Is it the time to lobby?
by Dima on August 16, 2010
in global, governance, industry, observation, policy, politics, technology
It’s been quiet on this blog for a while, so I decided to share an observation based on some conversations I recently had at one of the Internet governance meetings. The conversations were about ICT companies and the point was that while Western companies are extremely enthusiastic about emerging markets, they do not consider their regulatory systems with the same rigor as they do in the developed world. In other words, while in the developed countries these companies invest considerable resources in working with the governments and lobbying, in the developing countries their efforts are primarily in marketing. Even when they do work with governments, it is mostly done through the marketing departments where the governments are viewed primarily as costumers, less as regulators.
I heard similar observations from a number of industry players and also from a government official. I listened and “filed” these observations, but they were brought back to life with the recent explosion of the BlackBerry story. You may know that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and now also India and a number of other countries, are threatening to ban BlackBerry unless RIM allows them access to the encrypted email data of BlackBerry users, stored on the company’s servers. India gave RIM an ultimatum until the end of the month to comply and the rumor is that the Indian government has similar plans for Google, Skype, and perhaps others.
I wonder how did RIM find itself in such a situation? Will other global technological companies find themselves in a similar situation soon too? Peter Svensson writes in Washington Post today:
“Threats by the governments of India, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to shut down BlackBerry’s corporate e-mail services reflect unease about a technology that the U.S. government also took a while to accept. The foreign governments are essentially a decade behind in coming to terms with encryption, a technology that’s fundamental to the Internet as a medium of commerce. (…) RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry, doesn’t have years to wait for foreign governments to adopt the more relaxed U.S. stance toward encryption.”
I assume Svensson is right about his historical perspective; after all, writing about this is his bread an butter. At the same time, given that all the governments currently having an issue with BlackBerry are in developing countries, I think he is missing the point made by the people I talked to about the Western companies’ attitudes to the emerging markets’ governments.
It did not take the US government years to figure out its stand on encryption on its own. On the contrary, this position is a result of years of dialogue, argument, and debates between the government and the various interest groups, primarily the industry, through its lobbying activities, and the civil society. We can see a similar discussion taking place these days around the issue of net neutrality.
It seems to me that until the RIMs, Googles, and Skypes of this world won’t take the regulators in the developing world as seriously as they take the governments back home, we will continue seeing more “BlackBerry” cases. Until the multinational MICT companies will not engage in a meaningful way with the local governments in the emerging markets, the barriers to their activities there will continue growing and become more sophisticated, especially when it comes to such a politicized area as information.
So, I wonder if it is the time for these companies to start lobbying in the developing world just the way they are lobbying here. While I am aware of the potentially harmful influences of lobbying, it is an integral part of the policymaking mechanism and, for better or worse, it also has an educational impact on the policymakers. At the end of the day, usually those are the governments that are catching up with technology, while the industry is ahead of the curve.
What do you think? Is it the time to lobby?
Digest #24
There is a lot going on, so here is another digest. It starts with some feedback from the recent open consultations for the upcoming IGF. Then it includes links to some studies, including the recently released Berkman report on broadband policy and then to some interesting opinions about the role of content piracy in technology adoption and about the link between net neutrality and job creation. And of course, as usual, some fun stuff :)
On discourse and shaping of the information society
by Dima on February 15, 2010
in governance, interesting, internet governance, policy, research, society
There was a very interesting talk at the Berkman Center back in January. Julie Cohen, a law professor from Georgetown University, talked about her upcoming book “The Networked Self: Copyright, Privacy, and the Production of Networked Space.”
What I found particularly interesting about this talk is her attempt to introduce sociological literature into a predominantly legal debate. Her point of departure is the gap between the rhetoric of law and policy aimed at shaping the information society and the realities on the ground. For example, she points at the language of economic liberties as fueling the information society governance debate, but at the same time there are laws and regulations that significantly restrict those liberties being that through strong copyright or weak individual privacy protections. She also highlights that while the policy discourse is usually abstract, the individual’s interpretation of the law and his or her interaction with information and technology is very concrete and situated in a particular physical reality. Although she focuses on the policy debate in the US, I think her framework can be helpful in thinking about discourse and policymaking elsewhere.
Reaching across the disciplinary isle is not a trivial task and during Cohen’s talk at Berkman it was interesting to see how, during the Q&A, the lawyers in the room took her presentation to different directions from where I think it would go has she been giving her talk in a Communication or an STS departments. Yet, I think she did a very good job linking the abstract thinking of sociologists about the concrete actions of people to the concrete thinking of the legal scholars about the abstract concepts of the law. I view it is a part of a very important interdisciplinary dialogue we should have in the field and on purely selfish grounds it helps me to think about communicating the relevance of my dissertation research to the more “hard core” policy debate.
You are invited to watch the talk as well as to read its coverage on Ethan Zuckerman’s, David Weinberger’s, and John Palfrey’s blogs. In addition, I found a recent paper written by Julie Cohen, which provides an outline of her book (in case you don’t have the time to watch the video).
Enjoy!
Reading blogs #19
I don’t have much time recently to follow news, because I am working on a paper, but here is what did manage to go through:
Recently I started playing with Twitter, which turned out to be a good source of interesting information. However, many times there is a gap between the time I open a link posted on Twitter and the time I actually read the item and add it to the digest. As a result, I think a number of items here are missing attribution. Not sure how I am going to deal with it, but if you have any ideas, please share. In the meantime, I just put “via Twitter” by those posts.
The words of WTPF 2009
If you happen to follow this blog, you have probably noticed the relative silence in the last month or so. I was, and still am, extremely busy primarily with working on my A-exams and moving on with shaping my dissertation ideas. One of the upcoming highlights is me going to the World Telecommunication Policy Forum (WTPF) to observe how international telecom policy agenda is being shaped in real time and to conduct some preliminary interviews with people who steer this process.
As many other similar events (such as the IGF) the forum is not aimed at producing binding resolutions. Instead, its explicit aim is to set the agenda for the global telecom policy making. Here is how it is described on its website:
It (WTPF-DE) is not designed to produce prescriptive outcomes with the binding force of an international treaty; rather, it strives to foster productive debate and build multi-stakeholder consensus on constructive ways forward.
This is why I think it is particularly fascinating event and this is why it will be interesting to look at how its outcomes describe MICT, priorities of related industries, and the associated regulatory principles. Preparing for the trip I was pleasantly surprised to discover a wealth of information that the ITU made available online. For example, there is a repository of all the iteration of the “Report by the Secretary General of ITU”, which is the pivotal document of this meeting. In its preamble, the report states:
Decision 9 of the Antalya Plenipotentiary Conference states that arrangements for the fourth WTPF shall be in accordance with applicable Council decisions. In accordance with Decision 498 of the 2000 session of the ITU Council, discussions at the WTPF shall be based on a Report from the Secretary-General, incorporating the contributions and comments of ITU Member States and Sector Members (available at: http://www.itu.int/osg/csd/wtpf/wtpf2009/report.html) which will serve as the sole working Report of the Forum.
Since I am interested in words and in discourse, I thought to play a little bit with what was available. Together with Veronica, and with the help of the Many Eyes project, we created the following visualization of the current Report by the Secretary General of ITU – the report that is at the basis of the upcoming discussion. Here is what we got:
This image shows the 150 most common words in this 53 pages long document and the relative size of the word signifies its popularity. As we can see from a quick glimpse, this forum is going to be about ITU, Internet, networks, services, issues, international, ICTs, countries, use, resolutions…
The decision in 2006 called for convergence to be the main topic of this forum, yet, as we can see in terms of popularity, the word “convergence” is loosing to many other concepts. This is not to say that the discussion cannot focus on convergence using different terms, but I find this detail interesting. it is particularly interesting, because if you look at visualization of the first draft of this report (before numerous comments by stakeholders were absorbed in it) the word “convergence” was much more dominant (you can see visualizations of drafts 2 and 3 in the links).
These visualizations do not tell us much about the substantive content of these documents, but I think they are a nice way to have a brief glance at the terminology that is dominating this debate. I hope to continue following and blogging more on this subject.
Your comments will be highly appreciated!
