The Role of the Information and Communications Technology Sector in Expanding Economic Opportunity

Abstract

The information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been a pioneer and a powerful catalyst in addressing the needs and interests of low-income communities in developing countries. But it was not always so. Only in the past twenty years or so has a self-conscious appreciation for the ICT sector's role in expanding economic opportunity emerged. One of the principal reasons is that much has changed in a short time. In the technology sector, 20 years are more like five generations. In the 1980s, ""universal access"" was a goal, but not the reality, of the legacy PTTs, an acronym for the firms providing ""post, telephone, and telegraph"" services. Smile, if you wish; the words and services do sound anachronistic. So are the technological and business contexts. The PTTs, comprising much of the ICT sector of their day, were landline-based and, to a large extent, government-owned and -managed. Services were expensive, and in most parts of the world, they had deteriorated to the point where quality could be described as atrocious - if it had ever been good. Data network capability was non-existent. Technological innovation, to say nothing of business model innovation, was slow. The name of the game was rent-seeking; that is, extracting every dollar of revenue as possible from sunk-cost infrastructure, and, as a means to that end, suppressing any new, potentially competitive technology, service, or business model, often using the power of the state for that purpose.