Re: Africa & Icann

[Ant Brooks <ant at hivemind.net>]

"Wawa A. Ngenge" wrote:

> May I add the issue of unequal payment for access to the internet backbone by
> African countries relative to the USA.  My understanding is that we now pay 100%
> of that access so that US information consumers can come and consume information
> that is stored in Africa.  There is an ITU recommendation concerning this
> somewhere.  I think it is an issue that ICANN should definitely take up.

Some comments:

1. I don't think this is an issue for ICANN to take up at all. ICANN is the
   Internet Corporation for Assigned _Names_ and _Numbers_. ICANN is *not* an
   organisation for dealing with general global Internet issues. I believe
   that ICANN is already suffering from mandate-bloat, and I don't think it
   should be encouraged to get involved in even more tangential issues.

2. I understand completely why it seems as if countries in Africa are paying
   the US for connectivity and get nothing in return. However, that is just
   one way of looking at the situation. Here's another: ISPs in Africa who
   connect to US backbone operators are paying for (a) transit traffic to US
   customers of that operator; (b) transit traffic to other US backbone
   operators, with whom that operator has peering or other interconnect
   agreements; (c) transit traffic to ISPs in hundreds of other countries.

   If you were to run separate connections to ISPs in all of the other
   countries with whom you wish to exchange traffic, it would cost you many
   times more than it does to connect to one US provider. It can therefore
   legitimately be claimed that instead of taking advantage of African ISPs,
   US backbone operators are providing them with an efficient and cost-
   effective global interconnect service.

3. High costs for international Internet connectivity are influenced far more
   by restrictive domestic telecomms regulation (i.e. a lack of competition)
   than they are by manipulative US backbone operators. There is strong
   evidence [1] that the quickest possible way to lower costs of Internet
   access is to open up local markets to telecommunications competition.
   In particular, allowing ISPs to install and operate their own VSAT
   gateways seems to be a very effective way to reduce market costs for
   international connections.

4. The ITU recommendation [2] is (in my opinion) fairly useless. The
   intention of those economies which have pushed the recommendation
   this far is, more-or-less, to introduce a balance-of-payments system
   for Internet traffic similar to that currently used for telephone
   traffic. Since the balance of payments system seems to be the main
   reason that costs for international telephone calls are so much higher
   than domestic rates, I am extremely sceptical about introducing a
   similarly broken system for Internet services.

5. The United States has made it quite clear that it has absolutely no
   intention of implementing this ITU recommendation. Since most of the
   globe's Internet hubbing takes place in the US, the recommendation
   is pretty pointless without US co-operation.

6. Just in case anyone has already forgotten my first point, here it is
   again: I think that ICANN is completely the wrong organisation to
   involve in this sort of debate. ICANN has enough work to do handling
   naming, numbering and protocols. Please don't let it start meddling
   in commercial Internet interconnection arrangements!

Ant.

[1] The ITU's Internet case studies are a good place to start, see
    http://www.itu.int/ti/casestudies.
[2] http://www.itu.int/newsroom/press/documents/diii.htm

-- 
// ant at hivemind.net // +27 83 326 3933 // ICQ 417614 //

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