COMUNICATION-LATAM: US Is Gatekeeper for Internet Traffic

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 28 2000 (IPS) - There is much talk about the Internet’s great potential for democratising society. But so far traffic over the information superhighway has been monopolised by the United States.

More than 90 percent of the world’s information flows pass through the United States, whose hegemony over Internet is so strong that it even exceeds its influence over the global film- making industry, for example – a matter of concern to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

That situation arises not only from the economic might of the United States, but also from the great leaps made in Internet and telecommunications development by that country, which is even far ahead of other parts of the industrialised world like Europe and Japan.

The language issue is also crucial, given that 85 percent of the information posted on the Internet is in English.

Until recently, even communications over computer networks within powerful countries like Germany, for example, was carried out through the United States, according to Carlos Afonso, a computer science engineer and pioneer in Internet in Brazil who is working today on developing the Information Network for the Third Sector.

The huge imbalance in information flows was one of the concerns raised at the ITU regional forum held two weeks ago in Río de Janeiro. The flow of data from the United States to Latin America is five times the flow in the opposite direction, participants at the Telecom Americas 2000 conference pointed out.

But even if regulations were adopted, they could do nothing to change that situation, as it is a consequence of widely divergent levels of development of the economy, telecommunications and the Internet, said Raimundo Beca, vice-president of the Chilean telephone company CTC.

Since most of the information sought and the main search engines are based in the United States, there is no way to avoid the situation in which “all roads lead” to that country, said Afonso. Europe is too far behind to become another pole of attraction for Internet traffic.

Moreover, US advantages in terms of access are so great that service providers and portals from all over the world prefer to use US “backbones” (basic Internet infrastructure), said Ethevaldo Siqueira, director of the National Telecommunications Magazine published in Sao Paulo.

The Internet service provider recently set up by Globo, Brazil’s communications giant, is among the companies that have opted for US infrastructure.

That infrastructure is based on the wide availability of fiber optic cables, including underwater ones, communications satellites, TV cables and microwaves. The various elements involved in the development of cybernetics are entwined, which makes decentralisation difficult.

Investing billions of dollars laying in a cable from Latin America to Europe, for example, cannot be justified if the flow of information between the two regions is not heavy, said Siqueira.

For now, the information flow between the two regions amounts to a mere 63 megabytes per second, while the flow between Latin America and the United States-Canada amounts to 949 megabytes – less than the flow between Geneva, Switzerland and the rest of the world alone, said Siqueira.

The installed capacity between the United States-Canada and Europe, meanwhile, amounts to 13,258 megabytes per second, slightly more than double the flow between North America and the Asia-Pacific region, he added.

But the dependence on backbones in other countries carries a cost. Whoever rents the lines pays the whole price, even though the data transmission occurs in both directions, pointed out ITU under-secretary-general Roberto Blois.

Unlike the case of international telephony, the flow of payments involved in the worldwide web is totally favourable to the United States.

Nevertheless, the financial costs are not high, because the rates are low, thanks to the fact that Internet “was born in the United States, with subsidies,” said Siqueira, who added that technological innovations have continued to bring down costs.

But the imbalance explains attempts to use the spare capacity of telecommunications infrastructure, which has only been used to seven percent of capacity by telephony, “and only at the times of peak use,” he added.

However, countries that still have few Internet users, like Argentina and Colombia, already spent 60 million dollars each in 1998, according to the ITU – an amount that could soar with the expected mushrooming of computers connected to Internet over the next few years.

Unilateral payments increase the disequilibrium between regions by pushing up costs of access in Latin America and other regions and keeping them down in the United States, where users can visit sites abroad over the same line that provides the revenues for US companies.

That upside-down subsidy from the poor to the rich is holding up the spread of Internet in developing countries, especially among low-income sectors, while facilitating its expansion in the United States.

The alternative is making better use of already existing telecoms infrastructure by installing many points of access to the web, to foment links between regional providers and reduce dependence on centralisation in the United States, said Afonso.

But that must be “an engineering project, without national egoism and political impositions” in order to give fruit, he stressed. Brazil has developed its backbones in such a way that internal information flows no longer have to leave the country, but it is a unique case in the region.

The global outlook is changing fast, said Siqueira. Europe has awakened to the Internet phenomenon, and should make “a great leap in the next two or three years,” he forecast.

In Brazil, the physical infrastructure is mushrooming with huge investments by telephone companies and the installation of telecoms cables by power, sewage and TV companies.

The new technologies, like cellular telephones with access to Internet, will permit further advances, he added.

Language is a limiting factor, said Siqueira, who admitted that the dominion of English is “overwhelming,” and that even if links are set up among Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries, “sub-universes of Portuguese or Spanish language will remain minuscule” in the cybernetic world.