I've cc'd (former cypherpunk) Vince Cate on Anguilla on this for obvious reasons. I got a bit of blurbuge in the USnail from the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation (BIDC) on their 3rd Barbados Information Services Converence, (Subtitled "Surfing the Global Net from Caribbean Shores" ;-), February 26/27 1996. The headers in the blurb were: Investment Management in Emerging Markets -- Information Technology Challenges, Network Security on the Global Net, New Opportunities in Wireless Communications, Barbados -- the Carribbean hub for Internet Access. They promise a "Full Conference Programme available October 1, 1995", and they seem to have a mailbot at info_bisc@caribnet.net. Having inadvertantly <ahem> plugged their stuff with no idea whether it's a waste of time or not, I have a few thoughts about this and about data/banking havens in general. First, here's what I know about internet access in the Caribbean, gleaned from discussions with Vince, and by lurking on various caribbean newsgroups (see soc.culture.caribbean), web pages, and mail groups: First off, bandwidth down there sucks. This is probably because there really aren't many people there, the ones that are there are pretty poor, and they can't buy much phone time. This is compounded by monopolies, Cable and Wireless being the biggest, built on cozy relationships with government officials, if not actual creatures of those government officials themselves, amortizing their <exageration mode on> 30 year old centrex switches with 50 year schedules <e.m. off>. To be fair, they have to have long distance lines to the mainland, and those cost, whether they're copper, fiber, or satellite. All the shenanigans of third world politics apply there. Trinidad and Tabago had an attempted coup recently, Barbados, I believe, is in the throes of a constitutional crisis where the speaker of their legislature can't be impeached because she won't conviene the committee to impeach her... Not to mention hurricanes, and in Montserrat, a volcano going off at the moment... The obvious reason I'm interested in this is regulatory arbitrage, of course. If there's a government that will let internet commerce and privacy flourish there, then it flourishes everywhere on the net, national borders or no. I hear tell that Barbados is serious about converting its information technology business from data entry and forms processing to web-cluefullness. Given that their business development people don't have their own domain name, they probably have a bit to go. So, I have a little exercise... If we were to tell the government of Barbados what it had to do to promote the creation of internet commerce, what would we say? Anyone here could probably crank out a prima facie set of reccommendations, but I figure to beat this to death canonically and have a little fun at the same time. So, here a few categories to get started. I'm trying to keep it relevant to this group's charter. Infrastructure Power Long distance Local wire Local wireless Regulatory Financial Privacy Laws Telecommunications Competition Civil/Human Rights Privacy Business Deregulation Government intervention in the economy Culture Religeous/Cultural tolerance (the Netherlands are tolerant, for instance) Education (talent pool) Well, that's a place to start. I'll try to plug in my 2 cents in another posting... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 323-7923 "Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<