MoDuLe 9

I would chose the issue on digital divide as the most prevalent issue on the internet. We cannot deny that because of poverty there are people who haven’t even seen a computer in their entire life. There are people that do not have access because access on the internet means additional cost especially to ordinary citizens. The government doesn’t have major programs that aim to teach people about computers.

To compensate for the number of people who don’t have access to computers, there must be quality in terns of people who are studying in the field of computing. As a student, I must study hard, so that when I graduate I can compete with the quality of I.T graduates in other countries. Also students can conduct extension works and conduct computer literacy in depressed areas, so that peole who can’t afford to have access can now have opputunity to learn even just the basics of computer use.

THE GOVERNMENTAL RESPONSE

The term “digital divide” first emerged in the United States in 1993. The theme was important to citizen pressure groups who argument that government should force the new Internet companies to pay the additional costs of extending their products and services to the poor. But the Clinton Administration proved cool to this view. The framers of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act, after noting the existence of the digital divide, disappointed social activists by insisting it wasn’t government’s role to redress it. The various federal government programs that had been set up to close the Digital Divide in the Clinton era were discontinued under Bush. After 2000, with the dot-com bust, pressure on high-tech companies to respond to digital divide largely evaporated.

But if concern as concern over the Digital Divide declined in the US, is surged in developing countries. Just as economist Joseph Stiglitz gave legitimacy to the view that the “Washington consensus” in intergovernmental affairs was weighted against the interests of developing countries, many developing countries searched for a formula to close the Digital Divide. Hundreds of conferences and seminars were held to discuss Digital Divide ­ you can find 1.4 million references to speeches and project descriptions by Google search. The concern culminated in Geneva’s World Summit on Information Society, with 13,000 delegates from protect themselves against the common view that they would fall further and further behind as the internet industries spread their influence across the planet. But despite all the speech-making and hundreds of pilot projects set up to address the divide, the perception persists that the Digital Divde is growing not declining and, what’s worse, no formula has been offered to suggest how to harness the market forces that shape ICT products and services.

If there is an axiom that defines the digital economy it is this: 80% of the profits of telecom and IT companies come from the top 20% of the market. Thus, the entire culture of those industries is focused on “end to end” solutions of the most affluent customers. There have been some examples in the history of high tech when companies have tried to ignore this reality. For example, the founder CEO of one of the early US computer companies got excited by the idea in the mid-80s

Phase one: Offering carro Many of the first intergovernmental task forces to close the digital divide were created at the height of the dot-com boom when their organizers sought to become “honest brokers” for huge trust funds they thought would be established by billionaire moguls and G-7 governments. The World Bank strategy, following the pattern of debt-relief negotiations, was to offer carrots, in order to coak governments to privatize their telecommunications companies and other policy changes that could reduce prices and lead to better quality of service. But as the dot-com bust took hold, few carrots could be seen. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) made a pledge of $15 billion in development assistance to developing countries to promote closing the digital divide. The gesture was made as part of MOFA’s role as host of the 2000 Okinawa G-7 Summit, in which President Clinton extolled the virtues of digital technology and urged the G-7 nations to pool funds to close the divide. But the Japanese have found it difficult to fulfill the pledge after neither the US nor other high tech nations chipped in. Adding to the disappointment, some developing countries found that they were unable to gain revenue from spectrum license fees, or by mobilizing foreign direct investment into the rural telecom sector. Adding to the gloom, venture capitalists curtailed experimental projects in emerging markets in 2000 and only began to rise again in late

Phase two e-Readin: Wanting to embolden reformers, influential researchers in universities, such as economist Jeff Sachs, joined forces with reformers to promote a concept called “e-readiness,” or “network readiness.” The term refers to quantitative rankings of countries regarding the extent to which they were able to muster the complex policy changes that would be needed to become an “information society.”. By 2001 it was clear that some countries were doing a terrific job becoming e-ready, while others were not - a reality that was actually deepening the digital divide between countries. A study by National University of Singapore professor Wong Poh Kam showed that this pattern of deepening inequities between nations was particularly evident in Asia

Phase three: Taking on the PT Certainly more must be done than e-readiness research to strengthen the hand of reformers in countries where entrenched interests prevented reforms. Soon, the reformers set their sights on a common target: the “PTTs.” They are the incumbent “Post, Telegraph and Telephone” companies which tightly control the path and pace of a country’s transition as an information society. Like tenured college professors past their prime, many PTTs protect their status by extending favors to political allies, controlling the setting of standards and other aspects of regulation. After fifty years of telephony most fixed-line infrastructures were expensive, slow, bulky, and narrowly confined to cities. By 2000, most developing countries had only between 2-5% phone penetration rate, despite prodding by the World Trade Organization’s telecom services act. There was clear evidence that restructuring telecommunications was a pre-requisite to e-readiness. An ITU study found that countries that liberalized or privatized their telecom sector had doubled telephone penetration between 1996 and 2000, compared with only incremental growth by the unreformed countries.

Phase four: Wireless emerges as “disruptive technology,” and alliances between reformers and wireless entrepreneurs are born. &nbsReformers soon found that it wasn’t easy to dislodge the entrenched power of the PTTs, even after the governments mandated telecommunications sector reform. Just as in the business sector, some reformers evoked the name of Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, to argue that the only way to accelerate each country’s transition into information society’s is to promote “disruptive technologies” by backing entrepreneurs whose business models promise to undermine the control of the old guard.

In China, for example, China Telecom is a huge and politically powerful telephone company that employs more than one million employees. In recent years a rebellious anti-Telecom coalition rallied around a competing carrier, China Unicom. Unicom’s alliance included an assortment of players that each had separate reasons to counter the strength of Telecom: competing ministries, bureaus, scholars, entrepreneurs and multinational corporations. They each had separate motives, said one author assessing the coalition. “Some had a philosophical stance embracing free competition, some wanted to contain the power of government ministries tied to the incumbent, some were competing business interests that financially benefited from lessening China Telecom’s power."

In March 2003, the European Community became the first Official Development Assistance (ODA) donor to explicitly declare itself willing to provide financial support to wireless coalitions that aim to counter the dominance of incumbent telecoms in Europe. So far, no such example of this sort has occurred in Asia. But there are signs that the approach may emerge soon in Indonesia.

A country with a huge potential market of as many as 200 million new wireless customers, Indonesia offers another example that shows how rival coalitions can use the digital divide issue to advance their strategic position. Thanks to IMF pressures, Indonesia’s telecommunications market officially opened in 1999. Seeing an opportunity, two of Singapore’s flagship telecom carriers, Singtel and Singapore Telemedia Technologies (STT) made billion dollar investments to claim stakes in the Indonesian telecom market, the biggest investments in Indonesia since the Asian economic crisis in 1997. With its future dominance in doubt, the incumbent carrier, PT Telkom joined with a group of Korean investors to announce an “e-Indonesia” project.

The project, announced with farfare in the Indonesian media, is intended to close Indonesia’s digital divide. But Telkom’s rivals were worried. They feared it would give Telkom’s platforms unfair advantage: special access to the booming “e-government” and small/medium enterprise markets. Critics grumbled that eIndonesia would give Telkom control over a “universal services fund,” established to help low-income areas. They feared it would be used to subsidize Telkom’s own rural market-building activities.

Reformers in Indonesia wonder if e-Indonesia will provoke a counter proposal among competing wireless carriers, which would offer a different path for closing Indonesia’s digital divide. One important question is what position would be taken on this issue by Indonesia’s Consultative Group of Donors (CGD), an informal alliance between the World Bank, other UN agencies, and bilateral donors from OECD countries, such as Japan and the United States. “In the past three years the CGD group has held many meetings on Indonesia’ digital divide, and many now agree that the key to extending ICT to the poor is circumventing the influence of the incumbent telco,” said Idris Sulaiman, a Jakarta-based consultant to the US Agency for International Development. He adds, “The sudden emergence of Singaporean corporate stakeholders in our wireless market is causing many to wonder if these companies could be mobilized into a path of reform. The formation of such alliances may be politically risky and awkward for many of the players, but it may be the only way to trigger the changes needed to close Indonesia’s digital divide.”

Source: http://www.digitaldivide.org/governments.html