Today, May 14 2012, a joint ISOC-OECD-UNESCO report “The Relationship between local content, Internet development and access prices” was presented at the WSIS Forum in Geneva by Janis Karklins, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General, Markus Kummer, the Internet Society’s Vice-President for Public Policy, and Taylor Reynolds, Senior Economist at the OECD.
This important study finds that the three elements are inter-related and likely feed into each other in a virtuous circle: (i) better connectivity is significantly related to higher levels of local digital content creation. In essence, countries with more Internet infrastructure (at all income levels) are also the countries producing more local digital content as measured by Wikipedia entries and by web pages under a given country-code top-level domain; (ii) countries with more international connectivity have lower domestic broadband prices and countries with better domestic infrastructure have lower international bandwidth prices. The inter-linkages between the different elements lead to three key lines of policy considerations evolving out this research: (i) Fostering content development, (ii) Expanding connectivity, and (iii) Promoting Internet access competition.
The Internet Society press release is below. More info: http://www.internetsociety.org/localcontent
