Technology Policy

I like to think of it as a neighbourhood app store – and in many ways it’s the edges of the internet, where entrepreneurs are taking content online and offering it to local, offline and/or technologically illiterate customers. Also these corner shop app stores can be content editors for their community: they filter content they think their customers like, but they also guide what their customers might like as well.

Jan Chipchase writing about street-hacks.

This past semester I took an excellent course entitled Infrastructure Studies: Knowledge, Distribution and Power that took a broad, sociological view of the concept of infrastructure. For the term paper, I examined the GDP through the lens of infrastructure and classification schemes. The paper is embedded below or available for download (under a CC BY license) here.
A “Vulgar” Measure: GDP as Infrastructure
Incidentally, the day before the paper was due, a straightforward introduction to the troubles with GDP was published in the NYT Magazine.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about privacy protection in Africa, the launch of Facebook Zero – their free mobile services offered with more than 50 operators around the world – has some important implications for developing countries. I wanted to consolidate some comments I’ve made elsewhere about this development.

The Impact on Local Innovation

Let’s be blunt: barring some strange vagary, Facebook Zero is going to be a hit. Facebook is already popular in Africa, and in other developing countries, such as Indonesia, we know that usage is overwhelmingly through mobile devices. The success of MXit in South Africa, as well, is strong evidence of the viability of mobile-based social networking, and with free access to 0.facebook.com, the proposition is even stronger.

What does this mean for Africa’s burgeoning technology entrepreneurs? The mobile phone is an exciting, preexisting platform for services and applications. CellBazaar in Bangladesh and M-PESA in Kenya are standout examples of the value that can be created from building new mobile services. Competing with Facebook is going to be very difficult, especially when so many carriers are picking them and giving them the ability to not charge for data usage on 0.facebook.com. To be clear, I’m not opposed to Facebook competing in this regard. They are clearly doing good business.

But in the midst of doing good business, they could cannibalize African jobs. For example, Safaricom, who has not partnered with Facebook, just announced they are working with MXit to bring the South African service to Kenya. Erik Hersman sees this as a missed opportunity for local entrepreneurs. The real problem, though, is that the operators in Africa can choose winners and losers on their proprietary networks. New entrants (the proverbial “next Google or YouTube”) face very steep transaction costs that limit their scale.

A Caveat?

As Prabhas Pokharel of MobileActive points out, though, there is more to this story. Speaking recently at the GSMA World Congress, a Facebook representative showed that when Vodafone in the UK offered one week of free Facebook, not only did data usage shoot up, it stayed up: “the number of people paying and using data plans increased by 20% from the people that tried it.”

No wonder Facebook was able to partner with so many operators: in time, they will phase out the free access and will have convinced more users to sign up for the lucrative data plans. Is this a good thing? As Steve Song and others have argued, mobile usage costs in Africa can be very high. There might be reasons to worry that people are spending money recklessly on mobiles, to the detriment of savings or “better” consumption.

But there could be a silver lining. Data services provide more flexibility and capability. Oftentimes people do not even know their phone is capable of anything more than SMS and voice. If Facebook Zero encourages people to responsibly use the mobile Internet, there will be opportunities for many more entrepreneurs and delivery of richer services.

Facebook Zero as Africa’s Agora?

Steve Song is more bullish on Facebook Zero, despite having well-founded critics of both Facebook and African telcos. He says,

I think the potential for innovation with Facebook Zero is really about people having conversations, exchanging ideas about any and every aspect of their lives. Those conversations will spawn innovations. Right now, Facebook Zero only covers ten countries in Africa but supposing in covers all or most of them. Think of the scope for new ideas to find their way across the continent or across the road.

This is an interesting angle. Though it is starting to change, Africa lacks participatory media. Facebook, despite being used for plenty of inane purposes, does have the potential to encourage both innovative thinking and, perhaps more likely, political activity and awareness.

But, again, I think there are reasons to be pessimistic. Is Facebook really the platform we want for this? For one, it is another intermediary on which pressure can be placed. Even worse, it is an intermediary that does not have a good track record on safeguarding political speech within its bounds (see Rebecca MacKinnon’s recent post on the human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension). Frustratingly, Facebook has also not joined the Global Network Initiative, an effort by corporations and NGOs to promote self expression and privacy in a digital world through corporate best practices. Entering places like Tunisia with Facebook Zero demands thoughtful reflection on a company’s role in facilitating political activity.

So, it is, of course, too early to tell the implications of what was certainly a big week for mobile and development, but for this specific initiative, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned.

[As always, I'm speaking only for myself on this blog.]

Facebook recently unveiled a new mobile version of their site aimed at developing markets called 0.facebook.com. The site is optimized for mobile networks and devices, but the real coup is that Facebook has partnered with more than 50 mobile operators to offer the service for free. Leaving aside increased fragmentation of the Internet and what this means for local entrepreneurs trying to build the next MXit (both important issues), I wanted to consider the privacy implications of this.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Facebook has an abhorrent record on privacy protection. Stemming from its founder’s quixotic views and a financial incentive to expose user information, Facebook has used frequent policy changes, byzantine controls and double-speak to push the nearly 500 million users to a situation where they have far less ability to control who has access to their personal information. In the U.S., and even more so in Europe, there are institutional manners in which this is partially combated. Regulatory agencies can direct behavior, advocacy organizations can promote change, and the media can raise awareness. While we are certainly not in a perfect situation, I fear the developing world is in far worse shape.

Facebook is already popular in much of Africa. Users already access it from their mobile phones. But free mobile access is likely to even further drive adoption and use throughout the continent. Over the years, Facebook has made its lack of commitment to privacy clear; 0.facebook.com is not going to change that. But do African nations have sufficiently capable consumer protection agencies? Do they have NGOs focused on the emerging issues of digital life? Is the media providing informative commentary on the implications of the Internet? More fundamentally, are there African researchers examining privacy from a local context? And do users of new media have the literacies they need?

It is essential that Africa takes on this issue on its own terms. Privacy norms, practices and expectations may differ between Nigeria and Nebraska; tackling privacy policy should, too. That being said, international NGOs, and even wealthier countries or donor agencies can play a role.

Take, as a comparison, the issue of gay rights. Homosexuality is illegal in at least 37 African countries and two men were just sentenced to 14 years in Malawi. Amnesty International has taken up the case and is drawing public attention to it globally, the independent Center for the Development of People was formed by Malawians to promote change, and the government is fearful of losing donor funding over the issue.

This is the type of confluence of forces that are likely needed for positive change, whether on gay rights or privacy protection. Will Africa reach it for the latter?

[*Apologies, as always, for grouping "Africa" together as one entity. It's not. I know; I'm guilty.]

Studying for a evolutionary biology test, I read:

“Scientists discovered the first antibiotics, made by bacteria and fungi, in the mid-1900s, and they soon ushered in a new chapter in the history of medicine. Infections that once almost certainly would have been lethal simply disappeared in a matter of days. Some optimists declared that infectious diseases would soon be a thing of the past. But not long after antibiotics first became available, doctors began reporting that they sometimes failed. In the 1950s, Japanese doctors used antibiotics to battle outbreaks of dysentery caused by E. coli, only to watch the bacteria develop resistance to one drug after another.”

Compare to Evgeny Morozov writing in Foreign Policy:

“In the days when the Internet was young, our hopes were high. As with any budding love affair, we wanted to believe our newfound object of fascination could change the world. The Internet was lauded as the ultimate tool to foster tolerance, destroy nationalism, and transform the planet into one great wired global village… But just as earlier generations were disappointed to see that neither the telegraph nor the radio delivered on the world-changing promises made by their most ardent cheerleaders, we haven’t seen an Internet-powered rise in global peace, love, and liberty. And we’re not likely to. Many of the transnational networks fostered by the Internet arguably worsen — rather than improve — the world as we know it… Sadly enough, a networked world is not inherently a more just world.”

Yet, unlike with the Interwebs, we have clear-cut case of successful strategic use of technology and tactics to fight microbial infections: Norway.

Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked.

The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.

Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.

Throwing more of something – money, technology or rhetoric – at a problem rarely solves it; instead, strategic, tactical responses are needed. What are those to realize the hopes of digital utopians?

This post originally appeared on Techdirt.

Much has been made about the iPad as a consumptive, rather than creative, device. Some, including law professor Tim Wu at a recent New America event, have voiced concern that it heralds the end of a golden era of user-generated content. But to truly understand the importance and impact of user-generated content – including on the traditional media that Clay Shirky has recently argued are fatally too complex to survive – we must have better measurement of the phenomenon. Without reliable data and sensible comparative metrics, it is impossible to say if we have even experienced a golden age of open creative possibility.

For example, nearly two years ago in response to Shirky, Nick Carr bristled at the idea that the Web was the necessary component for creative production, participation and sharing. According to Carr, the people he knew back before the Web were also creating – writing, photographing, drawing, constructing and volunteering. This is undoubtedly true, but because technology did not enable the inexpensive recording, archiving, sharing and finding of this creativity, it went largely unnoticed. Of course, cheaper technology almost certainly does enable more creative production, but how much is hard to say.

When Shirky notes that an amateur video of two children has garnered more views than American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and the Superbowl combined, it is comparing apples and oranges. A minute video hardly competes with the Superbowl for eyeballs; certainly the Internet has opened opportunities to competitors to the Superbowl, but let’s compare those. The problem is, we don’t currently have the categories and metrics necessary to make sense of the rise (and potential fall) of creation. Some people are trying to create quantify the impact of blogs on the news cycle, but in regards to other media types, we seem to be ignoring the problem and living off anecdotes. So, how can we move ahead with better metrics for user-generated content and what should those metrics be?

The arrival of broadband Internet in Africa via the undersea cables is widely hailed as an opportunity for economic advancement due to the power of ICT-enabled businesses. The hopeful look at India’s success in software and services as a model for African growth, but a new meme is emerging that see the interconnections of Africans as a threat to global security. While it is an interesting, and perhaps fruitful, exercise to think through the potential downsides of the Internet in Africa, the way the issue is being framed, largely by Westerners promoting cybersecurity services, strikes me as overwrought and misplaced.

The argument has two versions:

In one, detailed by cybersecurity consultant and author Jeffrey Carr, there is a dangerous fusion of anti-American forces who do, or will soon have, the means, motive and opportunity to unleash cyberwarfare upon American critical infrastructure and commerce. Looking at Somalia, where piracy and terrorism seem to be mixing, Carr argues that the arrival of the EASSy cable will present a dangerous new challenge to international security:

Once Somalia goes digital, it will create a never-before-seen opportunity for local gangs to move their strategic alliances with Al Shabaab onto the Internet. Their twin exports – extortion and terrorism will have unlimited opportunities for profit and mayhem, particularly if they are directed against critical infrastructure such as energy, water, and transportation facilities.

The second version, which is probably a more likely one, is that the combination of broadband connectivity and poor virus protections in Africa will make African computers prime targets for botnet herders who will use them to “paralyze the network infrastructure of a major western nation.” Writing in Foreign Policy, an organizer of a major cybersecurity summit, Franz-Stefan Gady, argues

“[T]he continent is home to the world’s most vulnerable computers. About 80 percent of the African population lacks even rudimentary knowledge of information technologies, according to a recent World Bank survey. Though Internet cafes are widespread, providers often cannot afford proper antivirus software, making computers very easy targets for skilled botnet operators and hackers.”

Moreover, he says, African countries, by and large, lack the legal wherewithal to prosecute cyber-criminals.

As a final datapoint, consider a recent report by the cybersecurity firm Symantec which says South Africa is in the “unenviable” position of receiving better connectivity right when it is hosting the World Cup; this, they say, is a recipe for accelerated cybercrime.

It should be noted at the outset that the people we are not hearing from on this are Africans. Cybersecurity demands international cooperation, but the views of African regulators, businessmen and civil society – who likely have a more nuanced views of the upsides of connectivity – are missing.

I suspect this voice would add context to the above worries. For example, in countries where basic literacy is a challenge yet to be overcome, worrying about the next Kevin Mitnick rising from Mogadishu seems a little silly. Recall that the most sophisticated cyber attacks come from Russia, a country with a long history of technological prowess, and China, where top-notch technical schools are likely the source of the recent Google hacks. In addition to infrastructure, you need computer skills, and as anyone who works to promote ICTs in Africa knows, this is a tough job.

The obvious response to this is that the Somali terrorist-pirates could purchase hacking services. This are widely available and, as I understand it, fairly affordable (though likely much more than a few AK-47s and a boat). But this is also nothing new. Al-Qaeda, an organization which is far more anti-American, far more well-funded, and has far more access to broadband Internet, does not seem to be a fan of cyberattacks. As far as I know, there is no evidence that Al-Qaeda has established offensive cyber capabilities, despite having operatives in broadband-saturated locations.

There are some hints that affiliated people have considered hacking as a means to their end – manuals, for example – but terrorists rely on shock factor to, umm, terrorize. When effective cyberwar is as theoretical as it, risk-averse groups are likely to stick to IEDs and suicide bombers.

Furthermore, the view of the Somali pirates and “terrorists” is ahistorical. It misses the reprehensible waste dumping and illegal fishing that have decimated the Somali economy (of course enabled by the absence of a functioning government). Writing frantic articles about cyber WMDs arising from this position is reckless. Somalia instead needs state-building, legal protection of its sovereignty and job opportunities.

ICTs are a great opportunity and although they do have potential downsides, the whole framing of these African cyberwar (!!!!) pieces leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Update: For a hilarious and spot-on treatment of this subject, see this:

I think that Africans have more to fear from older technology outside their continent than the rest of the world fearing Africa. It would be ironic if at some point in the near future, Nigeria had to block IP addresses from the United States.

He’s right. When Franz-Stefan writes that “skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet café in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo” will create the world’s biggest botnets, he shows that he has little understanding of those “slums” – for starters, electricity is a little intermittent to power a cyberwar.

Update 2: A new bill in the US Senate would require punishment for governments who do not control cybercrime allegedly occurring in their country. It would create a list of bad states and could cut aid to them if they don’t align their cyber-policies with American desires. Imagine, if you will, that this ends up like the USTR’s Special 301 list which coerces developing countries to enforce more draconian intellectual property regimes. If, as Jonathan Zittrain argues, innovative networks (“generative” in his parlance) are under threat from cybercrime, then it won’t be long until America is coercing African countries to lock down their networks, perhaps at the behest of the same security consultants who are arguing we need to re-engineer our networks to be more locked down. I don’t like where this is heading.

The Google/China back-and-forth that has played across the media for the past few months has raised the specter of a fragmenting Internet, catchily known as the “splinternet.” The fear, raised in various forms, is that proprietary networks and devices, in addition to censorship and corporate withdrawal from certain nations, are fracturing the unified, standardized Internet that made it such a promising medium for international communication. To add to these fears, exacerbated by the withdrawal of Google from China, GoDaddy has just announced that it will no longer register domains in China due to onerous regulations. This has many arguing that China’s Internet will be a separate entity from the rest of the world.

But was the Internet ever all that unified? Or was it merely a potential, a hope?

The potential to speak, or even the potential to link, does not mean that potential is met. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is often missed in the rhetoric surrounding the transformational effect of the Internet.

The barriers to a unified Internet are far more numerable – and long-standing – than proprietary code or government censorship (though these certainly do have an impact). For one, language is a significant barrier to communicating on an international medium. More fundamentally (and less cured by technological advancement), most people lack either the time or interest to meet the potential of a unified Internet. Even more, as UCT Professor Marion Walton notes, the billions of people excluded from the Internet due to poverty have never been connected to even the hope of a unified Internet.

It is important to be aware and attempt to counteract new divisions between the communicative capacity of humans – among which are censorship and technical incompatibility – but valuing interconnectedness requires a far broader view than most pundits have right now.

Sometime last century, previously qualitative subjects were injected with hearty doses of empiricism. The advances from these new approaches swept across disciplines as diverse as finance to media studies. Today, quantitative grounding is considered a requisite for academic acceptability.

But what are the implications of this empiricism?

In his great history of academic economics and finance, The Myth of the Rational Market, Justin Fox follows how those disciplines became enamored with quantifying everything. Formulas, models, data, math. These were the approaches and tools taken seriously. In the process, phenomenon that weren’t quantifiable got tossed out – humans became rational actors, and it took monumental efforts by the behavioral economists to begin to re-imagine man in a more accurate, nuanced light. Yet, the damage was done; unintentionally, and not without adding great insights, but nonetheless done.

I wonder if the current trend towards huge data sets and massive computational power will have similar unintended consequences. There’s no lack of pessimists who think the Internet is ruining human society, but people like Jaron Lanier rarely hit the target and tend to be sensationalists trying to sell books. Of course, they’re up against plenty of Pollyanna’s who are selling this all as the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I think that whatever is happening, and whatever negatives there may be, is far less exciting than cover stories for The Atlantic or new business opportunities for Silicon Valley.

In a new special report on the data deluge, The Economist generally misses this theme. This isn’t to say the report isn’t quite good (it is) or that I would expect them to cover this (I don’t). However, one of the articles does get close when examining how to handle the extraordinary amount of information and the infrastructure needed to deal with it:

The cornucopia of data now available is a resource, similar to other resources in the world and even to technology itself. On their own, resources and technologies are neither good nor bad; it depends on how they are used. In the age of big data, computers will be monitoring more things, making more decisions and even automatically improving their own processes—and man will be left with the same challenges he has always faced. As T.S. Eliot asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Two months ago, I would have agreed that “technologies are neither good nor bad,” but a course on infrastructure studies has definitely made me question that. Eliot’s quote, though, is the right question to be asking.

Update: I forgot to include another relevant bit:

Processing data is another concern. Ian Ayres, an economist and lawyer at Yale University and the author of “Super-Crunchers”, a book about computer algorithms replacing human intuition, frets about the legal implications of using statistical correlations. Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, goes further: she worries about the “ethics of super-crunching”. For example, racial discrimination against an applicant for a bank loan is illegal. But what if a computer model factors in the educational level of the applicant’s mother, which in America is strongly correlated with race? And what if computers, just as they can predict an individual’s susceptibility to a disease from other bits of information, can predict his predisposition to committing a crime?

Update 2: I have previously written a bit more extensively about my reservations about quantification here.

Thanks largely to a course on infrastructure studies, my thinking about the role of technology in society has evolved greatly in 2010. I used to be convinced that digital technologies were just tools, capable of good or bad uses. Now, I’m more likely to find that they do exert some sort of pressure towards society, but that the ultimate effect is still a result of mixing with larger societal forces (see domestication theory).

These are issues that are receiving a lot of attention – Jaron Lanier is getting big-time media attention for saying that the Internet is taking us all to hell in a hand-basket in his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, the public is being led to ask questions about the effect of Google and the Internet on cognition, etc. But what is missing, in my opinion, from these discussions are the productive ways in which willing individuals can use specific technologies to change the supposed direction of our networked milieu.

For example, by nature of being a limited-purpose device, as opposed to the iPad’s more generalized capabilites, the Amazon Kindle has, at least anecdotally, allowed far more people to focus on reading long-form writing. Another option, and one that I use when writing longer papers, is Freedom for Mac, a simple software tool for OSX that disables wifi connectivity allowing me to avoid distractedly slipping into the series of tubes. Or take the advances in audio technology which limit external interference.

Sure, these are ways to “drop-out” of the technological world. And sure, Freedom for Mac isn’t as granular as I’d like (i.e. block Facebook but not LexisNexis), but these tools don’t need to be perfect, they just need to nudge people towards behavior that is more conducive to the good life. They need to just slightly alter any potential downsides of “being digital” to make the good parts easier. Unfortunately, the debate surrounding this all-to-often assumes that the trajectory is set and that we cannot change it through the use of innovative tools.