ICT Ecosystem Research Articles

Book Review: Fransman, M. (2010). The New ICT Ecosystem: Implications for Policy and Regulation

This academic peer-reviewed journal is an open access, peer reviewed, journal which explores electronic and digital ecosystems that facilitate information, communication, innovation and transformation in African economies and in the broader Global South.

Regulation, public policy, and investment in communications infrastructure

A growing number of countries are reexamining telecommunications policies in search of approaches that better support investment and innovation in advanced communication networks and services. In addition to regulatory instruments, a broad range of fiscal and industrial policy measures are being revitalized. These instruments affect regulated and unregulated firms in the ICT ecosystem in multifaceted ways and sometimes have counterintuitive effects on aggregate performance. The design of policies is further complicated by trade-offs between short-term and long-term policy objectives. This article examines individual and joint effects of regulatory and other policy instruments on the investment incentives in advanced communications. It conceptualizes governance as a problem of “tuning” a highly dynamic, adaptive system. Alternative consistent combinations of regulation and public policy are feasible but they have different implications for sector outcomes, most importantly the balance between static and dynamic performance.

Cybersecurity: Stakeholder incentives, externalities, and policy options

Information security breaches are increasingly motivated by fraudulent and criminal motives. Reducing their considerable costs has become a pressing issue. Although cybersecurity has strong public good characteristics, most information security decisions are made by individual stakeholders. Due to the interconnectedness of cyberspace, these decentralized decisions are afflicted with externalities that can result in sub-optimal security levels. Devising effective solutions to this problem is complicated by the global nature of cyberspace, the interdependence of stakeholders, as well as the diversity and heterogeneity of players. The paper develops a framework for studying the co-evolution of the markets for cybercrime and cybersecurity. It examines the incentives of stakeholders to provide for security and their implications for the ICT ecosystem. The findings show that market and non-market relations in the information infrastructure generate many security-enhancing incentives. However, pervasive externalities remain that can only be corrected by voluntary or government-led collective measures.

Spatial Technologies for the Mobile Class

This article offers a critique of Hewlett-Packard's ‘Cooltown’, a web-based vision of a near future organised according to the logic of ubiquitous mobile technologies. We argue that Cooltown is prototypical of utopian corporate discourses that frame mobile technologies as only enhancing human agency and subjectivity, and ICT ecosystems that new mobile technologies are increasingly designed to engender. Though seemingly benign, the continual surveillance to which people ‘in’ Cooltown are subject in exchange for their access to the technologies Cooltown will deploy renders such individuals more amenable to being managed as spatio-temporal co-ordinates in the machine of global capital. In response to this quasi-surrender of agency and control that for us Cooltown entails, we argue for a politics of place, choice and resistance in the burgeoning mobile world and for additional critical scholarship and alternative practices with regard lo the applications and uses of mobile and ubiquitous ICTs.