Regulating Technology

The conference, being held through Friday at the Edgewater Resort, was organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations whose mission, according to press material, is to “enable the growth and sustained development of telecommunications and information networks and to facilitate universal access to the emerging information society and global economy”.
ITU project manager Sandro Bazzanella said a meeting of the ACP in 2009 identified a list of topics that was of interest to its members – including numbering, licensing and cybercrime – and this week’s conference is designed to further discuss those particular items.
“The objective with each of those topics is to look first at what has been done in those 15 countries and look at what has worked and what has not worked and try to learn lessons from that,” said Bazzanella. “The next step is to compile outside the Pacific what has been done there to share best practices, so we can incorporate them with the experiences in the Pacific. It’s important for the region because it’s the first time that we’ve sat together, all the stakeholders, around the same table, to discuss at the same time, the same topics.”
According to ITU project coordinator Gisa Fuatai Purcell, inter-connection, universal service access and licensing are also on the discussion agenda.
“There are challenges that are unique to our countries, including the Cook Islands, because of being small,” she said. “Small population, small land mass, isolated from the rest of the world, lack of natural resources. By developing the information and communication technology and making sure that the governments have policies and regulations in place, and providing a legislative framework for all these, that means people who want to set up (telecommunications) businesses don’t have to wait for six months or 12 months to get a licence. By making sure everything is in place, it will make it easier for people, not only locally, but for overseas people who want to invest locally, to do business here.”
The ITU will go away from this conference with a better understanding of what the Pacific Island nations require as far as a telecommunications wish list, and will then proceed to map out how best to supply in-country support.
“We don’t want the world to move on while our little islands sit here with the status quo, not moving,” Purcell said. “This project allows our countries to have the capacity in order for us to move towards where the rest of the world is moving.”

By John Ireland

Herald Issue 463 10 June
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