IGF Bali: pervasive surveillance, no pervasive access

Least developed countries remain the biggest challenge for universal access to the internet,  campaigner Mike Jensen, Internet Access Specialist at the Association of Progressive Communications (APC), explained at the 8th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Bali. While internet access has grown since the first IGF in Athens, 2006, from 71 to 357 million people in the developing world (compared to a growth from 148 million to 340 in developed countries) according to current statistics of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the “last mile” - access in remote, rural areas or on small islands – is still an unfulfilled promise.

Internet access has been a staple topic at the different editions of the IGF. Yet, the forum has always been more of “a stocktaking space on access than one that had dramatic influence on access,” said Anriette Esterhuysen, APC's Executive Director, in an interview with the Internet Policy Review. It had over the years helped people, Esterhuysen said, to build an understanding of some of the issues.

Diversity of issues, problems

Essential to acknowledge and somehow also complicating the search for solutions was the diversity of regional, national and even local situations, according to the experts on an access panel in Bali. Even in highly connected countries like the United Kingdom, access was all but perfect, for example on some British islands, Jensen reported.

Bernadette Lewis, Secretary General at Caribbean Telecommunications Union, described that in her region, some countries had access rates of 80 percent, others of 10 percent only. Ongoing projects to increase access to the internet are multifold: computer access centres in Trinidad and Tobago, earmarking of universal access funds for broadband connectivity and national broadband strategies. One vital concern, Lewis voiced, iss related to the access of people with disabilities. Seniors or people who were institutionalised were “part of this 'universality' we are going after,” but they were all t0o often overlooked. “They are invisible in many respects,” Lewis warned. Those with hearing impairments could for example not just use any phone, but needed tools to overcome the barrier.

Affordability of access

Still of considerable concerns for the have-nots are prices. The internet, especially in areas with scarce access, is still generally quite expensive for the poor, Jensen observed. The current definition by the ITU and the Broadband Commission was that internet access should cost five percent (or less) of a user's annual income. “When I look at places like Africa, it is about 40 or 50 percent of your annual income,” Jensen said.

A fairly recent initiative, the Alliance for Affordable Access (A4AI) targets this question particularly, Jenniver Heroon, from Google's Access Team said. The Alliance, hosted by the World Wide Web Foundation and supported by large business including Google, Intel, public administrations like the UK Department for International Development, USAID, the Omidyar Network and other foundations, wants to “advocate for policy and regulatory reforms that drive down artificially high Internet access prices in developing countries.”

On the list of topics A4AI wants to address is “innovative allocation of frequency spectrum,” “promoting infrastructure sharing,” and “increasing transparency and public participation in regulatory decisions.” Still, in 2013, the initiative wants to engage with three or four developing countries and by the end of 2015, at least 12 shall engage. Also, an annual affordability report is on the to-do list.

The result of high prices was a widening digital divide, W3C Foundation founder Tim Berners Lee had said during the announcement of the Alliance. But with the advent of affordable smartphones, new undersea cables, and innovations in wireless spectrum usage, there was “simply no good reason for the digital divide to continue.” The real bottleneck is anti-competitive regulation.

Maximising revenue instead of long-term benefits for the public

Frequency allocations were often abused by state actors, according to a representative of Microsoft East Africa, for “maximising the revenue.” “Eventually, what happens is that those costs are translated back to the consumer side.” A second major policy problem was that regulators blocked the selling of access at lower prices to those who could not afford regular prices.

At the Internet Governance Forum in Bali, the universal access topic was also covered in a US-led panel on “bringing broadband to those who need it most.” The US, who was weakened during this IGF due to the revelations of Edward Snowden, tried as promised after the controversial World Conference on International Telecommunication Union to present its own story on how to develop the internet market. Yet, pervasive internet is still lacking, while pervasive surveillance was one top issues at the 8th IGF in Bali. One might wonder, what if not access will the 9th IGF discuss next year?