WALUBENGO: Lessons from the Internet Governance Forum in Bali
What you need to know:
- What Indonesia has done to their tourism sector is what Safaricom did to our telecommunications sector – which is to simply focus on the bottom of the pyramid, while making lots of money and creating lots of jobs.
- The recent report that the US may be spying on its allies made governments feel that the US was abusing its advantage arising from the fact that most global web-based services such as Emails, Social media networks, Google and other internet services are US-centric and hence quite vulnerable to US government engineered access.
- Whereas options like having each economy build its own email, social media and other web-based systems may provide national pride and a debatable sense of national security, it unfortunately goes towards balkanizing the Internet along existing national geographic boundaries.
The global Internet Governance Forum (IGF) came to a close last week in Bali, Indonesia.
With almost 3,000 delegates drawn from around the world and across different sectors, the four-day conference discussed so many issues that it is impossible to summarise them on one page.
Of course details can be gathered from the IGF website, but the following is what one would call local lessons learnt from the global IGF conference.
Surprisingly, the biggest lesson learnt did not concern IT, but rather the highly developed Indonesian tourism sector.
What Indonesia has done to their tourism sector is what Safaricom did to our telecommunications sector – which is to simply focus on the bottom of the pyramid, while making lots of money and creating lots of jobs.
Imagine downtown Nairobi - River Road area - with multiple miniaturised “Serena Hotels” competing to offer quality, affordable services to thousands of “mass-tourists” roaming around well-built, well-lit roads, pavements, pubs and shopping kiosks.
Bali, the smallest island of Indonesia, has about four million inhabitants but receives three million tourists per year!
Kenya, with 40 million inhabitants, is a thousand times bigger, offers a wider variety of tourists attractions, and is still struggling to reach and celebrate one million tourists a year. How is that?
WRONG PRIORITIES
We have had our tourist market priority wrong and maybe it is time to change.
We need to develop places like River Road, Mtwapa and others to cash in on the “average” tourist who does not have the budget to stay at The Whitesands or Sarova Stanley but wants the same service re-packaged and sold along River Road or Mtwapa.
But then again, if you were a member of the ruling class, owning or having shares in the high-end hotel chains – why would you want to use public money to develop a lower-end tourist sector?
Does it make sense to promote a sub-sector that may potentially cannibalise your own high-end tourist market? Nationally yes, personally – maybe not.
And so River Road, Mtwapa and others shall retain their desolate status over the next foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, our economy continues to target small numbers of high-end tourists because it makes business sense to the chosen few - who coincidentally happen to be and will continue being - in charge of our tourism policies and strategies.
Now, back to ICT. There are a number of lessons to learn but we shall consider only one for now: Cyber-security.
SPYING SAGA
The recent report that the US may be spying on its allies made governments feel that the US was abusing its advantage arising from the fact that most global web-based services are US-centric.
Hence emails, social media networks, search engines and other internet services are quite vulnerable to US government-engineered access.
Discussions centred on how this could be addressed with the technical community saying that whereas solutions exist, they may well not be approved by the very governments that are complaining.
For example, the simplest answer to email spying is for the technical community to enable by default, some high-end encryption for all email communications.
However, governments would find this uncomfortable since quite frequently – through legal and more often illegal means – they do want to retain the right to spy on their enemies, friends and citizens under the framework of national security.
Obviously, such technical solutions do not look good from a government's perspective; but they do look good from a civil society perspective who continue to push for greater online freedoms and privacy.
Whereas having each economy build its own email, social media and other web-based systems may provide national pride and a debatable sense of national security, it unfortunately goes towards balkanising the Internet along existing national geographic boundaries.
The final effect will be a diminished value for online services. Search engines will end up with only a localised or national view of data, as opposed to the more international view currently enjoyed by keeping the Internet open and global.
There is never a prescriptive answer to Internet Governance problems – but discussions tend to uncover different angles to different stakeholders. Usually, these collaborative discussions do ignite and crystallise small components of the full solutions.
The complete solution may not necessarily be seen today, but could come into full view several years down the line.
