The Politics of the Internet in Third World Development

Challenges in Contrasting Regimes with Case Studies of Costa Rica and Cuba

Bert Hoffmann

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415949590
• eBook ISBN: 9781135931575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

This book examines the political and developmental implications of the new information and communication technologies (NICT) in the Third World. Whereas the concept of the "digital divide" tends to focus on technological and quantitative indicators, this work stresses the crucial role played by the political regime type, the pursued development model and the specific configuration of actors and decision-making dynamics. Two starkly contrasting Third World countries, state-socialist Cuba and the Latin America's "show-case democracy" Costa Rica, were chosen for two in-depth empirical country studies.

Part I
Third World Development and
NICT in Political Perspective

Chapter One
The New Information and Communication
Technologies (NICT): Comparative
Experiences and Present Disparities

NICT—OR WHY WE INSIST ON SUCH A LENGTHY TERM

If the title of this work refers to ‘the politics of the Internet,’ this is a somewhat metaphorical formulation. In fact, ‘the Internet’ is just the most prominent aspect of what more correctly is called the ‘new information and communication technologies,’ or abbreviated: NICT. Other authors omit the ‘new’ and just speak of the ‘information and communication technologies,’ or ICT, others of ‘information technologies,’ or IT.

Although we have no major interest in semantic disputes, we want to insist on the importance of including the aspect of ‘communication,’ and not only ‘information.’ In the recent international discussion, this topic has risen strongly: the widely publicized term of the ‘information society’ has been explicitly criticized and confronted with the call for ‘communication rights,’ which emphasizes the human rights dimension of the issue and implies shifting the discourse from ‘users’ or ‘consumers’ to ‘citizens.’ Cees Hamelink, Professor of International Communication at the University of Amsterdam and for many years a leading voice in the field, noted in his keynote address to the first preparatory meeting for the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS):

“It is disconcerting that in the context of the ‘Information Society’ the notion ‘communication’ has disappeared. Yet, the real core question is how we should shape future ‘communication societies.’ Oddly enough, the UN World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993) did not refer in its Final Declaration to communication. There was only mention of information and news. Such an essential omission should not be repeated in the Final Declaration of the 2003 WSIS. (…) The Summit would make a real difference if a human right to communicate would be formally recognized. (…) The key challenge is to ensure that citizens—their rights, freedoms and responsibilities- should guide the outcome of the Summit.”¹

The focus on ‘communications rights’ has become a rallying call of civil society organizations working on these issues. A major political campaign launched by a number of articulate non-governmental organizations is in fact named ‘Communication Rights in the Information Society,’ CRIS. Importantly, too, in common usage ‘communication’ tends to imply much more a bilateral process than ‘information’ which more often than not is perceived as a one-way process of provision and diffusion of information.

Finally, when speaking of the new information and communication technologies, the use of the word ‘new’ deserves a note of explanation. We are aware of the relativity of this adjective, not only because it gives a vague temporal idea which inevitably is devaluated with the passing of time, but also because today’s ‘new’ information and communication technologies are the fruit of a rather long evolutionary process. In addition, the ‘new’ ICT are inseparably bound up with the ‘old’ ICT: to provide Internet access, the ‘new’ computer-modem uses the ‘old’ copper wires of the telephone system etc. In particular, any analysis of the political issues concerning the NICT will have to include the telephone system, which not only provides essential infrastructure for most of the NICT, but whose structures and regulations also determine much of the conditions under which the NICT are introduced and used.

Being aware of how blurred the dividing line is between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ICT, we nevertheless feel it necessary to use the term ‘new’ in order to make it clear from the beginning that the central interest of this study is not on printed press, radio, television or other ‘classic’ ICT but rather on the political implications of those new information and communication technologies that found their flagship in the Internet and whose definition and characteristics we shall discuss in the following section.

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE NICT—DIGITIZATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

What are we speaking of when we talk of the ‘new information and communication technologies’? To put it in one sentence: The term NICT refers to the converging set of technologies in microelectronics, computing, telecommunications, and broadcasting, whose common feature is digitization.

Digitization means the process by which information, whether in form of text, data, sound or image, is broken down into the digital, binary language of computers, into ‘0’ or ‘1,’ ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ‘on’ or ‘off.’ This conversion of information from very different sources into the binary digits universally readable by computer opened up the possibility for the integration of products, industries and media that hitherto had been developed and used separately. Thus, digitization brings together the formerly separate spheres of telecommunication companies, broadcasting, computer manufacturers and data processing industries, entertainment business, office functions etc. It is precisely this ability to create an interface between the most diverse fields through a common digital language that has been crucial for the enormous pervasiveness and ubiquity of digital technologies, which can be found in nearly all spheres of life, from kitchen appliances to space-based weapon systems. Due to the convergence and integration of these digital technologies, the impact of any specific innovation is not limited to specific technological and social areas but potentially reaches an immensely wide field of technology and social organization. Given the centrality of this aspect for society as a whole, authors speak of the “digital era” (Hewitt de Alcántara 2001), the “digital world” (Negroponte 1995), “digital capitalism” (Schiller 1999) etc.

A widely accepted definition defines “information and communication technologies” in general as

“all those technologies that enable the handling of information and facilitate different forms of communication among human actors, between human beings and electronic systems, and among electronic systems”
(Hamelink 1997:8).

We can adapt this definition by adding the aspect of digitization to arrive at a formal definition of what we will understand as NICT in this work: All those technologies on digital base that enable the handling of information and facilitate different forms of communication among human actors, between human beings and electronic systems, and among electronic systems.²

If the convergence and integration of different technologies is a central feature of the NICT, this is accompanied by a second aspect of fundamental importance: the dramatic increase in capacity and speed of information transmission through global computer networks (with the corollary of sharply decreasing costs), greatly reducing hitherto existing barriers of time and space. If traditional media and communication structures largely developed on a national or regional level, the transnational nature of digital networks creates new challenges for national regulation, from legislation—what is illicit in the sending country can be perfectly acceptable in the receiving country—to price setting or security issues. If there have always been transnational flows of communication of some kind, their dimension is dwarfed by the immensely greater velocity, flexibility and quantity of cross-border communication and information transmission potentially facilitated by the NICT.

Another important characteristic of the NICT has been the fast pace of technological change, the most cutting-edge technological innovations passing into obsolescence within a number of years, rapidly devaluing costly hardware and acquired user knowledge. As to the manufacturing side, the brief marketability of NICT products makes the orientation on as large a market as possible more imperative than ever in order to obtain sufficient economies of scale.

Of course, many more aspects of the NICT are derived from the above-sketched process of digitization and its consequences.³ One rather little noted aspect should be pointed out: digital technologies also dilute earlier dividing-lines between mass and individual media, between one-to-many communication (radio, television etc.) in the public sphere and one-to-one communication (telephone, letters etc.) in the private sphere. E-mail, for instance, can be both, a one-to-one medium as much as a message broadcast to a million receivers at the same time. (Again, this dividing-line was blurred before, too, but the NICT have further undermined this distinction.)

A final clarification should be made. The excitement surrounding new information and communication technologies has led many to excessively extend the meaning of these terms. Therefore it should be noted that in this study we will not include as NICT genetic engineering, as suggested by Castells (2000:29, 54–59) with the unconvincing argument that “it is focused on decoding, manipulating, and reprogramming of the information codes of living matter” (ibid: 29); nor do we include progress in agricultural or medical science, as does the United Nations Development Program’s Report on “Making new technologies work for human development” (UNDP 2001); nor do we find it useful to combine the issue of the NICT with advances in science as such or with a diffuse category of ‘knowledge,’ as does the World Bank’s recent “Knowledge for Development” report (World Bank 1998:1), where this concept includes everything from birth control to software engineering to in formation problems about the creditworthiness of a firm.

THE NICT EVOLUTION

In regard to the NICT, the term ‘revolution’ appears frequently, underscoring a notion of historical discontinuity. A typical example is Manuel Castells, whose trilogy on “The Information Age” (Castells 1997, 1998, 2000) has become a standard reference and probably the most widely cited social science work on the topic. The opening chapter announces “The Information Technology Revolution,” and it starts precisely by making a case against historical gradualism and localizing the “end of the twentieth century” as “one of these rare intervals in history” adequately termed “revolution” (Castells 2000:28f).

We, however, prefer to keep some distance from the term ‘revolution’ in considering the NICT. This is by no means to minimize the great dynamics of change associated with these technologies—that upheaval, in fact, is a central motivation of this work. But the emphasis on the historical discontinuity risks underestimating the continuities involved in the process—as much in the technological innovations themselves (as we will see in the following pages) as in their adaptation in the social, political and economic context (a subject to be examined in detail in the empirical country studies). Terms like the ‘information technology revolution’ etc. tend to imply that the technological discontinuity goes hand in hand with a ‘revolutionary’ discontinuity in social and political relations. Such an implication often blurs the dividing line between the analysis of empirical evidence and—especially where the empirical evidence does not live up to the proclaimed epochal dimensions of change—postulates of what should change, which opens a wide field for ideological preferences of all sorts.

If we focus in this work on the time from the late 1980s/early 1990s until today as the time-span which saw the public breakthrough and mass usage of the core technologies of the NICT, this is not to ignore that this process was based on a long list of technological innovations and evolutions that took place earlier. Effectively, if the NICT are characterized by a complex process of technological convergence there is no single historical moment to be named as the starting-point.⁴

The early breakthroughs in computer technology can be traced back to the first mechanical, programmable binary computing machine constructed by Konrad Zuse in the living room of his parents’ apartment in Berlin in 1938, and the IBM-supported development of an electro-mechanical calculator in the United States in 1939. The first general purpose computer, the 30-ton ENIAC, was revealed in 1946, but in fact it had been developed during World War II under the auspices of the U.S. Ministry of Defense. Since then, the evolution of computer technology has been marked by a process of seemingly endless miniaturization of the hardware components with at the same time exponentially increasing computing power and massively decreasing costs. Crucial steps were the invention of the transistor in 1947; the introduction of silicon as a path-breaking new material in 1954; the first integrated circuit in 1957; the production of the first microprocessor by Intel in 1971; the first commercially successful microcomputer from Apple in 1976; and IBM’s Personal Computer (PC) introduced in 1981, soon cloned in South East Asian countries on a large scale to become the prime international standard for microcomputer hardware. These hardware developments were accompanied by the creation of a breakthrough operating system by the founders of Microsoft, laying the foundations of today’s dominating software giant.

Essential innovations also were made in the telecommunications sector. Since the late 1960s and 1970s, digital switches and digital transmission facilities were developed. The era of orbital satellites was inaugurated when the Soviet Union successfully launched the Sputnik in 1957. Shocked by this technological leap of their Cold war adversary, large-scale investments by the United States and Western countries in space technology followed, and notably in the 1970s and 1980s, satellites became increasingly important in the transmission of international telephone calls, television programs, and other data traffic. In the 1980s, besides the inauguration of mobile telephony, crucial advances for NICT development were also made in optoelectronics, namely fiber optics and laser transmission, and in digital packet transmission technology.

In computer networking, the origins of the Internet in the United States are directly linked to the military logic of the Cold War confrontation with the USSR. The ‘Sputnik shock’ prompted the U.S. Department of Defense to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the late 1950s; and it was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the two super-powers came closer than ever before to a nuclear conflict, that led the U.S. Air Force to commission a study by the RAND corporation, the U.S. military’s most prominent think-tank, on how to maintain a workable communication structure in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. This study, titled “On Distributed Communication Networks” (Baran 1962), laid the theoretical foundations for what was to become the Internet, and ARPA was the institution to follow up on this work in practice. Finally, in 1969, the year of the first manned landing on the moon, the milestone in computer networking was set by the inauguration of the ARPANET, the ‘mother of the Internet,’ explicitly designed to provide the country’s military with a decentralized communications system invulnerable to nuclear attack.

Crucial for the further success of the NICT, however, were also breakthroughs far beyond military considerations, especially in the routing architecture and in the network communication protocols. Between 1978 and 1980 the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed that still as of today is at the base of the world’s Internet traffic. Another decisive element for the rapid diffusion of computer networking was an invention by two young Chicago students in 1978: the modem, which modulates digital computer signals into analogue telephone signals and vice versa, thus providing for a low-cost solution to connect personal computers to the global networks via ordinary telephone lines. In terms of applications of computer networking, a crucial early push came from the spread of e-mail communication, first introduced in 1971.

It has been argued that the 1970s mark the “technological divide” (Castells 2000:53) in that in this decade a set of crucial technological innovations came together. However, it was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that the core technologies of the NICT fully emerged and saw their public breakthrough and diffusion. A highly symbolic moment for this was in 1990, when scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) presented the concept of the World Wide Web with its ingenious ‘hypertext’ architecture (they also set up a universal standard address format for the web, the uniform resource locator, URL). Together with the invention of a graphical web browser (Mosaic first, then Netscape) in 1993/94, these steps were decisive in facilitating the transformation of computer networking from an expert issue into an everyday application for a wide public.

Since then, the active use of the NICT increased rapidly in virtually all sectors of society. Major applications such as e-commerce began to take shape in the mid-1990s. In 1993, the U.S. administration was the first government to establish its own website...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT AND NICT IN POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
• PART II: LATIN AMERICA’S ‘MIXED MODEL’: COSTA RICA
• PART III: LATIN AMERICA’S ‘SOCIALIST MODEL’: CUBA
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY