[Chapter-delegates] Global Connect initiative

[Dave Burstein]

Khaled

Due respect to your question, but a look inside the U.S. State Department
effort suggests it's a sham. I'm trying to post less but I've researched
this one since last fall.

Kathy Brown deserves credit for not joining the attempt to *reduce* Internet
users by 500,000,000 from the best projections of growth in the next five
years. In reality, nothing in what I've heard from Kerry or Novelli will
have any substantial impact on how many connect. The under $50 smartphone,
the drop in the costs of wireless broadband and the 90%+ wireless coverage
in most nations are driving a powerful increase in those connected. Africa
will probably pass 315M Internet connections in 2017 (Cisco data), the
population of the U.S. India has probably passed us already. China has
twice as many broadband connections and the gap is growing.

There's a very good reason ISOC wasn't part of the U.S. State Department
Global Connect: it's all hot air and no substance. Pure pr. It's absolutely
not multi-stakeholder. Despite three attempts, I couldn't get any
information about the event, who would be speaking and the schedule. (I'm a
reporter.) The meeting and two previous ones were closed. Inviting a few
hand-picked NGOs to an event does not make it "multi-stakeholder" in any
meaningful sense of the word.

The U.S. proposals are mostly offensive, White Man's Burden type thinking.
There's nothing in GC about the changes in what U.S. companies and
government do. Instead, it exhorts other countries, especially poor ones,
to do more to aid broadband in their own countries. That's insulting; the
hundreds of policy people I've spoken to since 2012 know the importance of
broadband, are already working hard and surprisingly successfully. Even the
most backward countries are moving ahead. In four years Myanmar is at about
70% broadband wireless and is on track for 90% by the end of next year.

At the WCIT in Dubai, I asked, "What are the most important things the
International community can do to promote broadband?" Particularly from
sub-Sahara Africa, I heard that the biggest *international* issue was the
high, cartel-like pricing of Internet transit/backhaul, still generally 10X
higher than, say, Poland, Only a small part of that is explained by the
cost of the undersea cable. A second concern was the failure of the
multinationals to pay taxes or hire locally. (Multinationals are not all
American. MTN in South Africa was exposed by the Daily Mail as hiding
$billions in Mauritius.)

Fixes for both were very strongly opposed at the WCIT by the U.S. and our
European allies. An effort the next fall to keep royalties reasonable was
shot down by U.S. opposition. There were real issues with the proposals but
everything was just shot down.

If you follow the money, there is a large and increasing flow from
developing countries to large companies, many ion the U.S. Simply reducing
that, say by paying taxes, would do more than anything in Global Connect.

I wish my country was working on the real issues but instead we put first
the interests of large U.S. companies.

Dave Burstein




On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 4:02 PM, Khaled Koubaa <khaled.koubaa at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
> The World Bank and U.S. Department of State co-hosted today a high level
> event at the World Bank to support the Global Connect initiative, an effort
> to bring 1.5 billion online by 2020.
> I looked at the list of supporters here
> <https://share.america.gov/global-connect-initiative-supporters/> and I
> wondered why ISOC was not involved in that ?
>
> Khaled Koubaa
> Twitter : @koubaak <https://twitter.com/koubaak>
> LinkedIn : http://lnked.in/kkoubaa
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> As an Internet Society Chapter Officer you are automatically subscribed
> to this list, which is regularly synchronized with the Internet Society
> Chapter Portal (AMS): https://portal.isoc.org
>



-- 
Editor, Fast Net News, Net Policy News and DSL Prime
Author with Jennie Bourne  DSL (Wiley) and Web Video: Making It Great,
Getting It Noticed (Peachpit)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20160414/4035844b/attachment.htm>