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

[Adam Nelson]

I'd like to jump in here and make a few points.  To make Susan's life
easier, I'll break them into sections:

------Technical Infrastructure---------
I'd like to second Michael's statements.  I'm the founder of a cloud
infrastructure startup in Nairobi (i.e. hosting) and we're just now getting
off the ground.  Aside from us and one other company which started last
year as well, there is no modern local hosting capacity for Internet-facing
services in all of East Africa.  Virtually all content consumed by Kenyans
is hosted abroad.  This isn't just an academic issue - the Internet is
literally slower here because of the distance all that data has to travel.
 Aside from Google which has a POP on the coast, most streaming video
doesn't work properly - it's a real problem not just for local content
consumers, but also for local content producers.  A major hurdle to the
production and dissemination of local content is the lack of local hosting
solutions.


-----Regulatory Infrastructure---------
I'm going to spin this one on its head.  I'm an American living in Kenya.
 Local content to me includes both content for Kenyans (because I live
here) but also American content for Americans (because that's my identity
and I enjoy American content).  Ironically, most American content is
unavailable here or can only be gotten by technical deception (vpn) or
outright theft (torrent).  I think the issue here is that the licensing
environment defines which countries have access to content as opposed to
which ones do not.

I would love somebody to clarify whether this is the case but it seems to
me that when content is produced, it is licensed to distributors based on
blocks of countries and therefore, most content isn't available in smaller
markets at all.  This drives piracy but also makes certain content
unavailable by any means.  For instance, 'Nairobi Half Life' is a great
Kenyan movie and can be gotten either on the street for $1 on DVD or
torrent, but nowhere else.  When distributed properly by an entity like
iTunes, the rights to the movie may not even be available in Kenya.

The solution I would like to see to this would be to make all content
default to a global license.  Then, rightsholders could 'exclude' certain
regions from the global license in order to maximize their income.  In this
scenario, a movie made by a US company would get a global license as soon
as it hits broad distribution but there would be carve outs for major
markets like the US or Europe or China (or all of them) in order to get
proper distribution.  This would allow local content producers using
foreign channels to re-access local content consumers in smaller markets.

Cheers,
Adam

--
Kili - Cloud for Africa: kili.io
Musings: twitter.com/varud <https://twitter.com/varud>
More Musings: varud.com
About Adam: www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson


On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal) <
glenn.deen at nbcuni.com> wrote:

>  Should local language search and metadata be added to the list of
> technical barriers  ?
>
>  This is the question of metadata which describe the content - simple
> things like title and author, but richer fields like description, location,
> date, other related content etc - and what fields will be in the local
> language , what fields will be in english(because a lots of metadata is in
> English so that search engines can ingest easily) and where it might be
> possible to have fields that support multiple languages to be
> simultaneously present in the metadata, and for both to be ingested by the
> search engines that users will use to find the local content.
>
>  Regards
> Glenn
>
> Sent from my iPad, please forgive any tpyos or auto connections
>
> 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
>
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