Athens 2006: Grifters, grafters, geeks and Greeks
Age shakes Athena’s tower, but spares gray Marathon — Lord Byron
Item: Atenas 2006: Relatório de Viagem (Brazil, Ministry of Culture)
When I get a chance, I need to really zoom in the question of who is who and what is what in the area of Internet governance in Brazil at the moment.
This is a needful task because people like Murilo, whom we — readers of (Hearing) Global Voices Online, of the Berkman Center for the Intel-Inside Society, and Brazlian taxpayers alike, apparently; and how does that work, anyway? — ostensibly are to rely on for solid information on this score, do not seem very reliable, given their deep structural conflicts of interest.
Oh, and also the fact that “citizen journalist Roberto Marinho” Murilo recently flunked a fundamental NMM fact-check. Badly.
Never trust a grinning Brazilian legacy admission who says “Just trust me.”
Or a grinning anybody who says it, for that matter.
Especially if they are in the habit of inducing deep states of psychosis in themselves.
I would say that the Orkut and the YouTube cases should give you a solid clue that Brazil, under the various chefs that have a hand in stirring the stew, is moving very politely but firmly in a direction that it believes will best defend its “public intellectual property” (patrimônio) and it right to autonomous governance of its own information sphere, so to speak.
And it is not alone in taking this position.
Meanwhile, your Internet and trade policies, my American friends and compatriots, are being negotiated by Moonies.
I am telling you: the defenders of your interests abroad are way outclassed here. Time to pull the starter and send in the reliever.
Which I guess, in a way, Hank Paulson kind of is at Treasury.
On a more general level, I think there is an awareness that both India and Brazil — and France, too, for example, and many others — are generating significant momentum in this direction; that they have good, sound reasons for doing so (let’s face it, the emperor has no clothes), with good political will behind their rationale; and that the thing for foreign corporations who want a piece of the action in these markets to do now is sit down and deal straight.
Hard as you like, because Brazilians love to horse-trade.
(It sounds like a stereotype, I know, but if it is, it is one that a lot of Brazilians I know really do seem to promote with pride.)
But straight. From the top of the deck.
This is no longer the Barbary Coast of the Roaring Nineties.
See, to take some randomly annotated examples, Stateless Memes and the IBM exec who declared “the death of the multinational.”
Because when IBM corporate communications stops gushing endlessly about the future of this and the future of that, reality-based rhetorical radar operators sit up and take notice.
Some notes, in that light, on Murilo of the MiniC’s report from Athens:
O Brasil marcou presença em muitas frentes no debate global sobre a rede em Atenas. O Carlos Afonso da Rits acompanha a questão da Icann há muito tempo — juntamente com o Zé Alexandre Bicalho –, e introduziu o tema no Openness Panel. O Rogério Santana do Ministério do Planejamento teve participação relevante no workshop sobre Open Standards, que desta vez contou com o apoio direto da Sun. Foi formada uma ‘dynamic coalition’ (outro conceito novo do IGF – seriam os verdadeiros resultados esperados para o forum) para difusão dos padrões abertos de documentos para governos. Isto sem falar no Demi Getschko e na Vanda Scartezini que se destacam como membros do board da Icann.
[translation tktktktktktk]
Ah, RITS, a Rio-based computer literacy and digital divide-bridging NGO from the first wave of the same.
I attended a session — and covered it for a local multilingual “citizen journalism” project, in fact, in return for “solidarity housing,” which was kind of neat, but hard on my back — on telecenter development strategy at the FSM-WSF in Porto Alegre a few years back — Jan. 2003 — in which RITS presented.
The entire French contingent, and those nerdy-looking, normally impeccably polite Indian chaps, and the rest of the Brazilians, and everybody else in the fairly well-attended session in a warehouse down by the idle docks of the city, spent the whole session ripping the guy from RITS a new asshole for dragging out some PowerPoint on the by now all too familiar argument that
we, realists that we are, accept donations of Microsoft equipment and teach Microsoft-based computer skills to the poor because Microsoft is the de facto standard, and we cannot move people directly into jobs unless they can write in their resumés that they have vendor-specific training in, for example, Excel.
At the time, of course, the Open Office suite was still in its infancy, as were Gnome Office and K Office and all those other open-source projects.
You know, the onese dedicated to the proposition that, with the exception of the Visual Basic scripting language — which is vital to the rocket-science finance people, as I know from working alongside a crazy Russian database administrator for six months one time in a high yield research cubicle farm — a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet is a spreadsheet.
X-Windows are windows, too, even if they are not Windows(TM).
And surely, the crazy Russian DBA was always saying, we can do better.
As only he would know; I am just telling you what he said.
This was a league-chart IT geek, mind you.
Now, however, that rationale seems to be getting harder to sustain.
Has RITS caught up with the times?
Remind me to check on that, Agnes.
The point being that it was the dawn of Lula I that year — I actually wound up having a beer in a Porto Alegre hotel with Genoino, without even having a clue about who he was, just some Solidarnosc truck-driver looking guy in a cheap suit with a nice grin I clinked a glass with– and the open e-government crowd was howling for change. right. goddamn. now.
Because the crazy fools really thought they could one day bring the monopolies to heel rather than rolling over and accepting their own de facto defeat.
The war is not over, obviously, but the tactics I see right now are all classic rear-guard actions.
Murilo’s little double game being a classic example.
[tktktktktktk]
The first thing Brazilians want to do with their new cheap good machines in get into the hot, hot — up 33% for 2006, market cap up 49% — BOVESPA, if the NMM focus group, the Forum of São Paulo, is any indication. Hoo boy. Are Brazilian regulators ready for the ensuing chaos? You know, I think they actually might be. Not that you can ever be too ready for a sudden flood of cheap credit and other consumer financial products into a market of total newbies. Looking into it.
The New Market Machines 