In India and Myanmar we may be seeing the effects of the internet on developing economies
For the developing world, broadband and mobile communications are helping
In Myanmar, the opening of the economy has meant accessible telecommunications for the nation’s farmers reports The Atlantic.
At the same time, Indian Railway’s Telecommunications arm RailTel is opening its fibre network to the public, starting with Wi-Fi at major stations.
What is notable in both cases is the role of Facebook. In India, Facebook’s project to offer free broadband access across the nation is meeting some resistance and it’s probably no coincidence Indian Railway’s WiFi project is being run as partnership with Google.
In Myanmar on the other hand, Facebook and Snapchat are the go to destination for rural communities, it will be interesting to watch how this plays out as farmers start to use the social media service for price discovery and finding new markets – as Tencent Chairman SY Lau last year claimed was happening with Chinese communities.
One of the promises of making the Internet available to the general public was that it would enable the world to become connected, thirty years later we may be seeing the results.
There are plenty of insights on online security trends which I’ll cover in tomorrow’s blog post but one aspect that sticks out in the report is the case study on the Angler Exploit which takes advantage of hacked domain registrar accounts to create new domain names to serve phishing pages, ransomware sites and malicious advertisements.
Dealing with these sites is a major problem for network administrators and Cisco claims many of the domains registered haven’t yet been used by online criminals.
The Angler exploit shows just how complex internet security has become. The issue of trust is a complex thing and certainly no-one can trust every domain we see. That there are thousands of ‘disposable’ domains available to scammers only makes things more difficult for the average user.
The latest Pew Internet survey shows America’s changing attitude to broadband
It appears the penetration of home broadband has peaked in the United States report the Pew Research Centre.
Since the organisation’s last home broadband survey in 2013, the proportion of adults living in a household with a fixed high speed connection has fallen from 70% to 67% while those relying solely on a smartphone connection has gone from 8 to 13 percent.
This also coincides with 15% of respondents reporting that they’ve cancelled cable or satellite TV subscriptions as they can now get the content they want from the internet. It’s clear the shift away from broadcast is now firmly on.
One of the jarring notes from the Pew survey is the digital divide developing with nearly half those without a home broadband connection citing cost, either of the Internet service or that of a computer, being the main barrier to going online.
According to Pew, Americans are acutely aware of the problems of not having broadband with two-thirds of those surveyed believing not having a home high-speed internet connection is a major disadvantage to finding a job.
The Pew survey shows how attitudes to Internet accessibility is changing, increasingly we’re seeing it as an essential like power and the telephone. Increasingly access to broadband is going to be a political issue.
Governments and politicians have an urge to restrict the internet
China held an internet conference today where, as Forbes reports, President Xi Jinping laid out the nation’s vision of an Internet that ‘complies with Chinese laws.’
That Internet is a walled garden where access to sites like Facebook are blocked and an army of censors make sure that subjects which aren’t to the Chinese Communists Party’s approval are promptly removed.
Meanwhile in the US, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated the Internet should closed down for America’s enemies.
That both the Chinese government and Donald Trump agree on something shouldn’t be surprising, however the urge to monitor and shut down the Internet is shared by many governments. It’s an urge that needs to be resisted.
The World Wide Web describes our times. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history
The World Wide Web describes our times but it’s an incomplete document as sites, pages and posts are lost, deleted or edited. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history.
As example of how fragile our online records are is illustrated by the tale of Kevin Vaughan’s Pulitzer Prize nominated story describing a 1960s community tragedy for the Rocky Mountain News.
The 34 part piece captivated the newspaper’s readership when it was published in 2007 but two years later, the Rocky Mountain News went broke and the story disappeared along with the rest of the website. The Atlantic Magazine describes Vaughan’s efforts to recover and republish his story.
Vaughan’s efforts to recover his work are not unique, websites are constantly being shut down, accounts censored and social media posts deleted. In the Coweb, The New Yorker’s Jill LaPore describes how the Ukrainian militia leader responsible for shooting down MH17 promptly deleted the message showing the plane’s remains and how the Internet Archive preserved that damming post.
Last week in San Francisco the Internet Archive held their Building Libraries Together event where director Brewster Kahle described their efforts to preserve as much of the web as possible for future generations.
The Internet Archive itself is in a restored church that seems almost custom built for the organisation. In her New Yorker piece, essential reading for those wanting to understand the project, LaPore describes Kahle’s affection for the building.
He loves that the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1923: everything published in the United States before that date lies in the public domain. A temple built in copyright’s year zero seemed fated. Kahle hops, just slightly, in his shoes when he gets excited. He says, showing me the church, “It’s Greek!”
For the Building Libraries Together event, the Internet Archive had spread out a series of exhibits on the organisation’s activities that range from trawling the web through to scanning books, digitising movie reels, saving old video games and collecting TV news broadcasts.
One of the important functions the Archive does is create collections around major events – the capture of the MH17 shoot down was part their Ukrainian War collection – which illustrates the problem of ‘link rot’ as many sites set up around events such as the Occupy movement or the Ferguson protests are now dead or occupied by cybersquatters.
Running a service like the Internet Archive is labor intensive and in an expensive city like San Francisco where almost all the staff could be paid substantially better working in the tech sector and the pay isn’t exactly stellar.
Kahle jokes “because we can’t pay stock options, those who stay three years here get a statue made of themselves.
The statues line one side of the old church hall that also doubles as an event space and the server room. At the back of the auditorium are the computers themselves quietly flashing away each time the archive is being read.
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For the presentations, Kahle bubbles away with his thoughts on the importance of preserving the Internet and Kalev Hannes Leetaru‘s presentation on data visualisation raised some important topics on copyright and communications which this blog intends to explore deeper in the future.
The final part of the night’s presentation was an award to the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, for his work in trying to keep intellectual property open and accessible.
At the end of the night, the crowd left with their gifts and t-shirts and the exhibits had packed up.
One of the stand out exhibits was the virtual reality stand where an old lady tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time, “this is wonderful. I just want to reach out and touch everything,” she cried.
Preserving that wonder and the promised possibilities of our time is possibly the most important thing The Internet Archive can do. In an era where many talk of open information but few genuinely practice it, we run the risk of leaving an information dark ages for future generations.
How we preserve a record of our times for future generations is a pressing concern. The Internet Archive is one step to solving that problem.
While that’s good news for those businesses and households in Chattanooga that need those speeds, there’s a much more important effect that Wired points out.
Municipal broadband providers are raising expectations nationwide for what good Internet service means, forcing commercial providers to improve their infrastructure. And by increasing the amount of bandwidth available, they could be setting the stage for the creation of new, more bandwidth-hungry applications. This is how better service goes from a “nice-to-have” to a “you’d-better-have” for the country’s recalcitrant cable companies.
A few municipal projects could be the trigger to getting better services across the country. This is a model that could work in many other fields as well.
Many of the new communications applications are enabling adhoc networks between smartphones and other devices. In times of civil emergencies and natural disasters, those networks may well turn out to be more reliable than the telecommunications networks.
With the various mesh technologies available, we’re seeing another way people can go ‘off the grid’ which will change many of the existing business models of many industries and possibly empower communities in unexpected ways.
Building a competitive nation is more than just rolling out broadband connections
How much does broadband really matter in developing a competitive and innovative modern economy? A corporate lunch with US software company NetApp last week illustrated that there’s more to creating a successful digital society than just rolling out fibre connections.
Rich Scurfield, NetApp’s Senior Vice President responsible for the Asia-Pacific was outlining the firm’s plans for the Australian market and how it fits into the broader jigsaw puzzle of economies across the region.
Like many companies in the China market NetApp is finding it hard with Scurfield describing the market as “chaotic”. This isn’t unusual for western technology companies and Apple is one of the few to have had substantial success.
Across the rest of East Asia, Scurfield sees them ranging as being mature, stable and settled in the cases of Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand through to India where the opportunities and the challenges of connecting a billion people are immense.
Digital outliers
The interesting outlier is South Korea, one of the most connected nations in the world, where the promise of ubiquitous broadband isn’t delivering the expected economic benefits to the entire community.
In theory, South Korea should be seeing a boom in connected small businesses. As Scurfield says, “from a technology providers’ view this connectivity means you could do more things very differently because of the infrastructure that’s available.”
Global Innovation Rankings
Korea’s underperformance is illustrated by last year’s Global Innovation Index that saw South Korea coming in at 16th, just ahead of both Australia and New Zealand whose broadband rollouts are nowhere near as advanced as the ROK’s.
Making a close comparison of Australia and the Republic of Korea’s strengths in the WIPO innovation index, it’s clear the technology and engineering aspects are just part of a far more complex set of factors such as confidence in institutions, the ease of doing business and even freedom of the press.
Putting those factors together makes a country far more likely to encourage its population to start new innovative businesses that can compete globally. When you have a small group of chaebol dominating the private sector then it’s much harder for new entrants to enter the market – interestingly a private sector dominated by big conglomerates is a problem Australia shares.
Small business laggards
NetApp’s Scurfield flagged exactly this problem, “Korea is an interesting market in there’s about six companies that matter and from a competitive view those companies are extremely advanced, they have great technology and great people.”
“However what’s not happening across the rest of the country is this adoption isn’t bleeding into the broader community,” said Scurfield “Because of that I don’t see broadband connectivity as having a wide impact.”
That Korean small and medium businesses aren’t using broadband technologies to develop innovative new products and service in one of the most connected economies on earth raises a question about just how effective investment in infrastructure is when it’s faced with cultural barriers.
Certainly we should be keeping in mind that economic development, global competitiveness and the creation of industry hubs is as much a matter of people, national institutions and culture as it is of technology.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of our people and institutions when evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a nation in today’s connected world.
The dynamic pricing of GoGo’s inflight Wi-Fi is a marker for the future of many industries.
Possibly the holy grail of business is to find a product that your customers will pay almost anything for.
In flight Wi-Fi service provider GoGo may be close to achieving that with a product that business customers depend upon. The New York Times describes how the company has found it can use dynamic pricing to customise its prices for each flight.
One of the limitations GoGo faces is the connections between the aircraft and the ground stations is narrow so a plane full of bandwidth hungry travellers will quickly bring everyone’s service to a crawl.
To overcome this – and to make more money – the service has developed algorithms to anticipate the demand on each flight and then customise the charges to suit.
In many respects what we’re seeing with GoGo is similar to services like Uber where fast, intelligent systems can analyse traffic patterns and use the predicted demand to set prices. It’s the ultimate demand driven economy.
Over time, this model is going to flow out across many industries – the airline industry leads the way in pricing around demand management – and consumers need to get used to the idea of a fixed price tag being a quaint memory.
Getting your business online shouldn’t require a doctorate says domain registrar GoDaddy’s international boss
“The days of getting a PhD to get your businesses online are over” declared James Carroll, GoDaddy’s International Executive Vice President last week on a visit to Sydney.
GoDaddy is the world’s biggest internet domain name registration service and Carroll was in Australia to promote the expansion of the company’s local operations.
Australia’s a prime target for the company with nearly half the nation’s two million businesses not having a web presence. “I think there’s an awareness issue about the skill that are needed to get online,” says Carroll.
GoDaddy’s Australia and New Zealand country manager Tara Commerford suggested two reasons why small businesses aren’t going online, “I think it’s lack of awareness and people don’t know how to do it”.
Commerford suggests that simplified online tools are making it easier along with the easy access to other platforms like social media and location online services.
One of the barriers to getting online is confusion and the new top level domains haven’t helped this by muddying the message about which domains they should be registering under. This is only increasing the fear among small business owners that going online is complex, expensive and risky.
It’s understandable that domain registrars like GoDaddy would push the new domains given the industry’s low margins and need for scale, but that’s not the problem for smaller operators.
The problem for small businesses is getting the basics right with with a mobile friendly website, particularly for hospitality and tourism operators. Having the right domain name is an important first start of an important journey for most businesses.
US internet adoption rates tell us much about affluence between different groups
With 85 percent of Americans now online it’s safe to say the internet has reached saturation point in North America.
However not all groups have been as quick to get online and the Pew Internet Survey has a detailed analysis of adoption rates across different demographic segments.
The results aren’t particularly surprising with lower adoption rates reflecting class, race and education differences although older age groups are the fastest growing segment.
Ultimately adoption comes down to affluence with the key chart being the connection rates across income groups.
What the Pew report does illustrate is how critical the internet is to income levels and why it’s important for the disadvantaged to be connected for them to participate in the new economy.
For countries following affluent nations in internet adoption, getting disadvantaged communities connected might be one of the easiest ways they can improve national income, education and well being.
A Reuters report looks at the changing media landscape and how the older news industries’ decline has some way to go yet.
“We seek news on Twitter but bump into it on Facebook” points out the Reuters’ 2015 Digital News Report in its analysis of global media consumption.
The broad trends from surveying over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia are clear – social media is becoming the main way people are finding their news while television is slowly declining.
Probably most concerning for the television networks how younger viewers have turned away from TV with only a quarter of those aged between 18 and 25 tuning in as opposed to two thirds of those aged over 65.
Given the aging of television network audiences it’s not surprising that last week Australia’s Network Ten, part owned by Lachlan Murdoch, found a lifeline from the country’s main cable network as the broadcaster is finding revenues declining.
The question is how long advertisers are going to stick with television as audiences increasingly move online creating a revenue gap estimated by analyst Mary Meeker to be worth around thirty billion dollars a year.
For the moment, the great hope for the online world is Facebook with Reuters finding the service is dominating users’ time. In that light it’s not surprising the company has such a huge market valuation.
The competing social media services are still facing challenges, particularly with Twitter showing a far lower level of penetration with the general public, leading Harvard professor Bill George to speculate the company risked becoming the new BlackBerry.
While the online services struggle for supremacy and television slowly declines, the real pain continues to felt by the newspapers who continue to find their relevance erode and few of their readers prepared to pay for their content.
The Reuters report confirms the trends we already know while giving insights into the unique peculiarities of each market.
