Posts Tagged ‘icts’

We are told that we live in an information age, a knowledge economy, and a network society. And while these are useful shorthands for pointing towards certain trends, of course, information, knowledge and networks are nothing new to our age, economy and society.

One of the strongest explanations for the historical importance of information and communication technologies to economic dynamism is James Beniger’s Control Revolution which convincingly argues that ICTs were originally necessary not to an information economy of services, but an industrial economy of manufacturing.

The telegraph, and even more mundane innovations like tables, arose in response to a “crisis of control.” The most poignant example of this was how the speed at which trains operated made traditional communication and managerial strategies inadequate. Crashes were frequent until ICTs were developed to overcome the crisis through alerting distant switching stations and tracking repair statuses.

What, then, does the rise of ICTs in developing countries mean for industrialization?

Many people hope that the Indian model, where ICT created an enormous service industry, is replicable (this form of leapfrogging is famously the goal of Rwanda’s President Kagame). But as we strive to use ICTs for productive activities in the developing world, we would be remiss to ignore manufacturing – the sector that stands between agricultural societies and service-based ones. As China becomes increasingly sophisticated, we see the initial stages of poorer countries replacing them as the world’s factory floor. Increasing the productivity and efficiency of industry in the developing world will require ICTs, from cloud computing down to file management systems. While this will mean some service-based businesses providing ICT solutions, I think a potentially more productive change will come as the structure of the economies shift from primarily agricultural to significantly industrial. This, I think, could be one of the more promising roles for ICTs in development.

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.]

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.

Over the past couple days, millions of dollars have been donated to help Haiti through the use of text messaging. This will surely be chalked up as another example of the role that ICTs can play in saving the world. People with that view are right to be excited about what this signals – another example of technology lowering the transaction costs to doing good.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the good news is all there is.

As an example, Chris Blattman points to a recent paper [PDF] about the infamous “hate radio” in Rwanda that played a role in motivating the genocidal violence. By looking at the variety of radio coverage in villages (due to hills interfering with radio waves), the author concludes that “complete village radio coverage increased violence by 65 to 77 percent, and a simple counter-factual calculation suggests that approximately 9 percent of the genocide, corresponding to at least 45,000 Tutsi deaths, can be explained by the radio station.”

ICTs are a tool and it’s important to remember that other factors (people, geography) will impact whether they are used for good or ill.

As much as I know the reality is far from it, part of me always yearns for the cyberlibertarian utopia of the 1990s. Best characterized by Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, the hope that the Internet and other digital connections would lead to dramatically increased freedom has not come true. In fact, there are plenty of signs that the opposite is viable.

However, reading a post on Patrick Meier’s always interesting blog, iRevolution, a little bit of hope was rekindled. Writing about the role that ICTs play in Burmese activism, Patrick notes that two researchers found that the “Bangladeshi cell phone network extends well into Burma so activists can use phones from Bangladesh to relay information.” Further, Burmese citizens with Internet access are more likely to fancy themselves activists.

While I imagine it isn’t terribly hard to jam the Bangladeshi cell network, as it stands now, the spillover effects of the Bangladeshi ether is probably a boon to activists seeking connectivity outside of the official telecommunications systems.

In what other ways could governments, NGOs and activists utilize the spillover of digital networks to assist domestic dissidents? The United States has operated Voice of America and Radio Free Asia/Europe for decades, so the precedent for sending freedom-enhancing electromagnetic waves into authoritarian areas is there. Why not do so with the Internet and cell phone networks? It could even be better than VOA because it would take away that paternalistic feel of VOA et al. and allow the Burmese to speak for and to themselves.