Rebuilding Iraq's Internet

Anselm writes "According to this article at Wired.com, "The war has left Iraq's Internet infrastructure in shambles. Now, a British ISP hopes to fund the reconstruction through sales of domain names ending in .iq." While I have no use for an IQ domain, the article does make me wonder: Should geeks around the world take the lead in getting Iraq back online?"

Comments

Re:GeekCorps

[charlesbakerharris]

I had dinner with Ethan Zuckerman, GeekCorps' founder, a couple weeks ago. He explained to me during a discussion of another underdeveloped region that GeekCorps was aimed primarily at places with almost nothing - places like Ghana and Mongolia that for-profit companies would not touch.

Iraq has an internet infrastructure, a modern economy... There's money to be made there, and they are hardly backwater. They're not really GeekCorps territory at all, so don't expect to see them there.

Re:Won't work

[Skyshadow]

I think it's a mistake to take a short-term view when talking about rebuilding a country.

There are obvious short-term needs which must be met, such as food and water. This is a no-brainer. The difficult part to rebuilding a country is taking advantage of the fact that you're essentially creating from whole cloth, and thus have the opportunity to either do things very right or completely cock it up.

Therefore, this is the time to talk about rebuilding Iraq's internet, especially given that the sort of freedom allowed by the internet could conceivably be an effective force for continued liberty in that country.

Iraq is a potentially wealthy country; I'd like to see that used for good things (net) rather than bad (weapons, oppression of its people, enriching Dick Cheney's friends, etc).

Before commenting on Iraq read this....

[Joey7F]

I have seen too many people making references to Iraq by appending other country's values to it. So read this from the CIA

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ iz.html

It has information like literacy rates, religions, etc. I was surprised by a few things, for example, I thought all Iraqis were Arabs, but it turns out there are a fair amount of Turks, Assyrians etc.

I hope they can become a shining example of democracy in a region that is dominated by dictators.

After all, Italy, Germany and Japan have it pretty well now!

--Joey

Priorities

[90XDoubleSide]

Should geeks around the world take the lead in getting Iraq back online?

Absolutely, but not before giving at least a small contribution to the World Food Programme, which is in desperate need of funds to combat starvation in both Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa at the same time. Then there will be enough people alive to use the internet!