The Internet has become a global commons, providing a uniform platform for commerce, communications, debate and research for all nations. But, with the rapid rise in Asian Internet users, the Internet runs the risk of becoming balkanized, Nitin Desai, chair of the U.N.’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF), warns.
Speaking at a conference hosted by Nominet, the UK body in charge of domain names ending .uk, Desai pointed in particular to a problem that could lead Asian nations to break away from the current Internet structure and create their own, separate Internet: most Asians don’t know the Latin alphabet, the basis of all domain names.
He said the Chinese government was concerned that users still had to type webpage addresses using Latin characters even when the pages were in Chinese.
“A large proportion of the internet users in China do not know the Latin alphabet.
World Bank expert Howard Williams said that a two-tiered Internet, which lies at the heart of the net neutrality debate in the U.S., also threatens to fractionalize the Internet were it to emerge. David Harrington from the Communications Management Association said that cultural differences will inevitably split up the Internet — it’s only a matter of degrees of separation.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
As expected, no news here, but the Justice Department plans to approve with no conditions the merger of AT&T-BellSouth as early as today, according to USA Today’s Paul Davidson. The green light from the antitrust agency could be the prelude to an FCC approval of the big telco combination tomorrow.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has recommended approving the deal, also with no conditions attached. But new commissioner Republican Robert McDowell is recusing himself from the vote due to past work fighting the large incumbent telcos, leaving Martin and fellow Republican Deborah Tate to a dead-even fight with the two Democratic commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein.
So, the item could be pulled from the Commission’s agenda tomorrow. But really, no suspense here either. The Democrats could ask for some concessions, but they probably won’t be terrible and the deal will be approved by the FCC soon.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:23 AM | Print | Comments (0)
In a move that could make Libyan school children even more digitally connected than their U.S. counterparts, Nicholas Negroponte’s non-profit group One Laptop Per Child has struck a deal with the government of Libya to supply all of the country’s school children with $100 laptops by 2008. MIT’s Negroponte describes the spy novel-like way he cut the deal with Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“When I met with Qaddafi, it had all the mystique and trimmings expected: middle of the desert, in a tent, 50 degrees C. etc.,” Mr. Negroponte, who was traveling to Asia on Tuesday, wrote in an e-mail message. “It took him very little time to find O.L.P.C. appealing as an idea.”
The group has also struck tentative pacts with Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria and Thailand. Negroponte’s program follows on an announcement last month by a rival initiative by Intel, called World Ahead, to bring WiMax technology to a remote region in the Amazon.
WiMax has yet to launch in the U.S. but the 114,000 residents of Parintins, a small town on the Amazon River, now have access to a next-generation, ubiquitous wireless high-speed network. Because so many developing nations are starting with so little in the way of information technology and Internet connectivity, these efforts to bring the poorer nations up-to-speed are actually vaulting them ahead of the developed world, at least in isolated circumstances.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:31 AM | Print | Comments (1)The New York Times’ Saul Hansell has this piece today (with a great headline…”Yahoo Feels Breath on Neck”) about Yahoo!’s fall from the comfortable Internet perch it enjoyed as recently as a year ago.
Yahoo! lost out to Google in its bid for YouTube in part because it was slow and, well, corporate-like in its approach to the jack rabbit video sharing site. Yahoo is a huge Internet company that deliver lots of eyeballs to advertisers, but its size and diversity may be the problem.
Yahoo may well be slipping because of the sheer scope of its ambitions. It competes in news with CNN, in sports with ESPN, in e-mail with Microsoft, in instant messaging with AOL, in social networking with MySpace, and of course in searching with Google. And it does so in dozens of countries.
“It’s hard to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, even though they are grown up now,” said Tim Hanlon, a senior vice president of Denuo, the media futures consulting arm of the Publicis Groupe. “Are they a content company? Are they a services company? Or are they a portal to other things? You ask three people and you may get three different answers.”
Moreover, the company is very slow to cut deals and seize the day and is what Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef H. Squali calls a “stodgy old Internet company.” The fact that it has been so slow to move into video advertising is testament to this big bureaucratic company mentality.
This new critique of Yahoo! stands in contrast to the glowing reviews of the company two or three years ago when CEO Terry Semel was highly praised for his sharp management of the formerly languishing Internet giant. And Semel is a savvy executive. It’s just that the pendulum has swung away from old-school. business management, much needed in the dot.com bust era, and back to entrepreneurial risk-taking (although nothing like the craziness of the dot.com era…we’re not in another bubble, but that’s another subject).
The race now belongs to the swiftest and it’s hard to run when your company is bogged down by internal turf-battles, decisions by committee, executives preening for promotions by managing up and all the other baggage that comes with being a big, established company.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:04 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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