Access to information

The Internet Rights and Principles Coalition officially published its Internet Bill of Rights on March 31st as part of their second expert meeting in Sweden.

Poverty and social inequity in South Africa have shaped the development of media culture and distribution in the country. Low incomes in a country where one-third of the population lives on less than one dollar a day, high prices for commercial DVDs and Cds and a widespread advertising culture have created a high demand for media goods which are not easily obtained legally for the great majori...

Although the political significance of piracy as a form of rebellion in South Africa has mostly dropped away in the post-Apartheid era, “the sharply racialised patterns of inequality and access to media have not,” says a new book that looks at the prevalence of media piracy, how it is organised, and why people buy pirated goods or work in the black market. The book collects case studies fro...

For about 75 years up to the sixties, nearly all telecommunications services in the country were in private hands, distributed among hundreds of local operators. Telephony authorizations were issued and controlled by the state governments. In this process Companhia Telefônica Brasileira emerged as a major operator of local and long-distance services, covering about 80% of the telephone termina...

Various social organisations that have been working together since 2005 to shape the information society in Latin America and the Caribbean have once again chosen APC to act as the civil society liaison within the eLAC2015 Plan of Action. Latin American and Caribbean governments in the Third Ministerial Conference on the Information Society approved the plan in November 2010.

Opinion Sharing Meeting on Role of Community Radio in implementing Right To Information in Bangladesh An opinion sharing meeting on “the role of Community Radio in implementing Right to Information” was held on 28th February, 2011, at 11 a.m. in Information Commission Bangladesh Office at Sher-e-Bangla-Nagar, Agargaon, Dhaka. The meeting was organized by Information Commission.

Most communications policies around the globe have been developed on models based on the economic, political and social realities of North America and Europe – which assume large private companies build expansive national wired infrastructures. So laws and regulations have evolved with the understanding that these wired networks are the main communication infrastructure and that wireless netw...

“Open spectrum is important because access is important” says Steve Song, telecommunications fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in an interview with APCNews. But in South Africa, the problem is not lack of access – it’s that access is not affordable. Freeing up wireless spectrum, such as television white spaces —the space between channels— or making more information available on ...