(Page 2 of 24) - NGOs AND GOVERNMENT: THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF INTERNET FROM BELOW authored by Fuentes-Bautista, Martha., Straubhaar, Joseph. and Spence, Jeremiah.

CONVERGING 2

ABSTRACT

Latin American Models of Internet Development

This paper argues that novel approaches to social development of the Internet have emerged in
Latin America. NGOs and social movements were a much greater influence on the early
development of the Internet there, relative to commercial and other actors. This seems to have
left important effects on the role of the Internet in society. The very early use of the Internet as a
international tool for organizing resources and support by the Zapatistas in 1991 was only the
most visible of a number of ways that NGOs, social movements and political groups throughout
Latin America began to use the Internet to network among each other and mobilize support
abroad. Small NGOs in Brazil were often using the Internet before medium size businesses.
Peru developed extensive public Internet access before the United States did. While many
businesses and branches of government are only now beginning to use the Internet, hundreds of
NGOs have been using since 1990. We argue that this has given these groups within civil society
a considerable agility in organizing and acting that may well create a lasting effect on relative
power relations with other more traditional sectors of society.
This different path of Internet development is due to several converging factors. First, many
activists across Latin America turned in the 1980s away from state-centered political work to
grassroots organizing, often using alternative media (Fox l988). Second, a quite different
relationship had developed between university and society in Latin America, which led
professors and students to take technology into activism almost as soon as they discovered it
themselves. Third, several NGOs, both global like the U.S.-based Association for Progressive
Communications, and national like IBASE in Brazil or the Red Cientifica Peruana in Peru, built
on universities and other early knowledge bases about the Internet to focus their operations on
bringing the Internet as an organizing tool to a wide range of other NGOs and social
movements. These NGOs trained people in how to use the Internet for networking and
organizing, trained them in the technical use of the Internet, created and operated non-profit
ISPs, and created models almost like non-profit franchises, for how to set up small cybercafes or
telecenters.
Within these general approaches, there were an interesting variety of approaches, both early in
the late 1980s-early 1990s and in the late 1990s to present. This paper concentrates on several
cases within Brazil and on the Red Cientifica Peruana in Peru. The study finds that approaches
have depended in large measure on the availability of telecommunications and ISP
infrastructure. Those in turn depend on both government regulation of telecommunications and
developments within private industry in telecommunications and Internet Service Provision.
Civil society in Peru had more open space to use Internet. Telecom use was more open to small
businesses. RCP quasi franchise model could multiply freely. Even after privatization, Telefonica
left the market open to small business rather than occupying it itself, so a space was created in
which many small access centers, called cabinas publicas, flourished. Brazil had more directive
policy. Brazilian telecommunication development was more directly driven by corporate and
state interest. Both telecom and ISP market were quickly occupied by larger businesses. Bythe
mid-1990s, however it became clear that Internet access needs by poorer people were not being
met, so state and local governments, as well as NGOs have begun to create a number of
telecenters.