[governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP

[Gaël Hernandez]

What nobody is mentioning is that Sofrecom, a business consulting group
owned by France Telecom-Orange, was asked by the Ethiopian
Telecommunication Authority to provide interim management at least during
2011 - Google it, it's there.

Did Sofrecom advice in this direction? Or did the contract finished and the
regulator took its own initiative?

Probably good to know before jumping into conclusions.

Gaël
On Jun 16, 2012 10:37 AM, "William Drake" <william.drake at uzh.ch> wrote:

> MM
>
> This is an example of where your argument that ITU does not matter only
> national governments do sort of frays at the edges.  The issue with the
> former is not just whether treaties get signed that have binding effect and
> are backed up by sanctioning mechanisms, and if they don't we can declare
> the organization to be a paper tiger and anyone who expresses concerns
> about it a witless dupe of corporate scare mongers.  Like other
> international organizations, ITU is also a space in which a great deal of
> collective learning, community building, and decentralized policy
> convergence takes place.  Long and iterative meetings are held and reports
> written on NGN, security, standards, accounting and settlements, whatever,
> and participants sit in a room and learn from peers and have to consider
> and explain what they are or aren't doing.  Given the symmetry of interests
> among many players, the natural result is that ideas and information get
> taken back home and acted on, and by the next cycle of meetings they're
> able to report back that they're doing xyz to address the collectively
> identified issue and are therefore a member in good standing of the
> concerned community.  And when enough governments, telcos and manufacturers
> start to do this on important issues, you can reach a point where policy
> spaces are being ordered, i.e. governed, on a decentralized basis with
> varying degrees of transnational consistency irrespective of the absence of
> a formally negotiated instrument.  That's why the OECD matters a lot even
> when not negotiating agreements.  Which is I guess a long winded way of
> saying economistic contractarian theories of international institutions
> miss much of the action that constructivist ones capture, and thereby
> present distorted pictures.
>
> In the particular case of VOIP restrictions, I attended the WTPF 2001 on
> Internet Telephony.  The ITU had produced various backgrounders and meeting
> reports saying that it's a major challenge for national 'administrations'
> that——together with the GATS, FCC Benchmark Order, and new modes of
> operation (call-back, resale, refile and hubbing, country-direct,
> country-beyond, calling cards, international simple resale) was collapsing
> the accounting and settlement system and rapidly suppressing foreign
> exchange earnings.  (Some in secretariat took the progressive line that
> reforms were needed to accommodate VOIP, but that was hardly a universal
> view in the membership.)  This was building on long discussions in ITU-T
> looking into all these issues, as well as the WTPF in 1998 on trade in
> telecom.  In this charged context, dozens of delegates at WTPF 2001 from
> across the developing world but particularly from Africa and the Middle
> East got up to say that they had adopted or were going to adopt bans on
> Internet telephony.  Of course, restrictions weren't always easy to
> enforce, and one ITU study at the time summarized that ' in most developing
> countries, governments choose to block outgoing VOIP traffic while being
> unable to block incoming VOIP.'   Subsequently, Skype took off and there
> was eventually some accommodation on revenue sharing for calls that break
> out into the PSTN, but a lot of countries' governments continued to take a
> rather dim view, and to talk to counterparts in ITU that felt the same.
>
> So all of this is just background, but it adds some context to the
> continuing propensity of some governments to periodically step out with
> self-defeating regulatory actions.  In a tightly woven international
> system, no country is an island.  And if the final WCIT text were to
> include some of the more problematic current proposals (e.g. declaring
> Internet to be telecom and subject to ITU instruments, applying the
> regulations to all 'operators,' defining and restricting 'misuse of number
> resources', making ITU a registry, requiring 'fair compensation'
> arrangements for IP traffic and yes, banning alternative calling
> arrangements) there'd be some countries that would take this as mandate for
> national policies and bilateral relations irrespective of whether OECD
> governments take broad Reservations.  So if down the line more countries
> announce bans and regulations Internet-related activities that have been
> debated intensively for over a decade, I'm not entirely sure I'd declare
> that this has nothing to do with the ITU.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill
>
>
>
> On Jun 15, 2012, at 8:49 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
>
> <irony>****
> How could they possibly do this before the ITU has taken over the Internet
> through the new ITRs?****
> </irony>****
> ** **
> *From:* governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org [mailto:
> governance-request at lists.igcaucus.org] *On Behalf Of *Wilson Abigaba
> *Sent:* Friday, June 15, 2012 4:46 AM
> *To:* governance at lists.igcaucus.org
> *Subject:* [governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP****
> ** **
> I think this is yet another dark day for internet users in Ethiopia, ****
> ** **
> A new law in Ethiopia has criminalised the use of VOIP (Voice Over
> Internet Protocol) services such as Skype. Users could face up to 15 years
> of jail time. The law was passed May 24th, but the story wasn't picked up
> by international media until recently****
> ** **
> http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/ethiopia-skype-me-maybe-0022243****
> ** **
> ** **
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