huridocs-tech Latin America: USA Gatekeeper for Internet Traffic

Title: COMUNICATION-LATAM: US Is Gatekeeper for Internet
Traffic

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 28 (IPS) - There is much talk about the
Internet's great potential for democratising society. But so
far traffic over the information superhighway has been
monopolised by the United States.

More than 90 percent of the world's information flows pass
through the United States, whose hegemony over Internet is
so strong that it even exceeds its influence over the global
film- making industry, for example - a matter of concern to
the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

That situation arises not only from the economic might of
the United States, but also from the great leaps made in
Internet and telecommunications development by that country,
which is even far ahead of other parts of the industrialised
world like Europe and Japan.

The language issue is also crucial, given that 85 percent of
the information posted on the Internet is in English.

Until recently, even communications over computer networks
within powerful countries like Germany, for example, was
carried out through the United States, according to Carlos
Afonso, a computer science engineer and pioneer in Internet
in Brazil who is working today on developing the Information
Network for the Third Sector.

The huge imbalance in information flows was one of the
concerns raised at the ITU regional forum held two weeks ago
in Rio de Janeiro. The flow of data from the United States
to Latin America is five times the flow in the opposite
direction, participants at the Telecom Americas 2000
conference pointed out.

But even if regulations were adopted, they could do nothing
to change that situation, as it is a consequence of widely
divergent levels of development of the economy,
telecommunications and the Internet, said Raimundo Beca,
vice-president of the Chilean telephone company CTC.

Since most of the information sought and the main search
engines are based in the United States, there is no way to
avoid the situation in which ''all roads lead'' to that
country, said Afonso. Europe is too far behind to become
another pole of attraction for Internet traffic.

Moreover, US advantages in terms of access are so great that
service providers and portals from all over the world prefer
to use US ''backbones'' (basic Internet infrastructure),
said Ethevaldo Siqueira, director of the National
Telecommunications Magazine published in Sao Paulo.

The Internet service provider recently set up by Globo,
Brazil's communications giant, is among the companies that
have opted for US infrastructure.

That infrastructure is based on the wide availability of
fiber optic cables, including underwater ones,
communications satellites, TV cables and microwaves. The
various elements involved in the development of cybernetics
are entwined, which makes decentralisation difficult.

Investing billions of dollars laying in a cable from Latin
America to Europe, for example, cannot be justified if the
flow of information between the two regions is not heavy,
said Siqueira.

For now, the information flow between the two regions
amounts to a mere 63 megabytes per second, while the flow
between Latin America and the United States-Canada amounts
to 949 megabytes - less than the flow between Geneva,
Switzerland and the rest of the world alone, said Siqueira.

The installed capacity between the United States-Canada and
Europe, meanwhile, amounts to 13,258 megabytes per second,
slightly more than double the flow between North America and
the Asia-Pacific region, he added.

But the dependence on backbones in other countries carries a
cost. Whoever rents the lines pays the whole price, even
though the data transmission occurs in both directions,
pointed out ITU under-secretary-general Roberto Blois.

Unlike the case of international telephony, the flow of
payments involved in the worldwide web is totally favourable
to the United States.

Nevertheless, the financial costs are not high, because the
rates are low, thanks to the fact that Internet ''was born
in the United States, with subsidies,'' said Siqueira, who
added that technological innovations have continued to bring
down costs.

But the imbalance explains attempts to use the spare
capacity of telecommunications infrastructure, which has
only been used to seven percent of capacity by telephony,
''and only at the times of peak use,'' he added.

However, countries that still have few Internet users, like
Argentina and Colombia, already spent 60 million dollars
each in 1998, according to the ITU - an amount that could
soar with the expected mushrooming of computers connected to
Internet over the next few years.

Unilateral payments increase the disequilibrium between
regions by pushing up costs of access in Latin America and
other regions and keeping them down in the United States,
where users can visit sites abroad over the same line that
provides the revenues for US companies.

That upside-down subsidy from the poor to the rich is
holding up the spread of Internet in developing countries,
especially among low-income sectors, while facilitating its
expansion in the United States.

The alternative is making better use of already existing
telecoms infrastructure by installing many points of access
to the web, to foment links between regional providers and
reduce dependence on centralisation in the United States,
said Afonso.

But that must be ''an engineering project, without national
egoism and political impositions'' in order to give fruit,
he stressed. Brazil has developed its backbones in such a
way that internal information flows no longer have to leave
the country, but it is a unique case in the region.

The global outlook is changing fast, said Siqueira. Europe
has awakened to the Internet phenomenon, and should make ''a
great leap in the next two or three years,'' he forecast.

In Brazil, the physical infrastructure is mushrooming with
huge investments by telephone companies and the installation
of telecoms cables by power, sewage and TV companies.

The new technologies, like cellular telephones with access
to Internet, will permit further advances, he added.

Language is a limiting factor, said Siqueira, who admitted
that the dominion of English is ''overwhelming,'' and that
even if links are set up among Spanish-speaking and
Portuguese-speaking countries, ''sub-universes of Portuguese
or Spanish language will remain minuscule'' in the
cybernetic world. (END/IPS/tra-so/mo/mj/sw/00)




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