Stories from Abroad

More than a quarter of UK homes do not have fast enough broadband to cope with a typical family’s internet needs. Just over 26% of the UK’s estimated 28 million households are getting by on speeds of less than 10Mbps, the level the media regulator, Ofcom, says is the bare minimum requirement for a modern household. “This research lays bare the extent of the UK’s digital divide,” said Dani Warner, a broadband expert at uSwitch. “Streets that are relatively close geographically can be light years apart when it comes to the download speeds they are getting.”

I’m pleased to note that the Americas region continues to work hard and steadily advance regional proposals for the 2019 International Telecommunication Union World Radio Conference. We are deeply focused on the WRC-19.

Facebook Basics is an app and mobile site that provides free access to a tightly curated set of web content and, naturally, Facebook itself. Facebook promotes Free Basics as a bridge to the wider internet for consumers in developing nations. But in practice the subsidized content can simply become the internet. That's what happened in the Philippines. That particular kind of internet provided president Rodrigo Duterte with the perfect environment to wage a war of misinformation against his enemies and on behalf of his brutal drug war.

Sens Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are asking the White House to look into whether the Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE violated US sanctions by helping Venezuela track and monitor its citizens. The senators write that they are concerned that, by building a database to help Venezuela track its citizens, ZTE "may have violated US export controls and sanctions laws" as well as an agreement between the Commerce Department and ZTE reached earlier in 2018.

Every four years, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) member states meet at a three-week conference, the Plenipotentiary (or the Plenipot), to set the priorities of the organization for the next period and elect its top five leadership positions. The 2018 Plenipot took place in Dubai, from the end of Oct to the middle of Nov. Here are some of the key issues that Public Knowledge followed in the Plenipot:

Officials from nine countries examining Facebook’s business practices have spent weeks trying to get the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to face questions at a hearing. Instead, Zuckerberg was represented by an empty chair. He skipped the session, which was organized by a British committee investigating Facebook and the spread of misinformation.

“Something has to be done,” President Donald Trump tweeted Nov 26. Frustrated by CNN, with which he has an ongoing beef, President Trump suggested that the United States create its own “worldwide network to show the World the way we really are — GREAT!” Despite the proposal’s origin in conflict with the press, it’s a really good idea. So good, in fact, that under another president’s watch — Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 — it happened. Seventy-six years ago, the world was a dark place.

A new report from Cisco forecasts an alarmingly slow internet traffic growth rate for Latin America, especially when compared to the other lagging regions, like the Middle East and Africa. When it comes to internet speed, Latin America is far behind all other regions and will continue to lag over the next five years, per the report.

Consumer agencies in the Netherlands, Poland and five other European Union countries asked privacy regulators to take action against Google for allegedly tracking the movements of millions of users in breach of the bloc’s new privacy law.  Google is already facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly tracking phone users regardless of privacy settings. The consumer groups, which included those in the Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden, filed complaints with their respective national data protection authorities, based on research by their Norwegian counterpart.

More than 30 Google employees have joined a petition protesting the company’s plans to build a search engine that complies with China’s online censorship regime. An employee-led backlash against the project has been churning for months at the company, but Nov 27’s petition marks the first time workers at Google have used their names in a public document objecting to the plans. The existence of the project, code-named Dragonfly, was confirmed by chief executive Sundar Pichai in Oct.