It was just another tiny effort to help bridging the digital divide and increase Suriname’s presence in Cyberspace. Like in many developing countries, in Suriname the Internet connections are very expensive and generally of poor quality. The Anton de Kom University's internet connection is 2 Mb for a total 400 desktop computers on campus, not counting many private laptops. The overbooking ratio is 1:7 and the price paid for this connection is 1500 US$ per month. This situation is caused by lack of proper telecom infrastructures and by monopolies held by telecom companies in a producer dominated market, but there is also another important reason. The prices of Internet connectivity in developing countries remain high due to lack of local “internet content”. As long as developing countries continue to download data i.e. content from data centres hosted in America, Europe or Asia only, prices for connectivity will not really go down. Developing countries should not only build their local telecommunication infrastructures, they should start to develop local content, do e-business, share local music online, etc. and host all these local digital data in local data centres. I know the Internet problem in developing countries is complex and very difficult to solve overnight. There is still a lot of chicken ‘n egg problem involved, but we should not give up. I am sure the Internet will take off in the developing world, the next five or ten years. That is why I am so involved in this subject.
This week an important step was taken, in globalizing the Internet. ICANN, the organization responsible for assigning domain names (domain names are names such as www.vu.nl, annabon.nl, youtube.com or regreeningthesahel.org etc.) accepted an adaptation in the technical system which will allow non-Latin characters in the domain name system (DNS). This opens opportunities for Chinese, Japanese, Arab, Russian and many other internet users to register domain names in their own languages, thus creating a more global and less western dominated Internet.
Our world is changing so fast and many global trends are moving and things always happened overnight while I was sleeping, as Thomas Friedman wrote in his international bestseller "The World is Flat".
Last week, the Internet’s 40th birthday was commemorated, as the first small amount of data was packet-switched from one university computer to another over the ARPAnet (the network which later evolved into the Internet) in California, on 29th October, 1969. This small step in Cyberspace marked a giant leap for mankind, but without all that fuss. It was probably a more important step than Neil Armstrong’s one on the moon, that same year.
This year is also the 40th birthday of UNIX, the “operating system of enlightenment” as BBC reporter Bill Thompson wrote this week, the first Open source software experiment, and undoubtedly one of the most important ones up to present.
Also the World Wide Web is commemorating, this year was its 20th anniversary. Would World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee have overseen the impact of his proposal in 1989 at CERN which marked the beginning of a new global information era?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the VU Symposium for Social Development on October 20th
I would have liked to ask Sir Tim this question, when I met him a few weeks ago in Amsterdam, during the Symposium for Social Development at VU University. But as Sir Tim was always surrounded by many people, I did not dare to disturb him with my silly little question.
It is now 20 years since my first job in information technology at SARA, the Amsterdam academic computing centre, where I started working on July 17th 1989. Those days I could not possibly foresee the future of ICTs, but it was thrilling for me to have a login account on a Cray Y-MP supercomputer, being amongst the first few people in the Netherlands with an email address, spending my evenings writing my own small command-line navigation system for the Amsterdam’s public transport, in the Prolog programming language, just for fun, (There was no Tomtom in those old days) or entering text in UNIX' vi editor, the world's most user-unfriendly text editor ever built.
UNIX, the web, and even the principles of the internet itself, are achievements of people who helped to build the “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented” Information Society, in stead of pursuing financial profits only. It is through the effort of these people that the digital divide will hopefully be bridged one day and knowledge will be available for people in all corners of the world.
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