Internet expands its tentacles across Asia

Internet expands its tentacles across Asia

Authoritarian governments, military juntas and freedom fighters across Asia are scrambling to get wired. Johanna Son reports for Inter Press Service.

MANILA: Vietnam's premier gets electronic mail from his foreign counterparts. The Indonesian military plans to post its own information on the Internet and Tibetan exiles use it to report the latest on what the Chinese are up to.

As communication costs plummet and cross-border electronic avenues expand Asian governments, separatist group and activists are all busy building links to the global information superhighway known as the Internet.

The region now has more than 1.5 million of the world's 50 million Internet users, two-thirds of them in Japan. Businessmen, activists, journalists and governments are logging on as Asia- Pacific personal computer sales soar and Internet providers proliferate in countries like China, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Suddenly no place is too remote: you can dial up from Mongolia or Nepal.

Singapore's information minister, George Yeo, says the city state "needs to establish borderless communication in order to develop Singapore as a regional information hub".

But some experts warn that while the glitter of technology promises to bring countries closer to the information age, the information superhighway also has pot-holes that may affect its utility for Asia and the developing world.

Roberto Verzola of the Manila-based E-mail Center says it may be worth looking beyond electronic communication itself, which is after all a technological tool that can be used in many ways. Much of the information on the net is free because the network began as a non-commercial endeavor, but Verzola says this is likely to change. "It is actually going to become infrastructure for distributing goods by rich countries to poor countries."

As North America and Europe increasingly become information economies, Verzola says the flow of information-based products and services to the developing world, which is often at the receiving end of such information, will pick up.

"There is very strong pressure from the commercial sector and its-free market ideology, which does not speak about free goods but goods for sale," he said, "Originally this is the public commons of information available worldwide, but it is slowly going to be privatized."

Northern users, ranging from business to activists, have easier and cheaper access to electronic communication and the Internet than developing countries, many of which are still struggling with high computer and communication costs.

In an October review of the Internet and the South, the London-based Panos Institute said: "Worldwide, the flow of information, like the balance of power, is essentially North to South rather than the other way around."

The danger of the information superhighway ending up a one-way street carries over to its use by activist groups, which are among those most benefited by e-mail and the Internet and have galvanized global protest campaigns in cyberspace.

While getting hooked up is a matter of putting together a computer, modem and phone line, in developing Asia this is still out of reach of most individual and organizations. And an Internet surfer in Indonesia could spend 12 times more on access fees than a European user.

"Because it is cheaper than other forms of telecommunications and gives access to a huge amount of information, it has the potential to narrow the existing North-South information gap," the Panos report said. "but it relies on technology which is much less accessible and much more expensive in the South than in the industrialized world."

Eighty percent of the world's people, do not even have access to a telephone. And while the United States has more than one Internet host computer per 100 persons, nearly 50 countries, many of them in Asia and Africa, have less than one telephone per 100 people.

These numbers are likely to change in the coming years, as governments open up telecommunications sectors. Today, over 160 countries have links to the Internet, over 100 nations directly and best by e-mail networks.

Far from disregarding the Internet, activists say Asian nations that come on-line must not be content with just being consumers and receivers of data and must use and generate information that makes their presence felt on the Net.

For the growing number of Asians who have discovered the wonders of electronic communications, on-line links have been no less than liberating. Activists in Malaysia can talk freely with the outside world, discussing matters too sensitive at home. Chats on the Internet's World Wide Web trash Vietnam's Communist Party and political restrictions in Singapore.

Some Asian governments have mixed feelings about opening up to global on-line links. But electronic communication is much harder to censor, and they know opening up comes with boosting competitiveness and integration into the world economy.

Yeo says Singapore, whose state-owned telecoms firm leases out Internet lines, will still try to police the infobahn even if censorship in the electronic age "can no longer be 100 percent effective". Singapore's twin aims of becoming a regional information hub and keeping out cultural and moral pollution from the West are "not a contradiction but a challenge".

He said the government, which keeps a tight watch on media and bans private ownership of satellite dishes, could be less harsh on discussions on the net. "It is such a jungle there. You can have all kinds of discussion in odd corners, and no one except the most determined will take notice."

Singapore's officials suggest countering "falsehoods" that crop up on the Internet, while Indonesia's military says it will go on-line to fight "misinformation" about Jakarta.

China, whose first commercial supplier began operating in June, wants to ensure that political dissent and pornography can be kept out. Telecommunications Minister Wu Juchuan said: "By linking with the Internet, we do not mean the absolute freedom of information."

Already, electronic communication has opened up frontiers in societies unused to open debate. And as the ease of hooking up increases, the price of controlling information is going up. For many countries, that alone may make getting wired worth the effort.

-- IPS