Dear Colleagues, I realize I left out one other point about ICT development and profitability:
I was making the case for profit as an important metric, and indeed I think that private, for-profit companies can and should take the lead in much of ICT, but profit is not the only metric and there is an important and natural role for the public sector in creating part of the network infrastructure for ICT. In the networking part of ICT I would propose a hybrid of public/private investment, somewhat analogous to many of our transportation systems (except railroads). The public sector builds the roads and highways, but the private sector supplies the vehicles, fuel distribution systems, trucking companies, etc. I think the road construction, while not cheap, is quite smaller than the rest of the system. In particular, I think in many cases it makes a lot of sense for the public sector to build what we call "Layer 0" of the networking stack: the physical layer. In cities that would be fiber conduits and possibly fiber bundles. They could then rent access to these conduits or fibers to companies that install equipment that uses these to make useful services, such as voice and data connectivity. These companies in turn would sell voice or data service to individuals and businesses. Secondly, in some cases it may make sense for the public sector to take the lead in building a backbone network, to which smaller regional or community networks might attach. And in most cases the public sector funds much of the educational system. The Internet is now a vital part of the educational system, and as such, public funding of educational uses of the Internet makes sense too. Thanks, -- Jim ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
