[governance] Ethiopia criminalises the use of VOIP

[Fouad Bajwa]

I am not going to complain here but did you know that I am forced to
register on the FT website in order to read that Gulf crackdown on
twitter article otherwise it throws me on to the front page??? Would
anyone be willing to just copy and paste here that article for
convenience?

No, thats actually becoming fun now, lets bash Twitter, oh no,
Facebook, nah, Google! Hey, Skype?

Its ironic that in some instances, the bashing does happen on US based
products but what would people say about Asterisk, SIP, Google Talk,
Google+ Messenger, Jabber, IRC, Yahoo Chat, Adobe Connect, WebEx etc
that all support voice based activity, some of them European and some
US and some open source community oriented development.

Someone Ethiopia dealing with the regulatory de-regularization is just
getting it all wrong but then again thats a well perceived example
from Pakistan and Middle Eastern countries to restrict Voip so that
the national exchequer makes some good load of money, may also need to
create a Universal Service Fund, a possible internet innovation
support fund and other activities to support a thriving telecom
sector. So the interest is completely economic and nothing else.

 One thing is clear, the recent visit of Google's CEO to Pakistan has
sparked both positive and negative feelings in the citizenry here. At
one side Google seems to be support FoE in the developing world and in
this case Pakistan but on the other hand it wants to use its
technologies to help the government implement surveillance which is a
privacy breach as there is more legitimate movement across the borders
than just extremist activity so its a mixed situation and no one
criteria to judge whats going on.

On the otherhand, in Ethiopia, its all economic and I believe they
should remove this restriction on skype after a bit of global media
bashing....

Do you think one day Development Aid to such countries will require
them to have more friendly and less restrictive regimes to FoE?

Best

Fouad

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Adam Peake <ajp at glocom.ac.jp> wrote:
> (Skype/Sweden? Whatever!)
>
> "Gulf states crack down on Twitter users"
> <http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1e647122-a8d1-11e1-be59-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1yDyZUR2y>
>
> Twitter's a U.S. company, so that's OK then...
>
> Adam
>
>
>
>> Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>>>
>>> On the other hand, despite the fact that such a ban exists on Skype,
>>> at the end of the day skype is a US based product, oh no, here we go
>>> again!
>>>
>>> -- Foo
>>>
>>
>>
>> I know we all hate the US, and I am as good at that as anyone sometimes.
>> And I know everything good that is bad for you come from the US.
>>
>> But in this case, I beleive Skype originated in Luxembourg and is still
>> based there.
>> Yes it was bought by Microsoft, but I am not sure that makes it a US based
>> product.
>>
>> avri
>>
>>
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-- 
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
ICT4D and Internet Governance Advisor
My Blog: Internet's Governance: http://internetsgovernance.blogspot.com/
Follow my Tweets: http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa

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