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African ISPs Being Fleeced by the West
dipfan writes "African ISPs are forced to pay the full cost of their connections to western telcos and ISPs, rather than sharing the costs, as in the case of voice telephony: quote - "America Online doesn't spend one single cent in sending emails to Africa." The total cost of any email sent or received by an African internet user is borne entirely by the African ISPs, totaling $500m a year for the continent, according to this disturbing article by the BBC."
"This is exploitation... These networks are raping Africa of half a billion dollars a year."
:)
Just goes to prove, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Europe and the west has kept Africa under one bootheel or another for about 500 years now...happened all the way through the industrial age. Now, at the dawn of the information age....nothings changed.
AOL/BT/WorldCom/all big telcos ought to be ashamed. On the other hand, their stock prices are probably embarresment enough!
Stop making sense. This is Slashdot, not the real world. Everything net related should be subsidized or provided for free.
For years this was true of Europe (And to a degree still is). The bulk of the transatlantic connectivity is still played for by European companies. This is the underlying reason why broadband and leased lines cost more here in Britain than in the states.
The situation has been gradually changing because there is demand in the US for some of the content being hosted in Europe, it will take a lot more time for the playing field to level out but it will eventually do so.
The African question is interesting, for the time being they are going to need to like it or lump it. I can't remember ever wanting to access an African website but my websites show quite a few hits from African domains. The situation for Africa is very much what it was for Europe a decade ago, they want to access the internet as it exists outside there country, it would be outright wrong to ask the rest of the world to pay for it.
As the African countries gain a larger online presence I'm sure people in the west will want to get at African sites, then they will start to go down the same road that Europe is now heading down.
Is this a tough barrier to entry into the Internet world? Yes. Should relevant authorities consider help and subsidies to help developing world deal with it? Yes. Is this a blatant attempt to rip of the Africa's of $500bn? Not even close.
At the risk of sounding politically incorrect...
How are these African ISP's being "fleeced" when they're simply being asked to pay what everyone else is paying already? What entitled them to special treatment in the first place?
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Sure..
The reason Africa sucks is because of fraud, corruption, and lots and lots of ethnic wars.
The 3rd greatest source of income for Nigeria is from fraud. (the first is oil, I wonder what #2 is?)
Many countries have gone from backwater who-gives-a-fuck to industrial powerhouses.. Look at Japan or China. Japan, in barely 2 centuries, China will do it faster than that. Then there's south america.. Wow, that was under Europe's bootheel for centuries too, and they're getting better.. Not great, but improving.
If Africa has managed to remain a backwater for 5 centuries, unlike most other places.. Maybe there might be a reason? (A claim of 'racial inferiority' will be met with uproarious laughter.
If Africa wants to make money, let it turn into a place worth investing in.. Get rid of corruption, ethnic wars, and widespread fraud.
They have plenty of money. Here is a good cause. Let them pay for it.
Yes, phone costs are split 50-50... but No, internet costs are not! You pay your ISP how much per month for that cable modem? Do you think AT&T cable should be paying for half of it? What makes you think that is right? What if I open an ISP here in the States... a big one, as big as AOL, let's say. Now, when my users send email to AOL, who's paying for the bandwidth? Well, I pay while it's on my network, they pay when it's on theirs. Not their fault that my network may tend to end at the limits of my most distant customer, yet theirs may reach halfway across the country to meet me...
Ok, all I'm saying is, all this "abuse of Africa" aside (which may or may not have historically been the case with their interations with the Europeans et al... that's not the point I'm here to comment on) this IS NORMAL. WHY SHOULD I PAY THE COST OF RUNNING CABLE to where THEY WANT IT? Yeah, we had a big strong government pay for it for us, and they have no such luck. Sorry, but there ARE BENEFITS to having a rich powerful government. It does not make it unfair or wrong.
"And he said that if data network operators in the West were forced to adhere to the same regulations as voice operators then they would have to pay half the cost. "
This "idea" has been around for quite a while, I've heard it from N. American, European, Asian, and Australian ISPs. Everyone would love to have someone else pay for part of their connection, but no one ever comes up with a workable connection agreement.
Imagine this, lets set up a connection between our two Internet networks. You pay me for every byte you send me, I'll pay you for every byte I send you. For simplicty, it can even be the same rate (even though we may have very different coverages, costs, etc). This is not unlike the voice world type of interconnect agreements.
Now lets play the game. Guess how much email AOL is going to send to Africa/Australia/Europe if they have to pay additionally to do so? How much web surfing will you do in Africa/Australia/Europe? Oh wait, I have to pay to send you the contents of the site? No thanks.
This is not exploitation (isn't this essentially trying to place the race card?), it's market economics. As these markets grow and mature they will be able to strike better deals w/ other providers, today they cannot.
Let's say you have someone living out in the middle of nowhere. And they want cable. Should the rest of the subscribers have to pay so that they can get their connection at the same price as everyone else? Or, should they have to foot the bill for the extras, like extra cabling, extra service costs, etc? No matter if they DO or not, but in my eye, it would seem only right that people with special needs like that pay their own way. Otherwise, move closer to town or go without cable.
Africa is the same way. Like it or not, but as far as the Internet is concerned, it's still a very small number of people in the middle of nowhere, as far as cabling and backboning goes.
As others have said, small ISPs don't get paid by the big ones for each email, do they? Then why is it special when an ISP in Africa is treated in the same fashion? At this point in time, by necessity any ISP in Africa is small, compared to almost any ISP in America.
According to the article, there's 4 million people hooked up to the Internet, across 54 countries. This doesn't seem to me to be a big enough population to even able to begin to think about dictating prices and policies. The person in the middle of nowhere is complaining.
The article claims that International Telecommunications Union regulations ensure that telephony costs between Africa and "the West" are split 50:50. Unless this arrangement is universal, Africa's telephone system has clearly been heavily subsidized. There's NO mention made in this article if ITU regulations apply to the Internet in other places, yet it's simply assumed that they should apply in Africa. A blatant omission, and poor journalism.
And another comment; how is Africa defined? Do ISPs in Casablanca and Cairo have this same problem? What differentiates an ISP in Cairo from one in Tel Aviv or Istanbul? The only country named in the article is Kenya, and no mention made at all of the countries that are physically close to Europe.
I, unfortunately, do not truly know what the economics behind all this are, and others can handle whether or not this is even a plausible argument. This is simply a critique of the article, and a suitable analogy.
A politically correct article designed to elicit appeals to repair the 'digital divide.'
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
The Governor-General and the Chairman of the BBC have strong links with the Labour Party, and surprise surprise, the BBC supports the Labour Government in virtually everything they do, and virtually everything they say.
If you had actually followed the BBC, you would have known what kind of coverage they do of the labour party. And, surprise surprise, it does not differ from the others.
This would include old-fashioned Marxist anti-colonialism.
...which is completely illogical in your stream of conspiracies - Labour in the UK is a modern half market-liberalistic social democratic party. Very far from Marxism. They even changed colour (from red to dark purple). Labour is not a socialistic party - and very not a Marxistic party.
They are very good at highlighting and exagerrating news which fits their agenda, while suppressing news which doesn't.
Unlike Slashdot, who provides all the different reports and stories which show the superiority of Microsoft products.
I suspect that many in Zimbabwe would be very pleased for the UK/US to send the soldiers in, simply to sort out the criminals they have in government now.
I think I'd rather listen to BBC than what you suspect. I don't know about the rest of the world.
Please people, can we be a little more objective and a little less emotionally-charged? I am not saying that this article is a complete lie (far from it, I can easily imagine AOL doing something like this), but let's look at both sides of the story before coming to a decision.
Obviously, you are slightly hypocritical here. Can't say your rant looks like you have considered both sides of BBCs alleged political agenda.
I'm not necessarily saying that I totally disagree with all your opinions. I'm just saying they are presented in a reactionary and completely black/white way.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
In the specific case of the African nations this is quite likely to be unbalanaced; most big web hosts are in the US and, to a lesser extend, in Europe, so most of the traffic on the links to and from Africa is unlikely to contain data that falls into the "peering" catagory. I really don't think that the Africans are getting fleeced; they just don't have the traffic patterns to make peering financially viable to western carriers. When we see major data hosting centers on the dark continent, then we should see the carriers of those data centers getting into peering agreements, until then though they are going to have to pay. The truth is, it's not Africa being singled out at all; the same billing scheme applies in the US and Europe as well. Peering is for carriers, not companies or small ISPs that piggy back of a large one, and Africa just doesn't have too many of those at present.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Capitalism may not have a conscience, but many people using the fruits of capitalism do. Although it may at times appear to be, the global economic system isn't self-perpetuating. It is in fact perpetuated by powerful people making decisions which affect the powerless.
So I am offend by all the posts saying, "It's inevitable, so boo hoo!" It's _not_ inevitable that Africa pays both ways, and technologically privileged users can make a difference. Slashdotters in particular have a responsibility to act on behalf of their less privileged counterparts.
How many of you have ever had to pay for an email which has been sent to you?
Amusing post, but it gives a distorted image of what's happening. The point is that Africa is not being treated as an equal partner.
For example, if someone in New York sends an email to someone in Nairobi, the African ISP gets charged for the bandwidth.
If however someone in Nairobi sends an email to someone in New York, guess who gets the bill? Yep, still the African ISP.
The Western ISPs (possibly the US ones, not sure) are more-or-less using their dominance to take Africa for everything they can get.
Fair? I don't think so..
Or, putting it another way, consumers in 6 continents are subsidizing Internet access charges for the residents of North America.
First of all, I doubt Antartica is doing much web surfing, so that only leaves 5 continents. Second, the other 5 continents aren't subsidizing anything. Now I'm the first to admit that the U.S. and it's citizens are fairly self centered and most really have no idea the rest of the world really exists, other than in the plot of a few movies, but by your own arguement, most Americans could give a rats ass if the rest of the world fell off the internet. The U.S. is simply refusing to subsidize your access to their network. If you don't want to access the U.S. network, don't pay the bill. I'm sure most Americans could care less. If you want to access the network, pay up. Sorry, that's the way it works in the U.S.
"All you little "success stories" are from largely single-culture single-language states - China is completely dominated by Han culture, Japan is dominated by the Yamato, etc."
Firstly they aren't little; Asia is the world's most populous region.
Japan may be single-culture single-language (at least it likes to think so) but arguably this unanimity is one of the reasons for its problems over the last decade; there's no-one to think outside the square.
South Korea and Taiwan are largely unicultural, but don't make a fetish of it the way the Japanese do and have benefited in greater flexibility. Note that South Korea was a Japanese colony until after WWII, and Taiwan was a rural backwater until the Chinese Nationalists moved there after the mainland went communist. Consider also that South Korea was utterly devastated during the Korean War (I believe that at the end of the war its standard of living was equivalent to Bangladesh today) and like Taiwan spends massive amounts on the military.
China may be dominated by Han culture, but by no means absolutely. China is an incredibly diverse nation, with dozens of languages and ethnic groups, not to mention in religious terms large populations of Christians, Buddhists *and* (notably in the west of the country) Moslems. Indeed I'd argue that China is like a large version of an African nation in that it is a multi-ethnic state with artificial borders under the dictatorial rule of one specific enthnic group. And let's not forget that China was *the canonical* example of imperialism at its absolute worst, and since then has been wracked by civil war and Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Yet for all its faults it's not a basket case whinging at how it's been a victim, but a newly proud nation with the fastest-growing economy in the world and a superpower in the making.
How's about Singapore and Hong Kong? Both with small populations, multi-ethnic, both wildly overcrowded and both with *no natural resources whatsover*. And two of the greatest success stories of the last fifty years.
Or let's take a few older developed countries. Finland has three major ethnic groups, each with their own language (Finns, Swedes (20% of the population) and Lapps/Sammi. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all ex-British colonies which inherited a "collaborator" class, and are now among the most ethnically-diverse nations in the developed world. Belgium is split down the middle between Flems and Walloons.
In most issues I'd be regarded as well to the Left of Slashdot norms, but nearly sixty years after WWII and over a decade since the end of the Cold War have shown that third world economic development is not only possible, but that third world nations can grow at vastly higher rates than the developed world until they reach parity. Imperialism may be a contributing problem but no more. We've seen most of non-communist Asia make spectacular gains, to the extent that several nations are now of first-world status. We've seen some of South America do reasonably (notably Mexico, Chile and Brazil) as is some of Arabia (notably the oil states and Dubai). India is finally getting its act together after realising that its experiment in national self-sufficiency through state socialism had failed.
On the other side we've seen Argentina, which in the 1920's was as wealthy as Canada or Switzerland, continue to shoot itself in the foot as it moves back to the third world, and sub-Saharan Africa lurches from one disaster to another.
You partly and rightly attribute the successes to "a healthy educational infrastructure", but note that the countries concerned when they were starting off *didn't have that infrastructure*! All they had was a strong *cultural* respect for learning. It appears to me that those *cultural* values are lacking in Africa.
Twenty years ago I rejoiced when black majority rule came to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. I have watched in increasing dismay as a successful colony (in the 1950's Salisbury, now Harare, was one of the boom towns of the British Commonwealth), and then a nation that after UDI kept going under sanctions disintegrate over the last few years, as Mugabe appears to care for nothing except keeping himself in power and passing money and power over to his "war veteran" mates. What future does such a nation have in *any conceivable* global economic order? Would you call him a "collaborator" with colonialism? And then his sham election gets the support of his African peers, the same ones who were so emphatic about standing up to white rule there.
I have grave fears that South Africa, the remaining economic powerhouse of this wretched continent, will go the same way. And, yes, I'm sure black African leaders will blame it all on white colonialism, the same white colonialism that created and sustained sub-Saharan Africa's industrial heartland through years of trade sanctions.
In the meantime, spare me the 1970's undergraduate guilt trips. Yes there are obstacles to third world development that shouldn't be there. But they are not insurmountable and there are plenty of success stories now around, of which the major elements are far-sighted and ambitious national leadership, the determination to build universal education, hard work, patience, a largely though not exclusively market economy (with government guidance of industry and education) and at least lip service to the rule of law.
Forty years after McMillan's "winds of change" were blowing through Africa it's really time attention was focussed on the crass incompetence, violence, short-sightedness and venality of Africa's current, post-imperial, ruling cliques. I'm not alone; one of the Jane's subscription journals a couple of years ago mentioned in an article how appalled educated Africans were at this debacle, to the extent of wondering about the best solution being *re-colonisation*! Whatever, the much-trumpeted "right of self-determination" has been a catastrophe for most of Africa.