When luddites go digital

Article that looks at the rise of digital Bangladesh culminating in the current blockage of www.youtube.com in Bangladesh.

Remember those days? It was 1993. Getting a new telephone line took several years and large bribes. Getting an international line was another matter and calling overseas required making a ?Trunk Call? through an operator and a wait of several hours. Phone calls were expensive. A one-minute fax or call to the US cost well over 100 Taka. The exchange rate was very different, and a 116 Taka one page fax would have set you back three US dollars! We needed government permission to import a fax machine and the clunky early generation mobile phones cost over one lakh each (US $ 2,500). It was less than twenty years ago. Now, Mobin, the guy in our mudir dokan (corner shop) downloads videos from my blog (where he is featured) on his mobile phone. We get news on TV sandwiched between gyrating boys and girls advertising FnF connections.  My attempts to curb Facebook use at work has failed miserably. We finally have 3G, at least partially.
How did this digital revolution come about? We had decided to set up our picture agency Drik, not in the established photographic marketplaces of London, Paris or New York, but in Dhaka, where our photographers were based. But while we were close to our photographers our distance from the market, in terms of miles and means was enormous. What we also wanted to do was to set up a South-South exchange, so we could build on our collective strengths. A Dutch organisation called TOOL was interested in publishing my book, and I decided to meet up with them while in Amsterdam for the judging of World Press Photo. Researching on them I discovered they also offered off-line email, using Fidonet technology. More importantly, they too were keen on setting up a South-South exchange.
Both sides moved fast and soon Hans Scheen was at Drik with a bag full of 1200 baud modems. That?s 1.2k for those who can?t think that far back! We arranged a seminar at the Engineer?s Institute, and invited the secretary of the ministry of information. We also wrote to the ministry asking for permission to set up an email service. I still haven?t had a reply to that 1993 letter, but the secretary did come to our seminar, so we could hardly have been accused of going round the government?s back! We played on those ambiguities, and soon Altaf (now CEO of DrikICT) was tearing down Dhaka streets with Hans on the back of his motorbike. Pretty soon, we had over 500 subscribers. The first five accounts belonged to Drik with me exercising founder?s prerogative by assigning myself account number 1. Drik had the first five numbers. Professor Yunus was number 5. Professor Rehman Sobhan number 11, Dr. Hameeda Hussain number 16. I?ve forgotten Dr. Atiur Rahman?s exact number, but he too was in the first 20. That list was a virtual who?s who of Bangladesh. My friend Mohandas from Bangalore had made us a fax, data, voice switch, so our single telephone line could be used for all three functions. The central server of Bangladesh?s email network was a 286 computer!
Since we didn?t have an international line, they would ring us twice a day from Amsterdam, to connect to our electronic postbox. The pzzzst of the modem handshake was music to our ears. The phone would ring all day, and all night, in between voice calls and the occasional fax. We were connected. Load shedding had not yet become the norm.
Other networks soon sprung up. Samudra Haque?s Pradeshta. Agni, and later a few others. We discovered the government was trying to set up an X25 protocol. Some consultant somewhere must have come with the idea of dumping antiquated technology on us. Mr. Al Hussainy was a senior secretary who commanded respect. He admitted he didn?t know much about the technology, but agreed to stay with us to lend us weight. Our fledgling email community met in Drik?s terrace and decided on a game plan. We gatecrashed the T&T office in Shere-e-Bangla Nagar. Luckily the government engineers knew far less about the technology than we did, and with Al Hussainy mama (he was my uncle?s friend) on our side, we won the day. The X25 plan was scrapped. We continued aiming for a TCP/IP protocol. We wanted Internet.
Email continued to be expensive. At 30 cents per kilobyte a 1 mb file would have cost us $ 300! So files had to be squeezed. Word files were saved in version 1 to reduce files. If formatting wasn?t too important, we used text files. Everything was compressed before despatch. We formed an email club that met every month in Drik?s terrace. We shared tips. Taught each other how to download from the Net using email via Gopher and Veronica. The Daily Star had a ?Live from the Internet? column where readers would post letters to the paper which would find it?s way to the Internet. The responses also got printed. This was one of the many hybrid technologies that became part of our guerrilla Internet. There was no stopping us.
What we wanted of course was full fledged internet. While we waited, friends set up a website, so while we weren’t online ourselves we did have an online presence. While we’d gotten away with email, for full fledged Internet we did need government permission. But there was no one in government with the farsightedness to recognise the importance of the Net. The caretaker government in 1996 provided an opportunity. They were only in for three months and had the single mandate of holding a fair and free election, but they seemed to be doing things that went beyond their mandate and they were doing it fast. They also seemed to be a reasonable bunch of people with some credibility. At least they hadn’t come in with the sole purpose of making personal gain. My ex partner in the Bangladesh bridge team Farooq Sobhan, was the foreign secretary. “You’ve got to use this chance to get Bangladesh online” I implored to Farooq. “I’m meeting Manzur Elahi tomorrow morning” he responded. “Let me have a concept paper by 8:30 tomorrow morning. No promises but I’ll give it a try.” Our partner at TOOL Marcel Kaljee happened to be in Dhaka. We had been planning for this anyway, so the data was at hand. Marcel and I worked till 3:00 in the morning and dropped off the document to Farooq. I never asked him what role our document had played, but before his short tenure was over Syed Manzur Elahi had given permission to a company called ISN to set up Internet facilities. Technically their license didn’t permit them to resell their services, but the adviser was going to turn a blind eye, all for a good cause. We all turned up for the launch of ISN’s new service. They were a competitor, but no one saw it that way. Internet was here and we were going to celebrate.
 

It was still very pricey at Taka ten per minute ($ 0.38/m). And their VSAT provided bandwidth of only 64k for servicing all of Bangladesh, but we were online. There was no looking back. Drik too eventually went online but VSAT technology was ridiculously expensive. We were using an Intelsat satellite. An Aguilar satellite offered cheaper connectivity, but there was a small problem. It was lower over the horizon and there was a tree in the way. So we found a Bangla fix. We built a tower on our rooftop so we could reach over the tree to the cheaper satellite! But we all rued missing out on the submarine cable. Trying to get the government to see beyond their noses was going to be a tall order. I’d set up an appointment with Dr. Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir (currently the Home Minister) who was then a member of the planning commission. That visit convinced me that there was no way we could convince these luddites that the 21st century was approaching. Dr. Alamgir had been very civil in granting me the meeting. As is the protocol when visiting high ranking government officials, I waited in the room of the private secretary (they are often powerful people themelves as they control access), I curiously looked at the pile of paper a junior officer was carefully collating, indexing and filing away in fat folders. The serious documents this official was diligently filing away were ‘out of office’ auto generated replies! His instructions must have been to log and file every incoming email and this machi mara kerani was not going to let up on his designated task.
My zeal tempered by this encounter with brute reality I returned to Drik chastened. Facing the 21st century with 20th century politicians and bureaucrats would need a different strategy.
I’ll fast-forward somewhat. The election manifesto of the present government had been to bring about a digital Bangladesh. Despite my previous experience, we launched a new company dedicated to information and communication technology. Altaf who had since set up his own successful IT company joined as CEO. The sector held huge promise, all we needed were sensible policies. That remains our stumbling block.
We had faced censorship when we launched Banglarights the country?s human rights portal. An article critical of the military had offended the gatekeepers and all telephone lines of Drik had been closed down. It had taken two and a half years to get our lines restored. Our show on Tibet had offended our Chinese masters so that too was shut down. My own show ‘Crossfire’ also ended up being closed down by armed riot police. We did take the government to court and eventually managed to show the work but the signals were clear. No dissent or criticism of any form was to be allowed. A young man who criticised the prime minister on Facebook (FB) had been arrested (we never really found out what happened to him afterwards), and  FB itself was blocked. Digital Bangladesh didn’t extend to free expression on the Net. Particularly when something less than flattering was directed at the prime minister.
The current fiasco has more serious consequences. FB is an important communication tool and clearly the king of social media. Disrupting FB affects the social fabric of many who use it solely for their communication. The current censorship of youtube is more sinister. It started with a badly made film by someone who lives far away. It was irresponsible to post it and insensitive and callous to promote it. But the idea that any offensive content by anyone anywhere on the Net can result in a significant part of the Net being switched off in Bangladesh provides ample ammunition to all our competitors and gives awesome power to anyone who wants to impede the growth of our nation. Just post something that a small section of Bangladeshis will take serious issue with and presto a paranoid and pliant government will immediately pull the plug on itself.
Youtube is the second largest search engine on the Net and the third most viewed website after Google and FB. While many use it to search movies, many also use it for research. It is the world’s largest repository of moving images. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech ‘I had a dream’. TED speeches by leading thinkers, all major presidential speeches, tons of tutorials for students and teachers alike, all reside on youtube. My class assignments require students to both watch instructional videos and also post their own work on the video reservoir. Exam markings are based on youtube postings. It is a teaching resource that is only bettered by the rare physical presence of skilled teachers in classrooms. This pointless ban is plying havoc with any teacher attempting to bring students up to speed in a digital world. If one were to assume the ban was to last as long as Google allowed the offending video to stay up, then the ban in Bangladesh could be permanent, or at least until the next elections.  Of course I don’t expect the new government to be any wiser.  After all, they were the ones who had rejected the submarine cable offer. But since all decisions by previous governments are cancelled by default, even stupid decisions have a finite lifetime in our strange land.
With governments like these who needs enemies?
END
Please circulate this mail. We cannot let this ridiculous blocking of youtube to continue. Twitter hashtag: #openyoutubenow