Follow-up to my previous post:
EUROPE'S MAYAN SYNDROME
Power and Privilege
Europe proves to be a patchwork of progressive and repressive forces.
by Brent Gregston
An American idea that began 25 years ago as an obscure military experiment, the Internet is now spearheading a digital revolution that will change Europe forever. And what the Europeans do on the world's largest computer network will be important to the rest of the world. No other geographic area of its size has as many artists, composers, opera singers, documentary filmmakers, fashion designers, libraries, monuments, museums, and engineers. Moreover, the combined gross product of the nations in the European Economic Union exceeds that of the United States by a third.
There are clear signs that the Net is approaching a new phase in Europe. In the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Belgium, for example, there are enough people with e-mail addresses to give fellow unwired citizens a vague sense that they might be missing out on something. And a media feeding frenzy about the Internet shows no signs of relenting. The result is that it is trŠs cool to be wired.
In northern Europe at least, many professionals and businesses now take the Net seriously as a means of furthering their competitiveness, while in Eastern Europe and Russia, those who can afford to do so are getting wired to circumvent inefficient phone systems and to plug into the more prosperous societies of western Europe. (In other words, the Internet is no longer just for Americans and Eurogeeks.)
But for the present, the ideal of an information highway with access for all citizens is as unattainable in Europe as it is in the United States. Digital Europe has many medieval features: road tolls and extortion-like taxes, witch hunts, an oppressed citizenry, and powers-that-be in feudal towers.
Europeans who want to get on the Internet must pay tithes to national telephone companies that shamelessly exploit Euro-Netizens. The majority of Europeans who do not live near a major city still have to call a service provider at long-distance rates that are much higher than those in the United States. For anyone off the beaten path who does not have a princely income, that means no Net.
Those who can reach a service provider via a local call still pay exorbitant charges. Unlike in the United States, they must pay for local calls at metered rates. In addition, some service providers tack on hourly usage charges after the first five or 10 hours a month. Then there is a sales, or "value-added," tax that approaches 20 percent of the bill. Thus, the price of using the Internet for a European is at least twice as much as it is in the United States. And before hooking up in most countries, the user has already paid at least twice as much for a modem.
Not only are the European national phone companies greedy, they are IQ-challenged as well. How else could you rationally explain the goal of British Telecom to create a national data network that runs at 2,400 bps? The British journalist and editor Jonathan Miller summed up his feelings in an Internet and Coms Today editorial (June 1995), saying, "It is time someone took out this massive national liability and beat them to death."
The official pronouncements of most European government leaders are in favor of a comprehensive network for interactive telecommunications. It was one of the campaign promises of French president Jacques Chirac. In practice, however, European governments show as much interest in policing the Net as in promoting it. The rights to free expression, free assembly, and privacy on the Net are all subject to question.
France and Russia have banned the use of encryption, putting themselves in the distinguished company of Iraq, the only other country to do so. A committee in the Dutch parliament is considering a ban as well, although it is not likely to become law in liberal Holland. The essence of the proposal is a ban on the use, ownership, and sale of encryption methods. First-time offenders would be punished with a fine and the loss of telephone access for a few days. The government of England has created an Internet Ethics Collaborative Open Group to study complaints about the Internet.
What happens now will be decisive for the future. European citizens want the ability to practice distance learning, to search the rich holdings of their libraries, and to participate in electronic democracy. Their telephone companies want to fix the price of access and their governments want to set the rules. The coming year will be one to watch.
United Kingdom
After a little hesitation, the British have taken the bungee-plunge into cyberspace. An estimated 500,000 people now have access to the Internet in the United Kingdom, up from 200,000 last year.
England has given the English-speaking world many of its best and worst newspapers, much of its best television and documentaries, and much of its worst gossip. It appears ready to digitize it all.
Many journalists have begun to publish e-mail addresses below their names, and there are Internet editions of The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and Time Out. The world-famous BBC public broadcasting channel is running an eight-part series on the Net with an estimated audience of close to a million viewers per show. British entrepreneurs are on the heels of the media and appear as eager to commercialize the Internet as their American counterparts, even if they have gotten off to a slower start. The list of businesses with a presence on the Net is growing fast.
Europe's first cybercaf‚, Cyberia, opened in London in September of last year. It has received as much press coverage as a royal sex scandal. There are now 15 cybercaf‚s in England (two are Cyberia franchises) and more than 20 more on the European continent. Cyberia co-owner Gene Teare said she was surprised by the intensity of media attention but always knew it was a sound business idea. Asked to cite a memorable moment since the caf‚'s opening, she responded, "A group of old-age pensioners came in for our breakfast training who were really open to what the Internet offers. It shows how useful it is as a technology, the fact that you don't need to be young to take to it."
France
Cyber-France is sparsely inhabited, with approximately 150,000 Netizens. Certain luminous places give some hint of what the rest of the planet might look like one day: The Web Museum, Le MinistŠre de la Culture, and some others. The rest is darkness.
Unfortunately, the national telephone company, France T‚l‚com, has joined forces with a small group of the cultural elite to portray the Internet as an American techno-cultural menace that threatens European culture. They are demanding some kind of vague "cultural safeguards" that look suspiciously like a preservation of the monopoly powers of French bureaucrats.
Will there be a quota system for content on the Net like there is for movies on French television and in French cinemas? It would be funny if it weren't. At the moment, France is a country endowed with distinguished engineers and an excellent telecommunications network, but without leaders who see the future as an opportunity.
Things are different at a grass-roots level where French Internauts say, "Just do it!" Thanks to them, the Net is expanding. A little over a year ago, there was not a single Internet access provider in Paris, and most French people didn't know the Internet existed. And until June of this year, it was prohibitively expensive to get access during business hours. Now there are a dozen service providers fiercely competing for customers. The rate for unlimited access has dropped from 240 francs a month to 99 francs.
Since the beginning of the year, the Net has become a constant theme in the press. Five cybercaf‚s--three in Paris, one in Marseilles, and one in Nice--have opened. The first French magazine devoted to the Internet, PlanŠte Internet, appeared in May (there are now three) and the first French e-zine, Cybersphere, came online in June-but not without some pain. Said Cyril Fievet, co-publisher of Cybersphere, "[The first step was] to obtain a permit to publish from the Public Prosecutor. They refused to give us one. Cybersphere is in a judicial void."
The Netherlands
With one of the highest computer-per-head counts in the world, a population that is at ease in English, and a home-grown hacker culture, Holland is highly visible in the European cybersphere. An interesting place to meet Dutch Netizens is Amsterdam's Digital City--a network akin to The Well in the United States, which was started with public funds in Amsterdam. It handles 10,000 calls a day.
Louis Rossetto, editor-in-chief of Wired, worked for several years in the Netherlands. One of his first investors was the Dutch software company BSO. WAVE, a Dutch-language clone of Wired, has been published in Holland and Belgium for nearly a year.
The first nation on the continent to privatize its national phone company, the Netherlands has a more flexible telecommunications infrastructure than most other European countries. During a visit to Holland in the fall of 1994, I found that a SLIP connection to the Internet was cheaper than one in the United States at the time. And you can now get an ISDN line installed in Holland for free (but there is a six-month waiting list).
"The nice thing about the Internet is that it is still the contrary of Big Brother: It is total anarchy. That was the key to its success, and we should make sure that remains that way," said Dr. Patrick Groeneveld, faculty of Electrical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, and creator of the Digital Picture Archive.
Russia
Until six months ago, only a small number of Russian academics, industry insiders, and scientists could have Internet access. The government does not finance telecommunications backbones or national computer centers. For the most part, the Internet in Russia is used by banks. It is a cruel irony that the European nation with the most computer scientists has had so limited an influence on the Internet.
But this has begun to change. Now there are commercial service providers and a nonprofit organization (GlasNet) that helps pro bono groups in the former Soviet Union get online.
Nicholai Gluzdov, the man responsible for the most beautiful of Russia's Web sites, estimates that no more than five percent of the Russian people have potential access. The rest are excluded by poverty or geography. He agrees with commentators in the West who believe it is only a matter of time before the Russian mafia discovers computers and sets off a digital crime wave. According to Gluzdov, only a totalitarian regime could stop them, "and then only maybe. We don't even have the force it takes to stop ordinary crimes."
Germany
Unlike its famous Autobahn, Germany's Infobahn is not free and is not fast. The German Postal Office provides an expensive and slow national data network, Datex-J, that has 600,000 users. There also are about 80,000 CompuServe users. Other private service providers are quickly getting involved before an anticipated explosion in Internet traffic.
As the most important economy in Europe, Germany has a lot at stake. Germans now seem ready to embrace the Internet for communications, advertising, publishing, and, slowly, telecommuting. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel went on the Net a couple of weeks ahead of Time in the fall of 1994, and other media companies are following suit. But many German managers still take a skeptical view of the Net as a place to do business, and German consumers, who save a lot more of their income than Americans and who tend to pay for purchases with cash instead of plastic, are not likely to start shopping via computer anytime soon.
"The environmental pollution created by commuter traffic all but forces us to rethink our method of organizing work. [With telecommuting] about half of our colleagues would only come to work every other day. The German forest could breathe again and the telephone company would have sufficient motivation to install a fiber-optic network extending to every place in the Republic of Germany," said Dieter Kuhner in Computer Zeitung (April 30, 1995).
Italy
"Just when the worldwide BBS scene is gaining general respect for its important role at the community level, in Italy the law hits those networks that have always been strongly against software piracy. Charging dozens of honest operators with unmotivated accusations, the main goal of this crackdown is directed against the social activities of small community nets--thus clearing the space for commercial networking." Thus spoke Alessandro Marescotti, Peacelink spokesperson, in La Republicca (May 13, 1995) in response to a police raid that shut down almost a third of all Italian BBSs.
The heavy-handed police effort might have been caused by government paranoia more than anything else. These are chaotic times in Italy, a society trying to recover its footing after the worst corruption scandals in its history.
A status symbol with sex appeal in a country where both are an obsession, the cellular phone has been a hit in Italy. Now, having an Internet address is becoming almost as trendy.
One of Italy's reasons for getting wired is to stay in touch with all the people who have emigrated in the last century. The "society of the diaspora is an information society," said Bruno Caselli, the director of ANSA (the National Associated Press Agency). His company provides a variety of information services to Italians and people of Italian descent living outside Italy. He is putting it all on the Internet in English and Italian on the Windows on Italy Web page.
Be sure to check out the summer's big event, the Palio di Sienna--a horse race between city districts in the medieval city of Siena--on the Web. You can view a lot of horseflesh and their riders. Prego.
Spain
One day, the Internet in Spain will be almost as interesting and varied as Spain and the Spanish people. But that manana is pretty far off. The number of Spanish Internet users is small and there are not yet many Web sites for Iberophilic Internauts. Some interesting initiatives are occurring on a regional basis, particularly in Catalonia.
More than any country in Europe, Spain is passionate about its folklore, and it is interesting to see some of it wind up on Internet: There is a regional guide to Basque country that has detailed information about the dates and locations of local events such as sword dances, fox dances, wine-skin dances, military parades, religious processions, etc. Another site has pictures and songs of Hemingway's favorite fiesta, the Running of the Bulls at Pamplona.
Scandinavia and Finland
By the cynical standards of other countries on both sides of the Atlantic, the people of Scandinavia regard their political institutions with a remarkable lack of suspicion. This trust extends to most aspects of life--education, city planning, health, income tax, and, increasingly, to information technology. With their affluence, some of world's best phone systems, and a highly developed system of local democracy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden appear ready to create virtual societies to coexist with actual ones.
The former Swedish government released a draft plan of a large-scale effort to disseminate government information called Wings for Human Ability. Part of the plan was translated into reality through Project Rosenbad, a government information database. The present government intends to give it a facelift with new Web pages, linking all ministries and ministers to the Internet. Project leader Inge Gustafsson calls it a victory for coordination, but admits that their ambitions and technical reality don't always jibe.
The Norwegian government also has launched a server to provide information to its citizens. It is possible to sit in on real-time sessions of Norway's Parliament via the Internet and hear the speeches as they are given. During the influx of 1.5 million visitors for the Lillehammer Olympics, the Norwegian police gathered information about events, places, people, and vehicles using electronic mapping and satellite navigation equipment, with electronic "agents" uploading and collecting information from Oslo's police headquarters and other police databases.
The Danish government has published a proposal (Information Society by the Year 2000) that envisions all citizens having an electronic citizen's card with picture and PIN code taking the place of identification papers, marriage certificate, health insurance card, drivers license, etc. By the year 2000, all public authorities are supposed to have an e-mail box to which all citizens and companies can send letters and information.
Despite the practical benefits, there is a widely acknowledged fear that egalitarian values could lose out as society becomes wired. "There will be a tendency for the population to become divided into an A-team and a B-team," as the Danish government study puts it. More than in other parts of Europe, citizens and officials are calling for universal access to the Internet and an educational system that teaches all people to master it.
For all the government initiatives, it is the explosive growth of the Internet driving them into the arms of virtual reality. The most recent Internet Society statistics show that Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are in the top 20 countries (8, 10, 12, and 18, respectively) in number of computers connected to the Internet. On a per-capita basis, the number of computers connected to the Net puts Sweden, Finland, and Norway in the top five, and Denmark is 11th (they have 22, 16, 12, and 7 computers per 1,000 inhabitants, respectively; the United States has 17 per 1,000).
Finland is the world leader in terms of Internet penetration. Why? According to Finnish Webmaster Jarno Tarkoma, "The geopolitical situation has something to do with it. We have always been somewhat marginal leftovers in Europe [and] grab any new chance to communicate with the world outside." Another reason is that access is cheap because of competition between access providers, allowing individuals as well as organizations to get wired easily. Most people in Northern Europe can get fully connected to the Net for $10 to $15 per month.
Much of Europe lags behind the United States in Internet access, but that is slowly changing as even former East Bloc countries become wired and eager to join the international community of the Net. Europe has a great deal to offer, with its cultural and academic centers, museums, and vast libraries. The Netizens of Europe long ago discovered the advantages of being connected. Now everyone else there is, too.
Brent Gregston is a freelance writer living in Amsterdam.
Link:
internetworld.com
Although the above report is four years old, I have to confess that there's nothing new under the sun.... Actually, in Belgium for instance, the local cyberlandscape has even worsened: a couple of weeks ago, our local monopolistic telecom operator Belgacom has raised its toll charges!
So, Derek, what's the viewpoint of a seasoned anthropologist? Remember that the collapse of the Mayan civilization is still a mystery today.....
Gus. |
