Recent news – Internet governance, China-Africa Summit and more

There seem to be so many things going on these days. Maybe it’s just that time of year or maybe I’m finally awaking from semi-hiatus. Either way, I’m probably going to cover a lot of news in this post.
Two of the more promintent items “du jour” are, of course, the China-Africa Summit and the Internet Governance Forum. Intriguing happenings on both fronts. Both of these, along with other not-as-visible things, underline the types of changes we are seeing, and will continue to see in the near future.
The China-Africa Summit is one more embodiment of what has been talked about for some time now, i.e. the changing relations in the global sphere being brought about by the rise of “new” economic powers, especially China and India. This summit makes it quite clear that China is looking to build economic ties with African countries to strengthen their position (although not only – I was recently at a meeting here in Iceland with a delegation of 30-35 people from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education that were on a world tour stretching right around the globe to build educational and business ties. Talk about thinking big!). Hopefully this is good news for Africa, but there is a justified measure of scepticism concerning the reputation of the benefactor. For instance, it would be great of the budding relationship between Africa and China would result in better telecommunications connections for Africa, but hopefully their use would not be managed the same way China manages its own communications infrastructure.
The Internet Governance Forum is in my opinion very confused. Governance involves the the exercise of authority to manage a consistent societal structure. I don’t see this as being applicable to the Internet as such. The issues that are increasingly being raised under the auspices of “Internet governance”, eg. access,
diversity and basic rights, are not exclusive to the Internet. These are issues that need to be addressed outside of cyberspace. We are not nearly “virtual” yet. Therefore there is no sense in trying to govern a space that is not inhabited, per se. For the time being, Internet governance should focus on the things that we can hope to govern, i.e. technical issues such as interoperability and domain management.
Several different points of view on the Internet Governance Forum’s inaugural meeting.
Another interesting thing worth mentioning:
Potential car of the future?
This is so cool! The sad thing is that it seems that each time one of these breakthrough ideas that will radically change energy consumption emerges, it seems to quietly disappear and things go on as before… (I remember reading about a revolutionary alternative to washing machines many years ago that was said to be on its way to the market shortly – never happened.) They can’t all be bad ideas, can they?