Stories from Abroad

Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on a new breed of device that only costs about $25. The gadgets look like the inexpensive Nokia phones that were big about two decades ago.

Back in Nov 2018, as the web was turning 30, it's creator, Tim Berners-Lee, announced that he wanted people to help him put together a "contract for the web" that would help strengthen and protect it for generations to come.

I look at the agenda for this conference [Caribbean Association of National Telecommunication Organizations (CANTO) 2019], and there are sessions on promoting 5G, artificial intelligence, and machine learning across the region.  There are discussions on creating safer communities where our citizens are protected from risks ranging from natural disasters to cyberattacks.

For all the promise of digital technologies to promote religious freedom, there are also very real downsides. When it comes to harnessing digital tools to punish religious minorities, the biggest offender is the world’s most populous country: China. China employs significantly more people to violate the rights of their citizens than the United States employs to militarily defend rights like free expression and freedom of assembly. 

President Donald Trump appeared to threaten that his administration would “take a look” at Google, opening an investigation into the search giant out of concern that it has been breached by the Chinese government. “Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government.” @foxandfriends  A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone!

SensTom Cotton (R-AR) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), along with Sens Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mark Warner (D-VA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Mitt Romney (R-UT), introduced legislation to reinforce the Trump administration's efforts to prevent the Chinese-owned telecommunication company Huawei from threatening America's national security. The Defending America's 5G Future Act would codify President Donald Trump's recent Executive Order and would prohibit the removal of Huawei from the Commerce Department Entity List without an act of Congress.

There is a growing divide in Internet quality of service (QoS) between developed and developing countries. With a panel data of 160 countries for the years 2008-2016, we examined whether the adoption of more pro-competition regulation can narrow this quality divide. Internet quality of service, measured as average connection speed, increased by three times greater in developed compared to developing countries during the period studied. We found that a unit increase in the pro-competition score increased the average connection speed in developed but not in developing countries.

Europe is host to a fiercely competitive environment of stakeholders all wanting to prove they can deploy 5G first. Obstacles such as spectrum auctions in some countries remain, but the region's networks have shown that when necessary, they can accelerate their own plans to catch up and keep pace with industry leaders around the world. One trend so far among European networks is the bundling of unlimited data with extra products or services, such as home broadband, or unlimited data reserved specifically for gaming or video streaming.

The purported details in the account of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, seemed improbable on their face: that Seth Rich, a data director in the Democratic National Committee’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Hillary Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

As Facebook prepares for increased competition scrutiny in the US and Europe, its top brass is repeatedly warning lawmakers and regulators that antitrust action could be a distraction from a much bigger threat: China.