Does Africa need to participate in Internet governance?

In Abuja last week, at a small gathering of IT professionals indulging in talk on the future of the World Wide Web, I was forced to return to an old but still raging debate on an African space in Internet governance.

Advocates of an African slot in the governance of the Internet first expressed their views publicly in Geneva during the first World Summit on Information Society (WSIS I), 2003. They brought the same fiery arguments to WSIS II in Tunis in 2005. Since then, they have been pushing for the democratization of the Internet to include "governing members" from all continents.

While the experts had their big and small talks on the future of the Internet in Abuja, I reflected on the position of the current secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Hamadou Toure. The African who presides over the affairs of the world’s communication regulatory body thinks it is a waste of time and misplaced priority for Africans -- yet to address the challenge of Internet access -- to dissipate energy on who should govern the Internet.

Toure is right, and I respect him for separating sentiments from reality. It is a nice idea to have Africans sitting with the rest of the world to decide how the Internet should go and what shape it should take. But becoming a decision maker should not come from whims but from the reality of what each stakeholder has on the World Wide Web. The African reality certainly removes her from having a practical say on the current state of the Internet and its future.

Africa has no place on the Internet in terms of infrastructure, content, capacity and research. More than 90 percent of the infrastructure that is today the Internet resides in the western hemisphere; over 90 percent of the content that excites our desire to use the Internet all come from the West.
The West also rules the Internet in terms of human capacity to keep the Internet running and sustain its growth. What's more, the West is leading the research for expanding the fate of the Internet. Only Asia appears to have a fundamental space in the advancement of the new global network called Internet 2. As for Africa and Africans, they remain at the fringe of Internet technology and research; so where is the argument for Internet governance with Africa having a say?

The big Internet issue in Africa is not who rules the Internet but how to expand access and make access affordable. Africa is the most under-infrastructure continent, and in spite of the gains made in mobile telephony, it remains the most disconnected of all continents. Africa paints a pathetic figure of a continent that is still a 19th century baby in the 21st century. And its case is worsened by a pretentious display of growth, such as the mobile explosion that tends to portray a continent in transition, whereas the reality is closer to stagnation than growth.

"The Economist" captured the African Internet reality in recent research where it showed that if Africa were to be measured as a landmass in terms of Internet connectivity, it would be no bigger than Northern Ireland. In other words, the world’s second-largest continent is no more than the size of Ireland in terms of Internet relevance.

To put it more poignantly, Africa is still 100 years behind the rest of the world in terms of communication. In the continent of 850 million people, bandwidth is scarce and expensive. Terrestrial links are absent, connectivity is available mostly through costly satellite pipes, and politics has helped to retard the growth of fiber-optic connection, including the grossly under-utilized SAT-3 submarine cable.

Less than 8 percent of Africa really, truly has access to the Internet. Less than 1 percent of Africans truly know what broadband Internet is all about. The Internet still plays a role in less than 3 percent of business decision-making and modeling (or is it remodeling?) in African business space. It takes 30 minutes or more to do a download that would take less than a minute in a U.K. home. Africa hardly uploads Internet content; over 98 percent of bandwidth consumption goes to downloading content from abroad. Virtually all the server links to African Internet access are hosted abroad.

If Africa has no Internet presence, if its access to the Internet is predicated on the goodwill of others or on the commercial services of others, how could it begin to ask for a stake in governance over an area where it is simply a loiterer?

The whole gambit over Africa and Internet governance is founded on an exciting debate of creating space for a community that is yet to understand the fundamentals of life in a new information society. And because the foundation of the debate is faulty, the logic to push the argument has been lacking! Should Africa’s headache be “Who owns the Internet?” or "How do we become relevant in the Internet age?"

This misplaced debate first gained momentum in the late 1990s when the Internet became popular, giving rise to its use beyond universities and research institutions. The controversy increased during the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) when debates pointed to the need to enhance the role of all key stakeholders in making the Internet a development tool and a global public good. In this context, a number of developing countries called for the need to re-examine the issue of who governs the Internet.

Are we going to unnecessarily deceive ourselves into believing that we are stakeholders when the quantum of our stakes in the Internet is suspect? The real question is: What is Africa’s stake in the Internet? Does Africa really and truly have a stake here? Before WSIS II in Tunis, there were a lot of posers in the role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a US-based private-public partnership dedicated to a preserving the operational stability of the Internet; promoting competition and achieving broad representation of global Internet communities.

The controversy over who should have a say on the fate of the Internet pitted developing countries against developed countries who were asking for an "inter-governmental organization on Internet governance matters" to take over the functions played by ICANN. Developed country governments rejected the idea. The only point of agreement by all the stakeholders was that a consensus on Internet governance is important, as it is a critical global development issue.

The definition of developing economies assumed falsely that South Korea and China are still LDCs. It is a notion that has only helped to create a deceptive platform with which Africa has unwittingly indulged in the silly luxury of desiring to become a decision maker in a company where it has no real and physical stake. If China and South Korea and even India demand a space in Internet governance, it is because they have a think tank in place to warrant or justify their demands. They are playing a leading role in the emergence of Internet 2.

What is Africa doing? Grappling with taking access to the next 20 percent of its 850 million people! How can a continent struggling to provide access talk about having a say in the governance of the Internet? Toure’s answer was sharp and somewhat painful: We would first have to address the challenge of taking access to our people, then talk about participating in the governance of the Internet. Until then, let’s face the real issue, and it is not about Internet governance. It is about easy and affordable Internet access.