[Lac] WGIG

[Taran Rampersad]

Haroldo Stenger wrote:

>On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 00:57:12 -0500, Taran Rampersad <cnd at knowprose.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Which of these candidates understands the problems of the Caribbean
>>countries?
>>    
>>
>
>Out of plain ignorance, what problems does the caribbean countries as
>a collective have? They seem to me very different to each other.
>  
>
I suppose this is one problem. In many ways they are very similar. In
many ways they are quite different. But as far as Internet Governance
goes, there are some commonalities. I suspect that, for the most part,
these interests are common to the entire South American region.

A lot of people seem very interested in the TLD issues.

IP Connection to the internet needs to be regularized throughout the
Caribbean as far as bandwidth purchasing. The major issue here becomes
apparent when considering it from an engineering standpoint: If
Florida's internet service to the Caribbean were disrupted (by a
hurricane, as an example), the entire Caribbean ICT infrastructure would
suffer. That's a single point failure and is not in the interest of ICT
and people who are represented by ICT. Imagine last year that Trinidad
and Tobago lost connection to the 'outside world of the internet' for 3
days because of a single point failure with U.S. Sprint DNS Servers.

Copyright laws enforced by TRIPs are a major problem. In Trinidad and
Tobago, by the Copyright Act of 1997, a database is implicitly
copyrighted. Not good. The same with content. Again, not good. This goes
further into patents and trademarks, but Copyright is probably the major
factor, with patents (and the software patents) playing a major part in
affordability and innovation in the region.

I'm still waiting to hear more. Realize that Grenada has been completely
devastated, and that communication with the island has been a problem -
especially when communication was most needed. Jamaica suffered some
severe damage, but the telecom infrastructure held out fairly well. I
imagine that the poles being newer after the last hurricane has
something to do with it, but they have been very stable. The problem
with Grenada reinforces the need to assure connectivity locally and
wherever the bandwidth is purchased.

It should be recognized that there are quite a few sovereign nations
within the Caribbean itself. 26, if you count all without worrying about
territories. 16 if you exclude those with dependencies.
So these are 16 Sovereign nations to be represented by the LAC as well,
which I would have to say is a substantial bit of the region. The
populations may not be as large, but these are sovereign nations - which
means Internet Governance gets further obfuscated.

There may be other issues.

Perhaps the small islands to the East bear further scrutiny :) I'll pass
along what I can, but the only real way to get this sort of information
is by research and communication.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean for the countries in
the Caribbean.

-- 
Taran Rampersad

cnd at knowprose.com

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