Subject: Re: Net Evolution in Asia From: johnb@Tempest.NET.HK (John W. Blackburne) Date: 31 Mar 1996 11:22:34 GMT

Bala Pillai,bala@apic.net, writes:
: 1) Countries that will see pronounced positives in their fortunes in the
: next 20 years would be India and the Philippines. They have a high
: underemployed literate class - some of their services potential is already
: being utilised by the West...for example quite a bit of Hollywood's cartoon
: animation is done in Manila and Bangalore, India is known for its role as a
: software development centre for US software companies. English is a
: predominant language in both countries. 

This last point will only be important for as long as English is the dominant
medium of communication in the technology industry. To date for technical
(the use of 7 and 8 bit character encoding) and economic/political reasons
English has been the preferred medium of computing communication. But as
technologies for non-ASCII text are widely adopted, and as the
economic/politial centre of gravity shifts away from English speaking
nations, there's no reason why this has to persist.

: 2) China - the net's growth has been significantly stifled in China. China
: and Singapore will be test cases 
: in whether economic freedom can exist without proportionate political
: freedom in the net context. I have my doubts. In a non-net context, quite
: possibly, but I cannot see it in a net context. Why is this important?

Asia's recent history has shown that economic freedom and development can
exist, even flourish, without political freedom. In many cases it is the lack
of political freedom that has enabled economic stabiltiy and growth -
contrast this to countries where sound economic management often loses out to
political considerations, e.g. US defict/bugdet row.

Rather than the world moving towards liberlisation with the web as a tool for
this, as the web becomes more important and is noticed by legislators in
countries it will be shaped by the political processes of the countries until
it does not conflict with their political agendas. This has already happened
in China, Singapore and the US, and will happen more and more as governements
take their lead from these contries and draw up their own laws to control the
Internet.

This may be technically difficult, but technical problems can quickly be
solved, especially where there's a political will. And it will not hinder
economic growth one bit. Most businesses will go wherever there's money to be
made, and value economic stabiltiy far more than political freedom.

John
- --
John Blackburne - programmer, writer, consultant, trainer
Perl, AS, QD3D and more at http://www.hk.super.net/~johnb

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