A lot of the potential of the internet is very obscure until you''ve been there - and, once you've been there it's so obvious that it's easy to forget to explain it.
So: please, please, shout if I use a word which you do not understand. Can the translators please ask the translatees to shout for them?
What I was doing at my computer during yesterday's session was making my
paper into a World-Wide Web page. So let's visit the Web.
I can't possibly cover the whole of the ground I have tried to cover in my paper.
So I'll start near the end, with the International Telecommunications Union goals from Buenos Aires 1994.
This is the wrong way around, isn't it?
Why does it matter?
I think most people in this room will accept that conventional economic measures such as GDP do not accurately reflect the conditions of life of anyone except bankers and tax-collectors. The concept of Human Capital is an attempt to develop a better measure -- but is it adequate?
No.
In the coming decades, development policy without communication policy will be as meaningful as development policy without literacy or health education policy. As we know to other people's cost, that won't stop development policy without communication policy being made.
Once you've visited cyberspace and explored it for yourself, it is obvious that it has all sorts of liberatory potentials. The Vice- President of the United States can see some of them. The Rand Corporation -- ex-heimat of Mr Kissinger -- can see some. People like us can see much more.
It is the poorest three-quarters of the world's population who have most to gain from this technology, and least chance of getting it in the near future.
I sometimes worry that I am acting as an unpaid lobbyist for some schemes were to go according to plan -- they will be able to do so for a mere couple of thousand dollars.
When my report The Internet: Superhighway or Dirt-Track for the South
was published a year ago, in Africa only Egypt and South Africa had internet connections.
The above may be the last version of Larry Landwebber's Internet Connectivity map. It's almost all coloured in. So is everything OK?
Let's do a quick correction:
Almost the whole of that green area is connected to email through one small computer in GreenNet's office in North London. I didn't have time last night to extend the yellow area in full detail.
Most of the rest of the continent had email connections -- set up by intrepid activists like Karen Banks and Mike Jensen trekking the continent with rucksacks full of modems. As a result, in Africa NGOs still have better international communications than most governments.
And let's look quickly at the numbers of telephones and computers per 100 people in the top 40 economies.
Now, commercial providers are moving in in large numbers.
The capital cities and the big businesses are going to get wired by private enterprise. But all that adds to the map, in reality, are a few tiny blue dots.
The priorities for spreading networking need to be changed.
Private enterprise telecommunications must, by its nature, seek out the most lucrative markets. Left to itself, it will wire the most privileged sectors of society. That will increase the economic opportunities of the most privileged in the most urbanised areas. It may -- and this is very difficult to predict -- even thus increase the absolute poverty of the rest.
Imposing regulation on telecommunications is extremely difficult. As I understand it, an extreme interpretation of the GATT agreements is that a state which sought to regulate any sector of the economy to the displeasure of the multinationals would be liable to suffer sanctions of the kind the US has imposed on Cuba.
I was thus very interested to learn of the South African measures on mobile phones. I was, by the way, very disappointed not to hear from the South African speakers about WorkNet/SANGOnet, an organisation which was last year staffed entirely by women and whose sole goal is to bring communication to the most disadvantaged.
The commercial sector needs to be reminded that organisations like SANGOnet and GreenNet are building their future mass market. They are doing so on tiny budgets -- GreenNet's present email operations in Africa could run for many years on the cost of this conference. If we can find the people, what the world needs is not bigger projects, but hundreds more small projects.
Almost all I ask is that you leave here and reverse the priorities set out in the International Telecommunications Union document which I quoted at the beginning. And that you reverse the priorities of that not notably fleet-footed organisation, and of other gazelle-like entities like the World Bank, within a year.