According to several delegates which attended an Internet conference in Nairobi this week, developing the infrastructure needed to provide access to the Internet should be a top priority for developing countries. A study conducted by the KcKinsey consultancy firm and published earlier this year revealed that almost 8 trillion dollars are exchanged each year thanks to online commerce. The Internet has also accounted for 21 percent of the economic growth in more developed economies. Less Developed Countries (LDCs) in regions such as Africa lack the required infrastructure and buying power to encourage telecom operators to invest in them, a problem which Joe Mucheru the head of Google in Sub-Saharan Africa believes should be addressed. “There is no way developing countries should sit back and wait, because online activities are driving offline activities,” said Mucheru. In markets where the connection to the internet is done mainly via mobile phones the emphasis should be on expanding the infrastructure, such as wireless networks and undersea cables, participants at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) said. Government officials and company executives mentioned increase in bandwidth capacity and competition will lower prices, allowing more people to get connected. Many Western telecom companies have begun looking in to the LDC market. French Telecom company Orange is looking to expand its African market, hopefully doubling their revenue in the Middle East and Africa to 7 billion Euros in coming years. A top official at Kenya's Ministry of Communication, Bitange Ndemo, has called on participants of the IGF to consider the acces to the internet a human rights issue. “I ask you to make (access) to this resource (high-speed Internet) a human rights issue,” Ndemo said. “If access to broadband is declared a human rights issue, then governments will step in and invest so no human being is left behind.” Governments were warned of imposing steep taxes on landing rights for such operations, saying the firms would simply bypass those nations. “Traditionally, international telecom firms were seen as a source of foreign investment and international currencies. Now, if governments have high fees and taxes for cable landings, operators will just by-pass those countries,” Cisco's Vice President of Global Technology Policy, Robert Pepper, warned the participants. BM
