The new ITU report on global Internet access, World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010, is one of those laudable but toothless documents that sets out an ambitious goal for world progress, exhorts governments to commit resources to achieving that goal, and then attests, through its own futility, to the impossibility of doing so.
The ITU wants governments to ensure that half the world’s population (3.4 billion out of the total 6.8 billion people on Earth at last count) has access to broadband Internet service by 2015. This at a time when nearly three-quarters of the population has no Internet access of any kind, a figure that rises to 90 percent in the developing world.
For some perspective, the U.N. Human Development Report said in 2006 that half the world’s population faces water-supply problems: 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to clean, safe water, period, while another 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
Among the “concrete steps” the ITU recommends governments take are “licensing mobile broadband operators,” “ensuring that broadband infrastructure is accessible to all citizens,” and “continuing to commit resources to connecting educational institutions” to the Internet. And, ah yes, “setting clear policy targets and monitoring progress.”
In other words, keep doing what you’re doing now. At this rate, half the world will have broadband Internet access in 25 years, not five.
In fact, the ITU report, as many such non-governmental organization (NGO) efforts do, inadvertently highlights the fact that most governments today are incapable of accomplishing public-infrastructure tasks like ensuring a majority of their citizens have high-speed Internet access. Consider the countries that have achieved the highest rates of broadband penetration, according to the OECD: they tend to be small, affluent Western European nations with social-democratic governments and high taxes, like the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland – the exception being South Korea, a small Asian nation which has an intensely communications-driven economy and a high proportion of leading information technology companies. And even those high-broadband countries have less than 50-percent penetration: the Netherlands has 38 broadband subscribers for every 100 inhabitants (the penetration rate quickly goes above one-half if you assume that for every subscriber more than one person has access).
