Global Mobile Archive

Sometime next year, for the first time, an internet domain name without any Latin characters will go live.

ICANN, the organization in charge of domain name and IP address registration, among other tasks, voted on Friday to permit domain names composed of nearly 100,000 different characters, beyond the 37 currently-permitted characters you see on your keyboard. Hindi and Chinese, Greek and Hebrew, Russian and Arabic characters will all be allowed in top-level domains.

The hope is that this change in policy will bring the internet within the reach of yet more people. It will certainly make the internet a more viable tool for children learning to read in languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet. It’s not an earth-moving event, perhaps, but it’s a small step that recognizes the global, boundary-free nature of the internet.

If you’re into this kind of thing, here’s a hopelessly sappy video from ICANN celebrating the change:

While the State Department is using SMS to build social networks in Pakistan, the UN World Food Programme is using SMS to distribute food aid to Iraqi refugees in Syria. Beneficiaries will recieve vouchers via text message with codes that can be redeemed at state-run stores.  So far it’s just a pilot program, serving just 1,000 of the 130,000 Iraqi refugees recieving food aid in Syria, but the hope is to scale it broadly. If it proves successful, it’s win-win-win:

It’s great for the beneficiaries, who can now spend their voucher on whatever food they like– including perishables like milk and eggs, which are not included in the typical food aid basket. What’s more, beneficiaries can now avoid the trip to the WFP headquarters and the wait on line for food.

It’s a boon for local business.  Instead of the WFP importing rice, flour, chickpeas, and whatnot, they’ll now be passing the cash to shopkeepers, and circulating money in the Syrian economy.

And it’s good for the WFP– if the program scales well, they’ll save a bundle on food distribution costs.

I think before long we’ll be seeing something similar in the United States replacing the food stamp program. The benefits aren’t quite as significant as in the WFP’s situation, and the functionality will be different (we don’t, for example, have many government-run groceries in the States), but I imagine this will be one part of an inevitable shift of government service delivery onto web and mobile platforms.

(h/t Dolbee)

Interesting news out of Finland, where new legislation will make 1mbps broadband internet a legal right. Most of the country is wired, but the new law will force broadband providers to extend their networks to rural areas. Says the legislative counsellor of the Ministry of Transport and Communications:

We think it’s something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection.

Other countries, including France, have mandated internet access, but Finland is the first to set a threshhold for speed. (And they’ve set ambitious goals for growth, too: 100mbps by 2015) Ban Ki-Moon has made global ICT access a priority, and spoke last week in support of extending networks to schools around the world.

The question of whether high-speed internet access should be treated as a right is one that I think we’ll be wrestling with a lot in coming years. Certainly, access to and understanding of the global ICT network is a prerequisite for the success of any child growing up in the 21st century. And increasingly, as more and more services are delivered over mobiles and the web, governments will need to ensure universal access.

We still have a long way to go in the United States, though. We are, in fact, the only industrialized nation without a national plan to promote the spread of broadband. Finland, two steps ahead of us, might be taken as an inspiration…

I was at Brookings this morning for a discussion on “Consumer-Driven Medicine” (A curious euphemism for what I would call “patient-driven medicine”– isn’t it a disturbing reduction to think of patients as simply “consumers” of medical services? But I digress…). Specifically, telemedicine (or mHealth, or whatever you want to call it) in America was the subject of the day.

There was unanimous agreement that telemedicine has the potential to help improve healthcare outcomes without raising costs (and possibly lowering them). Further, as I was saying on Tuesday, the technology is basically already here, and AT&T, a presenter on the panel, has been developing technologies that would network all our mHealth devices. So why can’t you track your blood sugar and check your medical records on your Blackberry?  A few key themes emerged:

• The biggest obstacle for telemedicine is that insurance doesn’t cover it. Part of the problem here is that when the CBO costs out implementation of telemedicine infrastructure, they don’t account for cost savings. True, a big upfront investment is required, but telemedicine is all about cost savings. It saves trips to the doctor.  It saves the valuable time of doctors.  Through preventive care and monitoring of chronic disease, people can avoid getting sick– and that’s a massive cost saver. So the CBO issue prevents Medicare and Medicaid from leading in telemedicine, and given a comfortable status quo, private insurers are unlikely to make the initial investment, either.

• Rural areas stand to gain the most from telemedicine. One of the presenters was Dr. Karen Rheuban, a self-described “country doctor” (and also head of the American Telemedicine Association). Like in any developing country, rural America faces challenges of resource scarcity. Doctors are few, hospitals are far-between, and high-quality specialty care is virtually nonexistent. Dr. Rheuban talked about one initiative in Virginia that brought a mobile mammogram machine into rural communities.  The images were reviewed by doctors in Richmond, and results returned the same day.

• Patients love telemedicine. Doctors are a little wary. The panelists concurred that after their first experience with remote monitoring or consultation, patients are enthusiastically ready to make it their norm. Doctors, while they know it has potential, and know it’s where events are leading, tend to be more dubious. This was interestingly reflected by the audience at the event; in question after question, doctors seemed very wary of telemedicine, and of yielding much control to either data-crunching software or to patients themselves. Change is hard, but this is a case in which progress could lead to doctors having more of their rarest resource: time.

In sum, good event from Brookings on a crucial subject (and one, I’d say, that should have a bigger role in our current healthcare debate). 

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the junta running Guinea (that’s just regular Guinea, not to be confused with Guinea Bissau or Equitorial Guinea), you’ll know that the current iron-fisted military leader has fulfilled none of the promises he made upon taking power a year ago, and has seen public opposition to his rule grow. A week and a half ago, a rally against his government turned into a bloodbath, as soldiers killed as many as 157 people, and viciously targeted women for rape and sexual abuse.

As it turns out, a number of protesters snapped photographs of the violence on their cell phones, and the images of sexual violence– seen as particularly heinous in this Muslim country– have further grown and solidified opposition to the government.  From the NYT:

Cellphone snapshots, ugly and hard to refute, are circulating here and feeding rage: they show that women were the particular targets of the Guinean soldiers who suppressed a political demonstration at a stadium here last week, with victims and witnesses describing rapes, beatings and acts of intentional humiliation… The cellphone pictures are circulating anonymously, but multiple witnesses corroborated the events depicted.

As in Iran earlier this year, mobile phones have empowered the citizenry to witness atrocities committed by a repressive state, and to share what they saw– not just with the few thousand other people who were there, but potentially with millions of people across the country and around the world. 

Also as in Iran, with opposition growing, the government in Guinea faces a choice: Crack down harder to ensure control, or yield to popular demands.  It’s hard to know how this will play out, but at a certain point, repressing a vocal, active, networked population of 10 million becomes very difficult.