Italy has finally joined the restricted club of states in the world that have chosen the constitutional path for regulating the Internet – or at least has taken a significant step in that direction – by adopting a Declaration of Internet Rights.

It is now looking to present the Declaration at the Internet Governance Forum scheduled for November in João Pessoa, Brazil.

The drafting process lasted more than one year, which is quick by normal Italian bureaucratic standards, and observers were surprised that it had seen the light of the day given what they says is the backwardness of the country’s digital infrastructures.Many questions related to access and use of the Internet go well beyond national borders because of the very nature of the Internet and therefore call for a coordinated effort at the international level

A number of progressive Italian media hailed the Declaration as of “historical significance” in view of the visibility and prestige that it will give Italy on internet governance issues within the global community.

Unlike other countries, where proposals for Internet Bills of Rights or Declarations have been promoted mainly by scholars, associations, dynamic coalitions, enterprises, or groups of stakeholders, the Declaration’s promoters have stressed that the drafting process was characterised by “peer-to-peer relations between institutions and citizens, so that the whole construction has become horizontal.”

In fact, the Declaration is the outcome of a complex and open multi-stakeholder process, which ended with the direct involvement of Italian citizens through a four-month public consultation on the Internet.

Nevertheless, momentum for the Declaration is closely associated with the figures of Laura Boldrini, President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and former spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Stefano Rodotà, an Italian jurist and politician and long-time advocate of a “Magna Carta” for the networked society who headed the committee of experts which drafted the document.

Explaining the contents of the Declaration, Rodotà said that unlike almost other similar initiatives,  the Italian Declaration : “does not contain specific and detailed wording of the different principles and rights already stated by international documents and national constitutions” but attempts to “identify the specific principles and rights of the digital world, by underlining not only their peculiarities but also the way in which they generally contribute to redefining the entire sphere of rights.”

The Declaration covers a wide range of issues, from the “fundamental right to Internet access” and net neutrality to the notion of “informational self-determination”. It also includes provisions on the security, integrity and inviolability of IT systems and domains, mass surveillance, the right to anonymity and the development of digital identity. It also deals with the highly-debated idea of granting online citizens the “right to be forgotten”.

The Declaration is critical of the opacity of the terms of service devised by digital platform operators, who are “required to behave honestly and fairly” and, most of all, give “clear and simple information on how the platform operates.”

Rodotà pointed out that the set of rights recognised in the Declaration “does not guarantee general freedom on the Internet, but specifically aims at preventing the dependency of people from the outside” through, for example, “expropriation of the right to freely develop one’s personality and identity as may happen with the wide and increasing use of algorithms and probabilistic techniques.”

The importance of needs linked to security and the market are taken into consideration but, according to the promoters of the initiative, there cannot be a balance on equal terms between these interests and fundamental rights and freedoms. In particular, “security needs shall not determine the establishment of a society of surveillance, control and social sorting.”

Renata Avila of Guatemala, who heads the “Web We Want” campaign launched by the World Wide Web Foundation, expressed her satisfaction with the section of the Declaration dedicated to net neutrality and free software, but said that it should have had more explicit and stronger recognition of “the right of people to communicate in private and the right to anonymity.”

The next step for the Italian Declaration concerns it status. It is currently simply a political document with no legal value, although Boldrini has said that it will be the subject of a parliamentary “motion” in the coming months.

As the basis for a legally-binding document, it has much in common with national legislation concerning the Internet in Brazil and the Philippines. However, it promoters note that the Italian declaration was created with an international framework in mind.

Its rationale, they say, is that “the many questions related to access and use of the Internet go well beyond national borders because of the very nature of the Internet and therefore call for a coordinated effort at the international level.”

According to the promoters, the main aim of the Declaration is not limited to being a text for the creation of new national legislation, but aims at being a contribution to public debate that points to possible legislative developments at all levels, “from national legislation to international treaties.”

For his part, Rodotà hoped that the Italian Declaration of Internet Rights would serve as an instrument for the “consolidation of a common international debate and of a culture highlighting common dynamics in different legal systems”.

Edited by Phil Harris   

During re:publica 2015, Juliet Wanyiri (centre), illustrates a practical workshop organised by Foondi*, of which she is founder and CEO. Credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

In a major paradigm shift, the German government is now placing its bets on digitalisation for its development cooperation policy with Africa, under what it calls a Strategic Partnership for a ’Digital Africa’.

According to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), “through a new strategic partnership in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), German development cooperation will be joining forces with the private sector to support the development and sustainable management of Digital Africa’s potential.”

“Digitalisation offers a vast potential for making headway on Africa’s sustainable development,” said Dr Friedrich Kitschelt, a State Secretary in BMZ, noting however that this “benefits all sides, including German and European enterprises.”

Broad consensus about the overlap between public and private interests in attaining sustainable development goals was apparent at two high-profile events earlier this year – the annual re:publica conference on internet and society, and BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference, both held in Berlin."Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships” – Muhammad Radwan of icecairo

In Berlin for re:publica 2015 in May, Mugethi Gitau, a young Kenyan tech manager from Nairobi’s iHub, an incubator for “technology, innovation and community”, delivered a sharp presentation titled ‘10 Things Europe Can Learn From Africa’.  “We are pushing ahead with creative digital solutions,” said Gitau, delivering sharp know-how and hard facts.

The Kenyan start-up iHub is a member of the m:lab East Africa consortium, the region’s centre for mobile entrepreneurship, which was established through a seed grant from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme for “creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy”.

In turn, m:lab East Africa is part of the Global Information Gathering (GIG) initiative, which was founded in Berlin in 2003 as a partnership of BMZ, the German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The m:lab East Africa consortium has spawned 10 tech businesses which have gone regional, and boasts a portfolio of 150 start-ups, including Kopo Kopo, an add on to the M-Pesa money transfer application which has scaled into Africa, the PesaPal application for mobile credits, the Eneza ‘one laptop per child’ project, and locally relevant rural applications such as iCow and M-Farm which help farmers keep track of their yields and cut out the middleman to reach buyers directly.

“We are by nature a people who love to give, crowdsourcing is in our genes, our local villages have a tradition of coming together to help each other out, so it’s no wonder we have taken to sharing and social media like naturals,” Gitau told IPS, mentioning the popular chamas or “merry-go-rounds” whereby people bank with each other, avoiding banking interest costs.

Referring to the exponential tide of 700 million mobile phone users in Africa, which has already surpassed Europe, Thomas Silberhorn, a State Secretary in BMZ, told a re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information projects in developing countries: “This is a time of huge potential, like all historical transformations.”

The pace and range of innovative mobile solutions from Africa has been formidable. The creative use of SMS has enabled a range of services which enable urban and, significantly, rural populations to access anything from banking to health services, job listings and microcredits, not to mention mobilising “shit storms” against public authority inefficiencies.

However, the formidable pace of digital penetration has raised concerns about the “digital divide” – the widening socio-economic inequalities between those who have access to technology and those who have not.

Increasingly a North-South consensus is growing concerning three core aspects of digital economic development – the regulation of broadband internet as a public utility; the sustainable potential of mobile technology and low price smart devices to bring effective solutions to a whole gamut of local needs; and the need for good infrastructure as a precondition for environmental protection and as the leverage people need to lift themselves out of poverty.

New models of development cooperation, technology transfer and e-participation governance are emerging in response to the impact of digitalisation on all sectors of society and service provision in areas as disparate as they are increasingly connected including health, food and agriculture – access to education, communication, media, information and data and democratic participation.

“Tackling the digital divide is crucial,” said Philibert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, addressing BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference. “It encompasses a package of vision, implementation and much needed coordination among stakeholders.”

Rwanda, which now boasts a number of e-participation projects such as Sobanukirwa, the country’s first freedom of information project, is committed to universally accessible broadband and is rising to the forefront of Africa’s power-sharing technical revolution. 

The most active proponents of the e-revolution argue that digitalisation also offers the possibility to place governments under scrutiny and have leaders judged from the vantage point of e-participation, open data, freedom of expression and information – all elements of the power-sharing models that have seen the light  in the internet age.

“Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships,” said Muhammad Radwan of icecairo.

The icecairo initiative is part of the international icehubs network, which started with iceaddis in Ethiopia and icebauhaus in Germany.

The icehubs network (where ‘ice’ stands for Innovation-Collaboration-Enterprise) is an emerging open network of ‘hubs’, or community-driven technology innovation spaces, that promote the invention and development of home-grown, affordable technological products and services for meeting local challenges.

The network is enabled by GIZ, a company specialising in international development, which is owned by the German government and mainly operates on behalf of BMZ, which is now intent on using a “digital agenda” to guide German development cooperation with Africa.

“Let us take digitalisation seriously,” said Kitschelt. “Let us use the potential of ICT for development, address the digital and educational divide and build on that resourcefulness in our partnerships by advocating for digital rights and engaging in dialogue with the tech community, software developers, social entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, bloggers, programmers and internet activists worldwide.”

Kitschelt’s words certainly found their echo among African e-revolutionaries whose rallying cry has moved forward significantly from “fight the power“ to “share the power”.

However, while this may be well be what the future looks like, there were also those at the re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information who wondered about priorities when Silberhorn of BMZ told participants: “”The fact that in many development countries we are witnessing better access to mobile phones than toilets is a clear catalyser for changing development priorities.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

*  Foondi is an African design and training start-up that focuses on creating access to open source, low-cost appropriate technology-related sources to leverage local technologies for bottom-up innovation. It provides a platform for problem setting, designing and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Its larger vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa working on building solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

Mobile broadband services are seen as a key tool of development communication the world over, but people in rural Asia and Africa say telecom companies should cater to their needs and not simply impose technology on them.

Experts say spreading the benefits of the digital revolution to rural areas poses a huge challenge for telecom companies, which have so far focused on urban markets.

“The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” Mark Summers, co-founder of Inveneo, a non-profit company promoting broadband connection in Africa warned at the Telecom World 2013 conference here last month.“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life."

He was immediately challenged by a Zimbabwean in the audience who said he lived in a rural area and didn’t need the technology they had all been talking about. He wondered if telecom companies ever asked people like him what they wanted before trying to connect them to the technology.

Similar debates had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s when radio was promoted as a development communication tool, mainly by western consultants.

“They talk of us as if we are uneducated,” Reuben Gwatidzo of the Information Society Initiative Trust of Zimbabwe told IPS.

Gwatidzo said it wasn’t necessary to learn someone else’s language or to have high literacy to be a good carpenter, farmer or build one’s own house.

“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life,” he said. He said he was not against new technology but rural people must be allowed to choose what they want, and not have some “international strategy” imposed on them.

The telecom meet was organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the Thai capital. The meet picked up on longstanding issues.

ITU estimates there will be over 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world by the end of 2013, but points out that there are 1.1 billion people who do not have access to the Internet, with 90 percent of them in the developing world.

Telecom companies – which target urban markets – have increased their revenue by 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. The industry is largely driven by private operators.

Many argue that private companies are not interested in rural markets because of low purchasing power and high cost of connectivity and that is why governments should step in to provide connections.

“The real challenge is how to structure spectrum allocation to attract carriers to both urban and rural sectors,” said Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, a Ghanaian telecom sector analyst.

“The truth is rural markets are not attractive, but there are mechanisms to address them, including government intervention through which you can tax the urban markets to subsidise the rural markets,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is convinced about the role of the government.

Dhaka-based Abu Saeed Khan, senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank, argues that governments can create problems too.

“In Bangladesh, the government has auctioned this bandwidth. It is not cheap, so private operators load the price on the package,” he told IPS.

“When it comes to Internet bandwidth, operators don’t have direct access because the government has erected a barrier – a middleman – so the cost of Internet bandwidth is too high for consumers,” he said.

ITU’s report, ‘Measuring Information Society 2013’, argues that people living outside major cities in developing countries are the ones for whom information and communication technology (ICT) can have the greatest development impact.

In many countries across Asia and Africa, schools and health centres are connected to mobile and broadband technology and farmers are provided information on crop protection and marketing.

For instance, the International Fertiliser Development Centre provides information via mobile phones to farmers in five African countries to protect them from counterfeit fertilisers.

In Malaysia, seaweed farmer Kabila Hassan has set up a successful business – also providing employment to half her village – by using the Internet to market products in China, Japan and the U.S. She received the ITU’s Transformational Power of Broadband Digital Icon Award 2013 here in Bangkok for it.

Brahima Sanou, who is from Burkina Faso and is director of the Telecom Development Bureau at ITU, believes mobile phones can be the new development anchor.

He pointed out several examples of this – such as Senegal where fishermen use mobile phones to find out the price of fish before they come ashore; Rwanda where it is used to follow government services in rural areas; and Costa Rica where it is used to combat non-communicable diseases.

“People who never had access to any technology are now using mobile phones. We have to develop (services) for people (through) what they own already, not bring new tools,” he said.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan telecom expert who is the founding chair of LIRNEasia, told IPS that the findings of a six-country sample survey on how poor people were revealing.

“It is very clear that they are accessing more than voice services through wireless platforms,” he said.

“We were surprised when, while doing research with poor people in Java (Indonesia), they clearly stated they were not using the Internet, but later they started talking about Facebook and various other activities.”

“This shows that they are using mobile phones without necessarily going through the steps they think are necessary to use the Internet,” Dr Samarajiva noted.

He said their sister organisation in Africa had the same findings.

“So it’s a different conception of the Internet,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards mobile devices. We will see an explosion of its use.”

As phones are transforming from merely voice communicators to what is called 3G or 4G, which transmits voice, visuals and data, a large chunk of humanity in rural Asia and Africa is waiting for a transformation in their lives but with technology that is relevant to their needs.