Paliwala, Abdul --- "Digital Divide Globalisation and Legal Regulation" [2004] UTSLawRw 2; (2004) 6 University of Technology Sydney Law Review 24
DIGITAL DIVIDE GLOBALISATION AND LEGAL REGULATION
Professor Abdul Paliwala*
The swift emergence of a global “information society” is changing
the way people live, learn, work and relate. An explosion in the free flow
of information and ideas has brought knowledge and its myriad applications to many millions of people, creating new choices and opportunities in some of the most vital realms of human endeavour.
Yet too many of the world’s people remain untouched by this revolution.
A “digital divide” threatens to exacerbate already-wide gaps between rich and poor, within and among countries. The stakes are high indeed. Timely access to news and information can promote trade, education, employment, health and wealth. One of the hallmarks of the information
society—openness—is a crucial ingredient of democracy and good governance. Information and knowledge are also at the heart of efforts
to strengthen tolerance, mutual understanding and respect for diversity.
Kofi Annan (2003)[1]
I don’t have a Mercedez Benz and I want one, but I cannot afford it.
Michael Powell 2001[2]
T
he notion of a digital divide has become an accepted part of the information society landscape as “one of the greatest impediments
. Yet the significance of the
to development” as Wolfensohn puts it
divide does not go unchallenged. As can be seen above, for those such as Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, technology diffusion is a matter of the market working things out over the course of time with wealthy people always getting there first.
This paper argues firstly that while the notion of digital divide highlights critical problems for developing countries, the notion is not unproblematic
and that a holistic analysis may be provided in the context of the larger phenomenon of social inclusion. Even more significantly, it may be important to consider it as an aspect of inequalities which are intrinsic to current forms of globalisation. In this context, the paper proceeds to examine attempts to ameliorate the problem of digital divide followed by ways in which the global regulatory framework may be responsible for the growing prevalence of inequalities in digital diffusion.
Digital Divide?
Digital divide is generally defined in terms of differences in access to the essential tools of the information society and to the infrastructure of the networked society or economy. These can be measured by surveys comparing access to computers, phones, cable, and other Internet-related technologies—such as J. Spectar’s “Bridging the Global Digital Divide: Framework for Access and the World Wireless Web”.[4]
For example, while Africa had one million estimated Internet users in 2000, the vast majority were in South Africa and the Maghreb states. The rest of Sub-Saharan Africa had less than 200,000 for a population as large as that of the United States which had 154 million users in 2000.[5]
Furthermore Africa suffers the world’s highest costs, critical skills shortages and unfortunate governance policies. The situation is a little better but still deplorable in other countries of the South.
In Digital Divide, her comprehensive recent examination of the subject, Pippa Norris suggests a slightly more complex picture:
The digital divide is understood as a multidimensional phenomenon encom- passing three distinct aspects. The global divide refers to the divergence of Internet access between industrialised and developing societies. The social divide concerns the gap between information rich and information poor in each nation. And finally within the online community, the democratic divide signifies the difference between those who do, and do not, use the panoply
of digital resources to engage, mobilize, and participate in public life.[6]
Her main findings are that:
• The global divide in access to digital technologies is substantial and has been growing during the first decade of the Internet age. The root cause is lack of economic development. There are reasons to hope that computer software and manufacturing will prove an important source of revenue in high-tech areas of development in Taiwan, Malaysia, India and Brazil. There is also some unevenness in the use of technology in which some developing countries such as South Africa, India and Brazil and transitional economies such as Estonia perform better than more developed countries.
• Similar social divides exist within countries, including within developed countries. The root cause is once again socio-economic and it is not necessarily true that the gap will automatically close as the Internet becomes more ubiquitous.
• The Internet is likely to be used to maintain the domination of the existing governance forces, and it is likely that those currently disengaged from governance will not engage because of e-government. However, there is also a possibility that e-governance, by promoting transparency and reducing the costs of political engagement for the committed, will enable minor parties, smaller groups and fringe movement activists to promote shifts in the balance of power.
The notion underlying the Norris study suggests the necessity to look at wider issues than mere technology access. Manuel Castells, who has been inspired by the rise of information technology in his definition of network society, has nevertheless placed the divide in the context of social networks:
In the information age, the critical organisational form is networking. The most critical distinction in this organisational logic is to be—or not to be—in the network. Be in the network, and you can share and, over time, increase your chances. Be out of the network, or become switched off, and your
chances vanish since everything that counts is organised around a world wide web of interacting networks.[7]
Similarly the World Bank group sees information technology in terms of its social connectivities, relying on theories of Bourdieu and Putnam to suggest a key link between information technology and social capital:
Information technology directly lessens the costs associated with imperfec information. In this way, information technology has the potential to
increase social capital and in particular bridging social capital which connects actors to resources, relationships and information beyond their immediate environment.[8]
It is in this context that Warschauer challenges the technology- determined concepts of digital divide as unsatisfactory even when they have been stretched in the manner proposed by Norris. He suggests two reasons for their inadequacy. Firstly, that ICT is about much more than providing Internet and computer connections. This is because access to ICT is:
embedded in a complex array of factors encompassing physical, digital, human and social relationships. Content and language, literacy and education, and community and institutional structures must all be taken into account if meaningful access to new technologies is to be provided.[9]
Secondly, the notion of a “divide” assumes a bi-polar societal split of the haves and the have nots at global and national levels. However, the situation is much more complicated because of the existence of a continuum which involves wide vatieties of quantities and qualities of access among all countries and peoples. Warschauer instances the gradation between
“the UCLA professor with high speed connection from her office, the Seoul student who occasionally uses a cybercafe and the rural activist in Indonesia who has no computer or phone line but whose colleagues in her women’s group download and print out information to her.” He therefore suggests that social inclusion, or the EU’s e-inclusion, is a more holistic way of approaching the problems now defined as the digital divide:
A framework of technology for social inclusion allows us to re-orient the focus from that of gaps to be overcome by provision of equipment to that of social development to be enhanced through the effective integration of ICT into communities and institutions. This kind of integration can only
be achieved by attention to the wide range of physical, digital, human, and social resources that meaningful access to ICT entails. [10]
While Warschauer is holistic in considering how technology may be used to solve specific social and economic problems, he ignores a key dimension. In my opinion, it may be as important to study how current patterns of diffusion occur, to what extent they solve and to what extent create social and economic problems. Globalisation provides one dimension for considering this diffusion. Communities of access are interconnected through global corporate and other links. Thus, to describe the developing country subsidiary of a multinational law firm which has satellite-based access to all the resources of the parent firm as an example of successful digitalisation for the country ignores the fact that the fundamental relationship for the subsidiary is not to the country but to the firm of which it is a tentacle. For example Champlin and Olson posit programmers employed in Boston and Bangalore: “indeed, two software professionals, one in Boston and one in Bangalore may share the same job in the same firm. While one sleeps, the other works. As one author observes, “In cyberspace, Boston and Bangalore are practically the same place.”[11]
Similarly the Indonesian activists who are linked to a global NGO network are part of a global digitalisation process. To see these as examples of the division between haves and have nots within one country provides only a partial view and does not provide an effective analysis of the electronic reshaping of the world.
Attempts to Bridge the Divide
The issue of an “information” divide has been a matter for consideration since the 1970s. Developing countries argued for a New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO) through UNESCO and other UN agencies as an aspect of the New International Economic Order. While the main thrust of NWICO was in terms of the news media, telecommunications and information technologies were also involved with the hope expressed that international organisations would offer assistance in areas such as “technology transfers, aid for higher education in communications science within Third World countries, tariff reductions for communications flowing from developing countries, and research and development of new, inexpensive, and more user friendly technology. The New International Economic Order movement attempted to combine the notions of global equity and national sovereignty. However, Western governments, particularly the US, supported free market-based flows of information in which they had a dominant position and NWICO had very little impact.[12]
The new initiatives on the digital divide take place in a very different environment of free market based globalisation. The attempt to create the Global Information Infrastructure and a Global Information Society linking the world have been largely dominated by the concerns to develop
e-commerce.13 They take place in the context of a regulatory environment which emphasises competition and economic liberalisation.
Attempts to bridge the divide have taken place through variety of international forums such as the UN, international financial institutions, the OECD, the G8, the EU and other donor countries. A key development was the G8 summit at Kyushu-Okinawa in 2000 which adopted the Charter on the Global Information Society and agreed to establish a Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force), to
integrate efforts to bridge the digital divide with the main aim of facilitating discussions with developing countries, international organisations and other stakeholders to promote international co-operation with a view to fostering policy, regulatory and network readiness; improving connectivity, increasing access and lowering cost; building human capacity; and encouraging participation in global e-commerce.[14]
The Force involved 43 members including representatives from the G8, developing countries, international organisations, global networks, private sector and NGOs. While this list appears broadly representative, the dominant groups in global networks, private sectors and NGOs involved
representatives from the G8 countries. The DOT Force Report with its Genoa Plan of Action suggested that appropriate application of ICT can make a substantial direct or indirect contribution to every one of the International Development Goals of the UN’s Millennium Declaration: ICT cannot of course act as a panacea for all development problems, but by dramatically improving communication and exchange of information, they can create powerful social and economic networks, which in turn provide the basis for major advances in development.[15]
The Report suggested a number of initiatives including:
• National e-strategies: These would be encouraged and linked to national and international development goals. However, the main thrust would be a “procompetitive regulatory framework” including economic liberal- isation to foster local and foreign entrepreneurs.
• Participation in international regulatory efforts: Developing countries would be supported to participate in international regulatory efforts including global self regulation such as for Internet domain names.
• Improving connectivity, increasing access and lowering costs: There would be emphasis in targeted interventions on community-based access points. Backbone access would be promoted through the private sector, but there would be support for joint stakeholder initiatives such as the African Partnership and the Africa Connection.
• Building human capacity: There would be targeted training, education, knowledge creation and sharing initiatives, including in the use of ICT for health including HIV/AIDS.
• National and international effort to support local content and applications creation: This would include promoting local software communities and developing country relevant software and content encouraging both cheap commercial and non-commercial applications.
• Prioritising ICT in the G8 and other development assistance policies and programs and enhance coordination of multilateral Initiatives: Development policies including those of the G8 countries as well as of the international financial institutions and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) would prioritise ICT but in ways which integrate ICT consideration as part of wider programmes in areas such as health, education and poverty relief.
There is an interesting mix of strategies in the DOT Report. But they do not provide for the substantial transfer of resources to developing countries necessary to make a real difference to technology diffusion. While the main thrust of the proposals is on national strategies based on a pro- competitive regulatory framework and economic liberalisation to promote local and foreign entrepreneurs, there seems to be a recognition that promotion of local content and applications might not be easily enabled through this strategy. Therefore there are exhortations to encourage both
open source and commercial communities to make software available to developing countries and to localise software applications—for free access to government information; for the support of organisations making information available on a noncommercial basis and for commercial publishers to develop business models which would enable cheap access to information.
In principle, the DOT Report adheres to the global orthodoxy of an underlying belief in market competition as the best solution to the problem. This orthodoxy is especially apparent in developed country policies in relation to national digital divides. The OECD Report on the Digital Divide in 2001 considered that the main basis for promoting an information society had to be the creation of a regulatory environment which reduced barriers to market entry and fostered competition.16 For example, while an earlier generation of telecommunications regulation led by the International Telecommunications Union(ITU) has provided universal service obligations for telephony, there is strong resistance to extending such obligations to encompass broadband Internet. The Australian Information Economic Advisory Council has argued:
The delivery of new services on a highly cross-subsidised, uniform price basis reduces or eliminates the prospect of competitive entry and discourages theincumbent from further investment and service improvement in non- profitable or less profitable areas of the market.[17]
The EU Universal Service Directive does not extend the concept of universal service to broadband Internet , but leaves it to member states to determine. This does not prohibit a member state from taking its own initiative to make broadband services publicly available in its own territory. But no compensation mechanism involving specific undertakings, operators or service providers may be imposed. Instead any support has to come out of general revenue. In the circumstances, only the Scandinavian countries which are the most advanced Internet users have provided funding support for backbone development which would provide universal broadband access. On the other hand, of the OECD countries, Korea has considered
it important to provide state funding for backbone development as have other South East Asian countries with “development state” policies.
For the poorer countries, the advantage of the DOT Report is the development of a coordinated agenda. The UNDP, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and other donors have provided support for telecommunications development and project funding for specific ICT projects. While these are significant and have increasingly involved funding which goes beyond provision of equipment to interesting initiatives such as the Grameen phone, rural telecentres and support for school teachers, the funding is insufficient for more than pilot projects.
A major emphasis is on regulatory reform to promote economic liberal- isation. On the whole, while Wolfensohn and Annan see the consequences of the digital deprivation to be key to future development and poverty alleviation, there is realisation that insufficient funding is available to make
a substantial difference. Thus we have innovative initiatives such as the
UN Secretary General’s Digital Volunteer force as an ameliorative device.
Regulating the Globalisation of
Technology Diffusion
Thus the underlying strategy of technology diffusion is the global information infrastructure “GII”, supporting a global information society
“GIS”. This is based on the development of free market reforms with only minor obeisance to notions of amelioration of the digital divide. In this section, I suggest that the underlying thrust of wider policies on international trade be to promote a system of information technology diffusion which supports economic globalisation on terms advantageous to multi-national corporations based in developed countries.
The WTO has had a major impact in the development of this approach. Thus, the Basic Telecommunications Agreement annexed to GATS—the General Agreement on Trade in Services—provided a key regulatory thrust for dismantling the previous global telecoms structures which were dominated by state telecom monopolies. Henceforth, the state’s role is to regulate the market in the interest of transparent and fair competition.18 Some obeisance
is made in the agreement to the special needs of a developing country which can place under its accession schedules: reasonable conditions on access to and use of public telecommunications . . . to strengthen its domestic telecommunications infrastructure and service capacity and to increase its participation in international trade in telecommunication services.
However, international agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank have promoted full liberalisation of the telecoms sector in developing countries as part of structural adjustment and, now, poverty relief programs. Similarly developed member countries are exhorted under the Tele- communications Agreement Article 6 to assist the efforts of international agencies such as the ITU, the UNDP and the World Bank in improving the telecommunications infrastructure in developing countries. While this has seen some improvements in telecommunications in developing countries, the results are far from impressive. In Africa, the promise of Africa One, the telecom ring around Africa largely developed through
private enterprise, is continuing to miss deadlines.[19]
The Information Technology Agreement provides for the abolition of all customs and other duties on information technology goods. The agreement
was entered into only between a minority of countries but the underlying principle was that technology diffusion requires full competition with minimum of import duties. This would result in overall reduction in the costs of the GIS. Yet few developing countries other than newly industrialising countries (NICs) subscribed to this agreement, because the dilemma for most developing countries is that they are largely technology importing countries often with precarious balance of payments. Customs and excise duties often represent an important revenue resource and, secondly, eliminating tariff barriers for expensive products might exacerbate balance of payments difficulties. The issue is more neutral for NICs such as Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia which export high-tech products. It is again more complicated for countries such as India which have historically attempted to develop their own import substitutes. The advent of competition can either kill off their home-grown feather-bedded industries or lead to sufficient reform for a thorough restructuring. The economic argument is that the social and economic costs of discontinuing uneconomic or poor quality local production of goods such as PCs have to be set off against the reduced costs and value throughout the information economy of cheaper and or more efficient imports.[20]
A key thrust of the GII and GIS is e-commerce. A significant decision was made on e-commerce by the WTO in providing temporarily in 1998 that e-commerce transmissions should be free of customs duties. This was continued at Doha and a WTO work programme intends to consider aspects of e-commerce including implications for developing countries. Some argue that e-commerce provides possibilities for developing countries to leapfrog by not having to undergo the costs of earlier technology. Examples are occasionally cited of positive aspects of ecommerce for developing countries such as the purchase by a German woman of a bicycle from Sri Lanka on the Internet . A more important phenomenon is the growing development of trade in “back office” services such as data entry and call centres, which can make a strong contribution to the export trade of high-skilled developing countries such as India.21 On the other hand, significant participation in
e-commerce is only possible if there is a sufficient infrastructure to enable ecommerce. This includes the availability at low cost of hardware and software, a suitable low cost communications system for linkage to Internet, including a reliable power supply and electronic transactions systems to enable payments by credit cards and foreign exchange transactions and an appropriate level of personnel to operate the system. In this respect, only the NICs, which have the capacity to invest in infrastructure, are capable of taking reasonable advantage of the potential of e-commerce. The other developing countries, particularly the poor ones, are likely to suffer in the absence of significant funding for infrastructure development.
A second issue is whether the type of e-commerce services in which developing countries have a comparative advantage are provided access by developed countries in their schedules under GATS. Until recently liberalisation commitments in relation to services have largely been in areas where developed countries are exporters and developing countries importers.22 In principle, the reformed regulatory regime may not enable the theoretical advantages of e-commerce to be obtained by any but a small group of developing countries. At the same time, it may expose their markets to services from developed countries, creating difficulties for customs revenue and balance of payments as well as leading to losses and decline of their own service sectors.
A similar argument about technology transfer can be made about the consequences of the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights
(TRIPS). Hardware and software patents and software and information copyright have become crucial new forms of intellectual property in recent years. The agreement is an apparently protectionist measure entrenching intellectual property rights, which are claimed overwhelmingly by trans- national corporations, and denying access to technological knowledge and preventing innovation, especially by small players and by developing countries. However, TRIPS was justified by the WTO on the grounds it sought a balance between the “the short-term interests in maximizing access and the long-term interests in promoting creativity and innovation.”[23]
Under Art. 7, its objectives are to promote technological innovation, transfer and dissemination, the mutual advantage of producers and users, social and economic welfare and a balance between rights and obligations. In the absence of protection, corporations would be unwilling to trade or transfer technology.24 As Trebilcock and Howse indicate, neoclassical trade theory does not support the case for a global increase in welfare as
a consequence of strong intellectual property protection. This is because for some countries the comparative advantage may lie in innovation and for others in imitation and adaptation of others’ innovations. In the circumstances, strong protection will advantage the innovators but disadvantage the imitators both in developed and developing countries. Furthermore, stronger intellectual property rights will have a tendency to raise prices of goods and services using those rights. Overall they suggest, relying on Maskus, that global welfare would suffer through increased intellectual property protection.25 In the circumstances, US insistence on stronger protection was not so much calculated to promote global welfare as to protect the interests of major US firms, which were responsible, in collaboration with the USTR and the OECD, for developing and promoting
TRIPS.26 The beneficial effects for US firms and the US economy of TRIPS and other developments in intellectual property can be observed in the positive correlation between the enactment of intellectual property protection in countries and the increase in US exports to those countries.[27]
In an era of corporate globalisation, arguments about intellectual property protection go beyond simple issues of protection of innovation. The protection of intellectual property has always been about the trade- off between promoting innovation through remuneration of innovative development and promoting the spread of knowledge, research and development as a public good.
In essence TRIPS involves an attempt at global harmonisation of intellectual property in ways which make it difficult for any players other than global corporations to participate in effective use of innovations. This will either be because of the resources and effort required for obtaining patents on a worldwide basis or because of use of intellectual property laws to ensure that the limited monopoly they provide is made much more extensive by devices such as obtaining new patents as a result of slight changes in the patented product, complex combinations of a range of rights in a single innovative development in ways which make it difficult to involve others and which discourage reverse engineering through provision of insufficient information.
On the one hand, there are the advantages of global corporations as the most dynamic force in international economy. On the other is a new enclosure movement in which global commons in knowledge and innovative development are effectively monopolised by global corporations.28 A possible consequence for developing countries is that global corporations and small firms will spread research and development to them as part of their global operations in the new global division of labour, as is the case with the use of programmers in India and other countries.29 However, the extent to which there will be a real shift in research and developments
is not clear. The involvement of developing countries in research and development activities until now has largely been in low level activities such as data input and low level programming.30 A more likely consequence
is that developing countries are denied the path to development through imitative adaptation of technologies which enabled Japanese and South Korean acceleration of development. A further consequence may be that as the world of innovation is cast in the multi-national mould, all forms of innovative activity, such as small firm and alternative technology-based
development, are undermined or taken over and substituted by the new multinational culture.[31]
More significantly for developing countries and all those on the other side of the digital divide, they have put the cost of attaining the goods as well as the cost of developing or adapting technology-based products into
a dimension which results in unequal and inequitable participation in the diffusion and development of information technology.
Conclusions
This paper has suggested that concepts of digital divide can best be explained within the overall context of networks and relationships which connect with information technology and that such key contexts are provided by the processes of globalisation itself. Policies which promote amelioration of the divide will not be effective by themselves without consideration of the underlying dynamics of globalisation. In this respect, the regulatory environment which promotes unequal relationships enable corporate globalisation to take advantage of the same unequal relationships. For some countries, and more significantly specific individuals and groups within them, digital opportunities may be opened up by corporate globalisation. Countries which have the right circumstances such as India and South East Asian countries may also invest their way into fuller participation in global digitalisation. For example, India has recently announced a $3.7 billion digital investment program over the next four years.
However, as with development generally, the ability of some countries to accelerate technology development may not lead to fundamental equity in global social and economic structures. Yet, digital globalisation also provides opportunities for minority and resistant voices because greater transparency, increased communication and reduced information technology costs can empower committed activists[32]
As this is a conference on the law and the Internet, it is useful to dwell briefly on the implications for the infrastructure of the law. The inequitable diffusion of information technology in general is also reflected in the diffusion of such technology for law. The effects of such unevenness can be dramatic. For example, there is considerable unevenness between the resources available to a developing country law firm, a developing country government lawyer and a branch of a multi-national law firm. Thus the multi-national law firm fee earner has access to vast information and communication resources available through the firm’s intranet. Among those resources will be access to expensive legal information systems such as Lexis and WestLaw which are unaffordable for most developing country law firms and governments. This has obvious implications for the rule of law and social justice. And yet, the development of the Internet
has some counterbalancing effects. As PCs and e-communications spread to developing countries, and to law firms and government, with all their limitations in power and effectiveness, opportunities arise for the innovative practitioner. Networks are developing for him or her to communicate with practitioners and support systems internationally, for example in relation to human rights or environmental issues. Equally significantly, the Internet provides free access to a great amount of legal information.
It is noticeable that a significant recommendation of the DOT Force in relation to content development is to support provision of free access to government information and the promotion of non-commercial content systems. It is in this context that the Public Legal Information movement and the development of WorldLII, in which AustLII has played such a large part, have a crucial role to play.
* University of Warwick, England. Director of the ICT UK Centre for Legal Education
[1] Kofi Annan, Secretary-General’s message to “The Net World Order: Bridging the Global
Digital Divide” Conference hosted by the Business Council for the UN, New York, 18
June 2003 (delivered by Amir Dossal, Executive Director, UN Fund for International
Partnerships).
[2] M Powell, “Testimony on Telecommunication and the Internet” (2001) Hearing Before
House of Energy and Commerce, 108th Congress 54.
[3] World Bank 2000, World Bank and Softbank to Invest in Internet Enterprises for the Developing
World, <http://www.worldbank.org/> at 12 February 2000.
[4] J Spectar, “Bridging the Global Divide: Frameworks for Access and The World Wireless
Web” (2000) North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation 26, 57.
[5] P Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide
(2001)
[6] Ibid, 4.
7 M Castells, “Information Technology, Globalisation and Social Development” (1998)
Conference on Information Technology and Development <http://www.unrisd.org/infotech/
conferen/castelp1.htm>.
[8] World Bank 2002, Social Capital and Information Technology <www.worldbank.org> at
November 2003.
[9] Norris, above n 5.
10 M Warschauer, “Reconceptualising the Digital Divide” (2002) First Monday 7, 7
<http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/warschauer/index.html> .
[11] D Champlin and P Olson, “The Impact of Globalisation on US Labor Markets: Redefining the Debate” 33 Journal of Economic Issues 443, 449.
12 Spectar, above n 4.
[13] T Yarbrough, “Connecting the World: The Development of the Global Information
Infrastructure” (2001) Federal Communications Law Journal 53, 315.
[14] DOT Report 2001, “Digital Opportunities For All: Meeting the Challenge” Report of
the Digital Oppurtunity Task Force including a proposal for a Genoa Plan of Action 1 May 2001
<http://www.dotforce.org/reports/> at 6 November 2003.
15 Ibid.
[16] DOT Report, above n 14.
[17] Australian Information Economy Advisory Council, National Bandwidth Inquiry: Report of the Australian Information Economy Advisory Council (1999).
[18] J Braithwaite and P Drahos, Global Business Regulation (2000).
[19] <www.africaone.com>. Generally on African communications see Yarbrough, above
n 13 and P Akst and M Jensen, “Africa Goes Online” (2001) Digital Divide Network
<http://www.digitaldivide network.org/content/stories/index.cfm?key=158> .
20 J James, Globalisation, Information Technology and Development (1999).
[21] A Panagariya, “E-Commerce, WTO and Developing Countries” (2000) Journal of
International Economics 959.
22 Ibid.
[23] WTO 2002, “Technical Note: Intellectual Property: Trips and Pharmaceuticals”<www. wto.org> at June 2003.
[24] J Kelsey, Reclaiming the Future: New Zealand and the Global Economy (1999).
[25] M Trebilcock and R Howse, The Regulation of International Trade (1998) 253.
26 Kelsey, above n 24, 293.
[27] C Correa, Intellectual Property Rights, the WTO and Developing Countries: The Trips
Agreement and Policy Options (2000).
[28] L Lessig, “The Creative Commons” (2003) Florida Law Review 55:763.
[29] James, above n 20 and C Coward, “Looking Beyond India: Factors that Shape the
Global Outsourcing Decisions of Small and Medium Sized Companies in America” (2003)
[13] Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 11, 1–12.
[30] James, above n 20; Correa, above n 27; Coward, above n 29.
31 Correa, above n 27, 36.
[32] Norris, above n 5.