Orientation of proposal

Setting up infrastructures cannot be left to simple market forces. They must be integrated in a global vision of the missions that should be carried out by the public service, which implies :
  that setting up infrastructures in developing countries will allow the latter to keep control over them. One can imagine that the profits made by the industrialised countries from the sale of licenses could be paid into a ICT "development fund" that would allow developing countries to finance their infrastructure needs independently.
  that setting up infrastructures in the industrialised countries should satisfy very severe criteria for fulfilling the missions of public service, including the networking of areas excluded from these infrastructures ;

Part of the profits made by these companies should be paid, via the government, to actors involved in the non-commercial development of ICTs.

Context

Basic challenges in terms of governance loom behind the construction of network infrastructures.

Although the need for connectivity is crucial in developing countries, this construction could provide the opportunity for additional control by the companies of industrialised over their economies. We know that control over the "pipelines" leads to possible control over the content that circulates in them. At the very least, it opens commercial highways to software houses, and commercial sites and portals, which partially explains their recent enthusiasm in filling in the digital divide between North and South. In time, far from solving the digital divide, there is a risk of further exacerbating the dependence of the countries of the South on these companies and thus strengthening the vicious circle of development/debt/dependence.

Industrialised countries have already experienced the following phenomenon : certain local and national governments have auctioned licenses (3rd generation telephones, ABLR) or subcontract without control over the contracts (cabling, fibre-optics, etc.). This purely commercial approach by governments, divested of responsibility- the market will solve the problem, lets grab all the profits- by selling to the highest bidder, is not without consequences for the consumer who, all said and done, pays the price of tax paid to the government. However, this tax would not be a problem if, on the one hand, the sale or transfer of contracts were to obey specifications including ambitious missions in the general interest (for example, the obligation to cable unprofitable districts and areas) and, on the other, the money levied in this way from the market were invested in the social and civic sector of information technologies. But such is not the case. Italy is the only European country to have explicitly provided that 10% of profits from the sale of mobile telephone licenses is oriented towards scientific research and an action plan for e-government and ICTs. Thus this type of scheme is feasible.

In Canada, the law already stipulates that cable operators must pay 5% of their profits to civil society organisations. However, this law is in fact hardly applied since it runs counter to other measures that divest responsibility from the public authorities. The municipalities of certain Italian towns that are sufficiently powerful vis-à-vis companies oblige the latter to support actors in the non-profit sector. They nonetheless stand to gain from the improved image providing such support gives them.