Group items tagged

"Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen. From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015."

National broadband policies listed by country

"Under the plan, called the Bandwidth Initiative, institutions in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda joined together to buy broadband Internet access, offered by satellite, at discounted rates."

This article touches on some of the problems that African countries are having getting needed high-speed Internet. Companies have a monopoly and grossly overcharge, resulting in prices that are many times that of U.S. or European high speed Internet. This sort of parallels the lack of democracy and highlights problems with corruption that cause many nations in Africa to get stuck behind in matters of development and innovation.

Melanie- Mary Internet is a basic human right...

2008 government publication

2007 government publication

"China has been a notoriously difficult market to crack for overseas Web companies. Google, eBay and Yahoo, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, have all struggled there, because of strong domestic competition as well as government blocking and censorship. But in its push into China, Softbank has avoided many of these headaches by focusing on e-commerce, local social networking sites and online games - sidestepping the difficulties of government censorship."

This article makes me wonder whether Softbank can bring new media and social networking, broadband Internet, etc. to China and allow China to continue it's censorship practices... IV