April 2012

While it's easy to dwell on just how much we pay over to the government this time of year, we're actually paying taxes all the time -- when we buy things, when we fill up our gas tank and when we pay our cell phone bills. Those phone bills are the focus of proposed legislation in Congress that would freeze cell phone taxes for five years.

Scott Mackey is an economist at KSE Partners; he also works with the major cell phone companies. “The typical customer pays about 16 percent of their total bill in taxes and fees,” he says. “To compare, the sales tax you pay on everyday items that you purchase, that rate is about 7.4 percent.” But why do the cell phone companies care how much we pay in taxes? Mackey says it’s pretty simple. People have limited budgets. “To the extent that taxes are driving up cost of people's bills, they have to cut back in what kinds of services they buy and what they purchase,” Mackey says. He and other supporters of the legislation argue that these taxes disproportionately impact lower-income people, who depend on their mobile phones for phone and Internet service.

[Commentary] As Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way.

Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors. Why this disturbing trend? In the West, cynicism about African democracy has led governments to narrow their development priorities to poverty reduction and stability; individual liberties like press freedom have dropped off the agenda, making it easier for authoritarian rulers to go after journalists more aggressively. In the 1990s, leaders like Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia were praised by the West as political and social reformers. Today, the West extols these men for achieving growth and maintaining stability, which they do largely with a nearly absolute grip over all national institutions and the press. Then there’s the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

[Mohamed Keita is the Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.]

[Commentary] Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that “very powerful forces” — including oppressive and territorial governments, the entertainment industry, and Facebook and Apple — “have lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world.”

Conflating Internet censorship and Google’s biggest competitors is a bit lazy, and it makes Brin seem wistful and out of touch. Has he looked around his own company lately and seen things like Search Plus Your World and Google Play? “Open” probably isn’t the best word to describe them.

Brin can argue that the current environment wouldn’t have fostered the creation of Google, but we’ve come a long way on the Internet since the late ’90s. If the definition of “open” is “that which can be indexed and monetized by Google,” maybe we need a new word.

Iraq -- cut off from decades of technological progress because of dictatorship, sanctions and wars -- recently took a big step out of isolation and into the digital world when its telecommunications system was linked to a vast new undersea cable system serving the Gulf countries.

The engineers who designed and installed the cable that made shore in Al-Faw, near Basra, had to deal with an unusual number of challenges. There were more than 100 oil and natural gas pipelines to cross; stretches of shallow water where the cable had to be buried; and unexploded ordnance from the Iraq war that had to be avoided. The new cable will speed Internet and telephone traffic to India in the East and Sicily in the West. From there, traffic moves onto other networks to connect to the rest of the world.