Technology

A Vibrant Community Works to Make the Internet Better in Africa Could Africa become the next incubator for Internet innovation? If so, a community of people who’ve spent more than a decade growing its Internet infrastructure could play a key role. Dawit Bekele, the Internet Society’s regional vice president for Africa, remembers the days before Internet exchange points (IXPs), a vital part of a strong Internet infrastructure, took off on the continent. “It was very different from what it is today,” he says. Before 2010, there were few functional IXPs, and they didn’t have a lot of traffic. Many people thought IXPs had no big place in Africa. Bekele says as a result the Internet Society struggled to get people to accept the importance of IXPs to exchanging traffic locally. “Most of Africa’s traffic was exchanged internationally and there was little prospect of this changing any time soon. We realized it was an important battle to change this, which is why we decided to have a multi-yea...

How Do Surveillance Laws Impact the Economy? In 2018 the Australian parliament passed the “TOLA” Act, expanding the government’s powers to bypass digital data protections, and bringing with it the potential for significant harm to the economy and to trust in digital services and the Internet. Under TOLA, law enforcement and security agencies can require “designated communications providers,” or other businesses associated with them, to help provide access to the content of encrypted data, even if that means disclosing confidential product information or modifying existing products and services. Given the extreme reach and potential impact of TOLA, we assumed it would have been preceded by a thorough economic impact analysis; we were surprised to find none. The Internet Society therefore commissioned a team of independent researchers to assess the economic impact of TOLA. This team, Law & Economics Consulting Associates (LECA), has today published its final report – The Economic Imp...

Pandemic and Digital Transformation—The Middle East and North Africa Are Ready to Level Up Demand for the Internet has been on the rise since the advent of COVID-19, and it’s a trend likely to stay with us for long afterwards. Even before the pandemic, we heard about the fourth industrial revolution—how it was beginning to transform governance, management, and production systems across the globe. Mitigating climate change and fostering socioeconomic development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart cities, and the like, rely heavily on having good connectivity. With such big stakes, policy development has focused on digital transformation. Decision-makers are thinking about how to deploy more inclusive policies, use data in an open and secure manner, and raise the skills and capacity of their communities to absorb such changes. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is striving to catch up. Many countries have committed to set up thriving digital economies by 2030. Their ...