[Chapter-delegates] Hillary's parting shot

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-04/hillary-clinton-helps-silicon-valley-on-her-way-out-the-door

By Elzabeth Dwoskin

Taking the podium in the U.S. Department of State’s Ben Franklin Room
one last time before stepping down on Feb. 1, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton thanked a lot of people, offered reminiscences, and
announced a flurry of last-minute programs. “We’re all, like, one
millisecond away from just collapsing here, because of the emotion and
the feelings that are coursing through all of us,” she said

One of those new programs, the Alliance for an Affordable Internet,
barely got a mention in Clinton’s speech. But it merits attention. The
public-private partnership among the State Department, the World Wide
Web Foundation, and tech companies including Google (GOOG), Microsoft
(MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Intel (INTC), and Cisco Systems (CSCO), aims to
give more people in developing countries access to the Web. It could
also open new markets for Silicon Valley. “We’re going to help the
next billion people come online,” Clinton said, before moving on to
talk about clean cook stoves for women in poor nations.

Only a quarter of people in developing countries are online, compared
with three-quarters in developed nations. If the U.S. helps change
that imbalance, the credit will go in part to Ann Mei Chang, a former
senior engineering director at Google who joined the State Department
in November 2011 as an adviser on technology and women’s issues. She
now lives in Nairobi, Kenya, a city Google Executive Chairman Eric
Schmidt has called Africa’s soon-to-be Silicon Valley. Kenya has some
of the fastest, cheapest Internet access in Africa thanks to
government investment in technology, low taxes on hardware and
software, and policies discouraging communications monopolies. Chang
spends her time teaming up diplomats with U.S. tech companies and
nonprofit groups to figure out how other countries can follow Kenya’s
example.

In many developing countries, Internet service is far more expensive
than most workers can afford, in part because computers, phones,
modems, and software are often taxed as luxury goods. “It’s one of the
few things they can tax,” says Chang. “That’s shortsighted.”

Poor countries also lack the physical infrastructure that forms the
Web’s backbone. In developed nations, Web traffic moves between
service providers through hubs called IXPs, or Internet exchange
points. In the U.S. there are dozens of these hubs; Kenya has at least
one. Ethiopia, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and 101 other
countries worldwide have none, according to Packet Clearing House, a
technology research firm. Web traffic from these nations must travel
over international fiber-optic cables to hubs hundreds or thousands of
miles away, slowing service and driving up costs. The Alliance hopes
to use corporate and diplomatic power to push governments to change
laws getting in the way of Internet access.

At this point it’s not entirely clear how this will be accomplished.
As U.S. diplomats press governments to invest in IXPs and deregulate
telecommunications, the companies will lend the State Department and
governments abroad technical expertise. The firms have also pitched in
seed capital, though State won’t say how much. Google, Microsoft,
Yahoo, and Cisco all confirmed membership in the group; Intel did not
respond to a request for comment.

“We want to go in with a unified voice and say, ‘There are things we
think you can do so the Internet will flourish and will cause your
economy to thrive,’ ” says Chang, who used a similar pitch to get big
tech companies to sign on to the project: A flourishing Internet in
the developing world will help them thrive, too.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
WWWhatsup NYC - http://wwwhatsup.com
 http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
 VP (Admin) - ISOC-NY - http://isoc-ny.org
--------------------------------------------------------------
-