On August 20, as news spread out that Tripoli was liberated, one of the signs that confirmed the happy news to city residents was the fact that the internet was back on. Before then and for obvious reasons, Big Brother considered the internet a sworn enemy and surfing it easily raised suspicion. As the revolution swept Libya this past february, it did not take long before the main switch was turned off by LTT and an internet blackout was imposed on the country.
While there is every reason to believe the new Libya will have a different attitude towards internet freedom, a recent protest at the LTT offices on the continuing low quality of internet access service available in Tripoli, is bringing into focus the issue of wether the LTT is able to transform its image from that of a dictatorship tool, in the past used for communication monitoring and control, to a communication and knowledge empowernment tool serving a free and democratic society.As the sign carried by one of the recent Tripoli demonstrators rightly says, "Downloading is a right and not a luxury". The problem was reportedly triggered by the slow speed experienced by users of the LTT Wimax internet service. In the absence of a proper infrastructure, the system was hastily put in place by the corrupt ex-regime as a ragtag solution and its slow speed is most likely caused by its limited bandwidth and the increasing number of users, in a large city of the size of Tripoli.
While internet access is a citizen right in the first place, it is also a vital infrastructure component for the national economy as a whole. An efficient broadband network covering the whole country is a pre-requisiste for ushering a new age of e-education, e-government, e-health and e-commerce services which the new Libya, with its small population and vast land, badly needs. Imagine the savings of a good e-government system would offer if it is allowed to replace the cumbersome, corrupt and hopelessly inefficient bureaucracy Libya has inherited and kept since Ottoman times. Countries such as Sweden and South Korea are at the top of rich nations partly thanks to their state of the art fiber optic networks connecting homes, schools, businesses and government offices. Among Arab countries, the UAE was the first to take a bold step by introducing Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) systems, as early as 2007, covering major cities such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Whereas Gaddafi worked to build up his spy network of "revolutionary committees everwhere!", the new Libya government should work to build up a citizen network enabling "internet access everywhere!". In a country where more than half the population is under the age of 20, an online knowledge-based education is essential for development. Since Libya is set to rebuild much of its city infrastructure destroyed by the recent war and by decades of neglect before that, this provides an opportunity for us to do things right from the start. One of the tasks the new government should do is to come up with a good five-year master infrastructure plan, based on serious techo-economic studies and taking into consideration factors such as future population gowth and distribution in Libya, modern architecture and greenary standards, public transport requirements such as metro and rail systems, and last but not least a nationwide-linked fiber-optic network. Through a re-organized LTT, entrusted with information and communication technology (ICT), the government should focus on sponsoring, installing and maintaining the overall communication and information backbone infrastructure itself, and leave internet service to a competition of private ISP providers so that an efficient and smooth customer service is assured.
During the early days of the revolution, timid efforts were made by the NTC to have a presence on the web and on social networks but perhaps due to lack of experience and resources, these efforts were not always very successful. The NTC website was and may still very well be not up-to-date and repeated efforts to contact the NTC by email failed to draw a single response. Now that a proper government is about to be in place, we hope that the prime minister and his ministers will have their official websites and will use them as channels for information and communication with the public and that officials will be accessible through their "gov.ly" email addresses. In its quest to establish democracy, the new Libya cannot afford to neglect the role of these online and social media networks and should make good use of all available channels to better communicate with its citizens and indeed with the rest of the world.
During the early days of the revolution, timid efforts were made by the NTC to have a presence on the web and on social networks but perhaps due to lack of experience and resources, these efforts were not always very successful. The NTC website was and may still very well be not up-to-date and repeated efforts to contact the NTC by email failed to draw a single response. Now that a proper government is about to be in place, we hope that the prime minister and his ministers will have their official websites and will use them as channels for information and communication with the public and that officials will be accessible through their "gov.ly" email addresses. In its quest to establish democracy, the new Libya cannot afford to neglect the role of these online and social media networks and should make good use of all available channels to better communicate with its citizens and indeed with the rest of the world.
