is such that the former is highly
decentralized and the intelligence of the network is at the edges of it whiles
the later is a highly centralized network with the intelligence at the core;
this is the big deferential between the two platforms. The deferential is not
just an engineering error or an inanimate discovery but a deliberate human
design that seeks to create a distributed yet extremely collaborative platform
for scaling global communication and commerce. In a simple way, the argument can
be advanced that your level of governance of the Internet is commensurate to the
“amount” of Network and Intelligence we contribute to the
global common.
We can extrapolate further that it
is paramount for Africa to prioritize its few
resources on the building of our network and it’s intelligence at the edges of
the global platform to contribute to the global collaboration in order to gain
critical bargaining power as the Asians did. This is not to say Africa should not be part of the debate because it does
not have the critical network needed but rather that we need to prioritize our
few resources on where we can gain more weight and not use the scarce resource
on elements of the structure which are porous. The suggestion for Africa to
concentrate on her infrastructure development is not just rhetoric against our
participation in global policy development but rather underscored by the fact
that Africa is the most unwired continent in
the world, most of its internal communication (voice, data, and video) has to be
resolved internationally. This cost the continent a fortune hence the cost of
communications is significantly higher in Africa than elsewhere in the world. It has been estimated
that for data alone this routing of traffic costs the continent US$400 million a
year.
A forthcoming report on bandwidth projection for Sub-Saharan Africa predicts 24%
overall growth in the three years up to 2008. According to a new report
published by Balancing Act recently, the transmission capacity required to carry
Africa’s international voice and data traffic increased by 91% in the three
years to 5.09 Gbps 2002, will increase by at least 137% to 12.09 Gbps in the
three years to 2005, and a further 81% to 21.9 Gbps in the three years to
2008.
The
demand projections suggest the need for a robust passive infrastructure
build-out in and around Africa using fiber
optics. There is an urgent
need for new approaches to financing and building out information and
communication infrastructure to address this large unmet demand for information
and communication services. This leads me to my argument that
if Africa has to build its network and intelligence then it must of necessity
focus on the second and as far as am concerned the most important outcome of the
Geneva phase which is “financing the Information Society”.
The ban of infrastructure, service
and product development on the ICT track in Africa is due largely to the
restrictive laws and an untrustworthy regulatory process that thwart the ability
of local entrepreneurs and outside investors alike to supply the local markets
with these technologies. The elimination of the existing (and emerging) legal
and regulatory obstacles to open communications network deployment is a
significant boost to private-sector investment.
Given that
the future of all voice, data, multimedia, and broadcast communications lies
with packet-switched, Internet-based networks, the question for Africa is whether we will (a) embrace these open,
decentralized, low-cost technologies, or (b) seek, as most have been doing, to
prohibit or restrict them, under pressure from our state-owned monopoly telecom
operators. In the more stable parts of Africa,
the central obstacle to investment in Information Communications Technology
deployment (and the spread of low-cost, reliable, up-to-date information and
communications services) is foolhardy governmental regulation. Most African
governments have imposed heavy-handed, restrictive, backward-looking,
monopoly-protecting laws and regulations to the telephony sectors; many have
currently moved aggressively to extend them to Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
and the ICT sector at large. The result is that most African governments are, in
large ways or small, actively discouraging or prohibiting investment in and
deployment of ICTs in the areas of infrastructure, service and products.
Most
African still have astonishingly low rates of communications penetration. If the
populations of those countries had ready, affordable access to high-speed
Internet-based wireless voice data communications, the benefits could be
tremendous: reduced costs of doing business; increased productivity and
efficiency; greater political transparency, and new tools with which to fight
corruption.
The
various issues mentioned above are all connected to each other: they raise the fundamental question of
whether the African governments in question will recognize and embrace the
fundamental shift toward Internet-based communications networks. The
alternative, which is currently prevailing in nearly all developing countries,
is for the government to cling to yesterday’s technology and do everything in
its power to prop up the monopoly telecom. What makes the choice difficult is
that it is not simply between old-fashioned telephone and new-fangled Internet
technologies – it is a choice between two ways of behaving as a government and
society. The old ways, fitting the telephone network,
were closed, centralized, controlled, and top-down; the new ways, like the
Internet itself, are open, decentralized, competitive, and technology-neutral –
WAKE UP AFRICA.
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