Stories from Abroad

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the scale and consequences of the digital divide and underlined the urgent need to find solutions to digital inequality. Governments are being forced to reassess priorities and step up with innovative solutions to address a range of challenges across health, employment, education, and economic resiliency. As the internet and digital technology will play an increasingly important role in our world, governments must develop policies to deliver affordable and meaningful connectivity to all.

A fight over foreign countries' efforts to tax big American tech companies' digital services is likely to come to a head in January just as Joe Biden takes office. Governments have failed to reach a broad multilateral agreement on how to structure such taxes.

The Covid-19 lockdowns were expected to push the resilience of broadband and mobile networks to the limit. With millions of people suddenly working from home, it was widely expected that telecoms companies would struggle to keep everyone connected, particularly in countries where full-fibre broadband levels are low and 5G upgrades remain a distant prospect. Yet networks mostly held firm as minor outages and service difficulties such as jerky Zoom calls proved surmountable for most workers, children and furloughed staff stuck at home.

The Internet Society presented the prestigious Jonathan B. Postel Service Award to Onno W.

By most measures, China is no longer just leading the US when it comes to 5G. It is running away with the game. China has more 5G subscribers than the US, not just in total but per capita. It has more 5G smartphones for sale, and at lower prices, and it has more-widespread 5G coverage. Connections in China are, on average, faster than in the US, too. When it comes to the things that are supposed to make 5G revolutionary, not just evolutionary—the apps made possible by the greater speeds and capacity—China’s front-runner status is less well-entrenched.

Peru, the nation with the world’s highest coronavirus mortality rate, is also one of dozens of countries where schools nationwide remain closed on account of the pandemic, with no reopening date in sight. The quarantine here is particularly severe; children 14 and under are permitted out of their homes only one hour per day. Some families can afford workarounds. Students from families wealthy enough to pay for private schools have kept their educations going with private tutors and interactive classes on home computers.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s election promise to connect the entire country to cutting-edge broadband speeds by 2025 has been dubbed “ludicrously unrealistic” after the parliament’s spending watchdog warned that rural internet users risk being left behind by the slow pace of progress. The comments from Meg Hillier, chair of the public accounts committee, followed a National Audit Office report that said the 2025 target was “challenging” and warned that those rural areas risk being further left behind.

Europe’s internet infrastructure is riddled with gaps and bottlenecks, exposed over the past seven months by surging hospital admissions to the rise of home working and explosion of e-commerce.

Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks called for new scrutiny of undersea cables that transmit nearly all the world’s internet data traffic at the FCC meeting Sept 30.  “We must take a closer look at cables with landing locations in adversary countries,” Commissioner Starks said.

In exploring the principles behind democratic health communications around the world, South Korea and Taiwan stood out for their use of technology both to understand what their citizens were thinking and to prevent the health disinformation spreading as it did in Europe and North America. Their experiences in dealing with the infodemic provide five important lessons for policymakers: