11th Doha Forum, Qatar 9th-11th May 2011
Wednesday (11th)
Ninth Session 0900-1030
Panel Chairman:
Mhamed Krichen, News Department, Aljazeera Network
Speakers:
Tarak Ben Ammar, Owner, Quinta Communications, Tunisia
Chris Doyle, Director, CAABU
Yours truly
Tarak began the proceedings with an analysis of the Tunisian uprising in early January (now referred to more frequently as the Arab Spring or Arab Spring Revolution) with an explanation of how and why it happened. He then went onto to discuss the role of old and new media and how it played into the popular uprising.
Chris had cleverly tweeted his paper already and so he explained through his “Nine” tweets how social media had worked in the Arab Spring suggesting it had been vastly over-hyped.(He has put his paper up at:
www.caabu.org).
Picking up where Chris had left off, I pointed out that only Egypt and South Africa has 3G in Africa. Egypt’s population of 80 million had 60 million mobiles and a key component of the Egyptian revolution was the role of texting (sms messaging) which was why Mubarak moved two days before the events at Tahrir Square to close down the three main mobile networks.
I rarely write speeches these days and tend to extemporize from a set of notes.
I began by giving a précis of some of the issues surrounding the internet since January 2010:
Google’s withdrawal from China having claimed she had been singled out for hacker attacks by the Chinese government (January 2010)
Hillary Clinton speech about the internet calling for the basis of the First Amendment to be assigned to it (February 2010)
The FCC (USA) Report on Digital Exclusion was published with a stimulus budget of $8 billion with no strategy built in to the bidding procedures whilst the UK’s was a paltry £30 million (March 2010)
The iPad was launched in April 2010 in USA with first month sales of 300,000 and by mid January 2011, had achieved 13.5m sales. (April 2010)
General Keith Andrews – a 4 star general - takes up his post as Cyber Chief (May 2010)
The UK’s Coalition Government cancelled, without a murmur, Sir Tim Berners-Lee Institute of Science costing £30 million which would have created a world class centre (May 2010)
The Indian government announced a new slimmer iPad clone costing $35 but inevitably there were then the usual arguments within the Indian Government about tenders. The Education Ministry had said it would order 100 million for its schools’ programme (July 2010).
In the UK, the NHS had 4,121 web sites costing £85 million (August 2010)
Research in Motion, the Canadian makers of Blackberry, almost ran aground in the Mid East and India over security issues (August 2010)
And right at the close the Wikileaks story ran and ran and ran (December, 2010) which saw Hillary Clinton change her tune on the internet in a second speech.(December, 2010)
The Arab Spring (January-May 2011)
Over 100 million PSP3 accounts were hacked leaving Sony with a possible $1 billion liability (May 2011)
Cloud Computing was in danger of becoming the norm without citizens being told how this would affect their privacy and data rights (May 2011)
******
I then concluded my remarks by explaining why I had proposed the Oxford Internet Institute to Oxford University in 2000 (it opened in September, 2001) and why I thought a part of the solution to the issues I’d raised above was a new world Internet Policy Institute.
We took nine questions from the audience about wikileaks, regulation, knowledge, mobiles, mass media et al.
(You can find more at www.derekwyatt.co.uk and a review of my speech at www.qnaol.net)
Afterwards a number of delegates stopped to chat including:
Dr Azahar Iqbal, Alnoor Holdings
Adel Iskandar, Georgetown University
Nadia Al-Ashqar, Doha International Centre for Interfaith Dialogue
Sundeep Sonawane, Editor, Qatar News Agency
ends