[Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments

[Tauqeer Safdar]

I second +++

Regards

Tauqeer Safdar
Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 21, 2014, at 2:40 AM, Michael Kende <kende at isoc.org> wrote:

> Hi Susan,
> Many thanks again.  I will focus here for the most part on the technical infrastructure issues, for which I would include data centers, hosting, content delivery networks, and IXPs.  At one level, there are no impediments, as someone developing local content has access to very inexpensive hosting offers in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, enabling them to make their content available globally, particularly to expats from their country as well as locally within their country and region.  However, as discussed elsewhere, this access will be slow and require expensive international capacity to ‘bring it home’.  This will in turn limit usage, and my hypothesis is that it would impact the amount of new local content that is developed as there is no large market, or interest, in local content given the cost and latency.  We will try our part in testing this hypothesis, and would be interested in other thoughts on the subject.
> At the local level, there clearly are impediments to the technical infrastructure, both actual and perceived.  In terms of actual impediments, based on my experience (unfortunately I do not know of any data on this) there may either be no data centers for hosting, or they are owned by the ISPs and thus not neutral.  There may also be frequent power outages.  Further, the pricing may be very high, based on high costs (e.g. For power) and/or low scale.  On the other hand, there also seems to be a perception about low quality (in terms of security) which may or may not be true.  
> One initiative to take would be to bring together the industry, convened either by an industry body or by government, to address perceptions and then the remaining actual issues – so for instance, discuss security issues (during the one we held in Rwanda someone told a story of their US hosting company crashing and wiping out most of their data, while no one had a bad experience with a local company), and pricing issues – whether the offers are addressing the needs of the local providers.  
> I heard of such a meeting in Nigeria, where an owner of a Nigerian video streaming company, hosted in London, complained that no one in Nigeria could reliably stream his movies from his site, and could not understand why the same movies could be watched from YouTube – that is where he learned about the Google local cache and the impact of the IXP, and focused on putting in his own server to increase his local market.  
> Governments that host their own data locally also may help to create a local industry.   We would be interested in learning more about other initiatives that may have been taken elsewhere to address this issue.
> Thanks
> Michael
> 
> From: Susan Chalmers <susan at susanchalmers.com>
> Date: Sunday 20 July 2014 23:32
> To: "bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org" <bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org>
> Subject: [Bp_localcontent] Existing policy measures and private sector initiatives, impediments
> 
> Greetings all,
> 
> It's now time to move on to the third area of our discussion on local content best practices, and that is identifying existing policy measures and private sector initiatives & impediments for the creation of local content.
> 
> I'd like to remind the group of the tripartite structure we've adopted, and invite all to make contributions under this framework. For example, please note measures and initiatives under these categories:
> 
> Area 1 - Human Capacities
> Area 2 - Technical Infrastructure
> Area 3 - Legal Frameworks
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Susan
> 
> -- 
> Susan Chalmers
> Consultant, Internet Policy
> 
> +1 269 324 4101
> www.susanchalmers.com
> _______________________________________________
> Bp_localcontent mailing list
> Bp_localcontent at intgovforum.org
> http://mail.intgovforum.org/mailman/listinfo/bp_localcontent_intgovforum.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://intgovforum.org/pipermail/bp_localcontent_intgovforum.org/attachments/20140721/80808b60/attachment.htm>