The Internet: towards a deeper critique by Roberto Verzola, Secretary-General, Philippine Greens A common critique of the Internet says: "The technology is great. But it is only accessible at considerable cost, and to a few percent of the population. Un til we make it more universally accessible and bring down its cost, few of the poor can benefit from the technology." Such a critique sees the Internet – towards which new information and communications technologies (ICTs) are converging today – essentially as a democratizing factor. At worst, it sees the technology as class-neutral, which can be as useful to the poor as to the rich, once it becomes affordable and universally accessible. The main problem according to this critique, therefore, is to bring the Internet to the masses. Or, as some would probably put it, to bring the masses to the Internet. From Chiapas to the Balkans, from eastern Europe to Indonesia, popular movements have used the Internet to reach millions. E-mail and mailing lists have led to the emergence of virtual communities. Future e-commerce offers tantalizing possibilities to small economic players for competitive advantage and huge markets. All these have enhanced the seemingly democratizing image of the technology. But today, the Internet's reach in most developing countries ranges from less than one to perhaps five percent of the population. In the Philippines, for example, it is currently in the range of 2-3%. Optimists often cite Internet growth trends – a few percent a month in some fast-growing markets – to project that the technology will eventually be universally accessible at some future time. Then, according to this critique, the only remaining problem will be in reducing the cost of access. A deeper critique of the Internet can be based on the following issues: * Rapid Internet growth immediately results in vast expansion of markets for hardware, software, connectivity, consultancy and other ICT services. Except for some niche areas, the information economies of North America, Europe and Japan are in the best position to exploit this market growth. * The Internet creates its own hierarchy of access that retains and may even worsen the gap between rich and poor. * The Internet reinforces the automation mindset that replaces workers with machines. Even the new jobs the technology creates are subject to this automation mindset, resulting in loss of jobs and job security. * The Internet's impact on physical and mental health has been largely unexplored in the public discourse. Problems with hands and fingers, with posture and with eyesight are the most common. But there are also incipient problems of Internet addiction and skewed mental development. * The Internet is becoming more and more like television, though an interactive one. TV turned out to be an "idiot box" for many people. If it will be mainly an expensive interactive idiot box, the Internet won't be much of an improvement. * The seductive powers of computers and the Internet are so compelling that they are drawing precious resources away from the major intellectual challenges of our time. * In contrast to public spaces like the radio spectrum, the Internet has basically become private space owned by rentiers. Until cyberspace becomes a public commons, to move our lives into this private space is a essentially to fall into a trap. * The Internet has deeply hidden centralist elements that negate its democratic and even anarchistic claims. * The Internet also reflects an embedded globalist bias, from the widespread use of English to hidden subsidies by local users for international communications. Market expansion for information economies Internet technology is very expensive: the hardware is expensive; the commercial software is expensive; connectivity is expensive; consultancy and other services are expensive. In the Philippines, for instance, the cost of entry-level computer hardware has remained pegged somewhere around US$500 since desktop computing was introduced in the early 1980s. Users used to be able to copy software freely, but strict intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes mandated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) have raised software costs to the level of hardware costs, and often higher. A dedicated 24-hour connection needed by a network of Internet servers requires a minimum monthly expenditure of around US$300 for port costs alone to more than US$1,000 if leased line costs are included. One-time costs include the server, modems, routers, terminal servers, uninterruptible power supplies and miscellaneous equipment. Consultants, trainors and Web designers charge what the market will bear. Furthermore, the technology is changing very rapidly. This implies new investments every few years or so. Simply to participate in these new ICTs therefore immediately turns ourselves into markets for information economies that sell or lease hardware, software, connectivity, consultancy and other ICT services. The World Bank, for instance, has estimated the size of this potential market for the ICT infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region in the next ten years to be around US$1.2 - US$1.5 trillion. By designing products with short life cycles and replacing their product lines every few years or so, these firms can easily trap us into a never-ending cycle of purchases and obsolescence. Equipment which break down after a few years are most often replaced rather than repaired – if they can be repaired at all. Particularly in developing countries, the repair equipment, skills, or spare parts are often not available. Thus, investments in new ICTs – huge enough as they are – must be repeated every few years or so, not only to stay current with the technology but also to remain competitive. A firm's ICT expenditure over time will therefore look like a downhill obstacle course: a series of large investments every few years or so, to discard obsolescent technology or acquire a more competitive new technology. Each new investment promises to give the firm a better competitive edge due to lower marginal costs. Such a cost-versus-time expenditure graph may be seen as a series of huge expenditures, reflecting the high cost and rapidly changing nature of the technology, superimposed on steadily decreasing marginal costs, reflecting the improved competitiveness promised by newer ICTs. The promise of ICT – and the expectation of the firm – is that all these huge investments will make the firm more competitive and therefore more profitable. But will it, really? Perhaps it will, vis-a-vis those firms which are unable to make similar investments. But unless it has sufficient investment funds to leap over every obstacle on its path, it will remain less competitive vis-a-vis those firms who can afford the leading edge and presumably more competitive technologies. In short, the downhill obstacle course is a huge investment trap: a firm must keep investing on newer and newer ICTs if it hopes to keep its marginal costs lower and lower to keep up with its leading competitors. If everybody joined this downhill race, the biggest money will be made not by developing countries who hope to sell their agricultural or manufactured commodities over the Internet. It will be made by those who put up the obstacles on the race course: those ICT firms in the developed world selling the hardware, software, connectivity, consultancy, training and other ICT services. It is these ICT firms who are best positioned to exploit this huge emerging ICT market. A hierarchy of access The downhill obstacle course is a typical feature of elitist technologies: the entry costs are very high, but once you're in, the marginal costs are very low. The high entry costs filter out the many who cannot afford the technology and allow in only the privileged few. The low marginal costs make these privileged few much more competitive compared to the excluded many. Going back to the downhill obstacle course in Figure 1: those with little money will remain to the left of the first obstacle, which is the cost of access to the Internet. They will be saddled with the highest marginal costs. For instance, they'd be making operator-assisted overseas calls from public calling stations rather than sending email from their office or home. They'd be going after receivables by visiting borrowers, rather than receiving credit card payments. They'd be losing much of their margins to intermediaries. People who are unable to go over even this first obstacle will be living in a very different world. But those who cross over this digital divide are not necessarily much better. They will find themselves spread out over the obstacle course, depending on their financial capacity to make the necessary and continuing investments to keep up with the unfolding race. The poorer ones will give up after one or two o bstacles, trapped behind an investment wall they cannot hope to cross; the richer ones will be trapped after a few more obstacles; the richest will manage to keep going, becoming more and more competitive as they invest in each new and more expensive technology that the ICT industry throws across their path. Among the Internet users, different access levels create another hierarchy, reflecting essentially the same social stratification we see today outside the Internet. At the lowest are those who have neither computer nor telephone line. They can only afford occasional access through Internet cafes or telecenters. A telecenter will most probably have a 56 Kbps or 64 Kbps connection, shared among several computers. Through such a connection, users will probably be accessing their email through a free U.S. mailbox with limited storage. Thus, even the downloading of emails will be slow and expensive. The user will probably be paying something like a dollar for every 1-3 hours of Internet use. Where the typical minimum wage is $1-5 dollars per day, with many families not even getting the minimum, it is easy to see that the poor cannot be a regular Internet user, only an occasional one. Next in the hierarchy are users with their computer and telephone line, a regular Internet account, which might include a mailbox, browing capability, and limited web space. Within this group and somehat higher up in the hierarchy are those who can afford their own domain name and a subscription to a Web hosting facility, making them much more visible to Web browsers. On top of the hierarchy are the highly privileged users with their own 24-hour connection to the Internet. In the Philippines, this would entail a monthly expense of at least US$200 for the Internet port charge alone. This privileged group can use the Internet anytime, as long as they want, with no additional cost. This top-level stratum will have its own hierarchy of users, depending on the speed of their connection, which may range from less than 64 kilobits to more than 50 megabits per second. Those who have the fastest and most reliable connections will be the most competitive of all. Especially as online buying and selling and other forms of e-commerce materialize, those who can automate such transactions and conclude them faster will enjoy a huge edge over those constrained to slow, manual online operations. The former can scan the network for arbitrage and other opportunities, maximize their margins, make decisions automatically, conclude transactions more often, and do them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With their superior connectivity and financial clout, the richer firms and countries will be in an even better position to concentrate wealth into their hands, widening the gap between the poor and the rich. We had better think again, those among us who imagine that by making huge investments in hardware, software, connectivity, consultancy, training and other services offered by the ICT industry, the developing countries can leap-frog to a competitive future by selling our agricultural and manufacturing commodities and our cheaper labor over the Internet. Replacing workers with machines The Internet appears to be bad news for labor too. Will ICTs be a net creator or net destroyer of jobs? This was the very topic which more than a dozen scholars, consultants and union officials debated in an online conference sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in May-July 1999. As can be expected, the discussants all acknowledged that ICTs were both a creator and a destroyer of jobs, but could not agree which role predominated. Some discussants asserted that ICTs create new goods and services as well as new market opportunities and income sources. Thus, they stimulate general economic activity, which translates into more jobs. ICTs, their argument went, help businesses save money, which these businesses then invest elsewhere, creating new jobs. There is even a shortage of skilled ICT workers. Other discussants argued that ICTs are selective in their positive impact, and that they lead to unemployment elsewhere. When bosses introduce machines and computers, some workers invariably get fired. In many workplaces today, machines and computers are taking the place of human beings, who are then left to fend off for themselves. A 1994 study by the Communications Workers of America, for instance, showed net job losses due to ICTs over a 10-year period. A participant argued, however, that the available studies today are confined mostly to Northern countries and a few Asian and Latin American NICs. The present data are too ambiguous for a definite conclusion, and one can find data to support either position. The discussions revealed two trends: * Working-at-a-distance. This could lead to the increasing use of teleworking, to which many workers react ambivalently. It is true that teleworking provides new opportunies for women in the home, for instance, or entrepreneurs in remote villages. But teleworking also breaks up labor cohesiveness and weakens unions; furthermore, it tends to exclude the teleworker from traditional social security and other job benefits. * Managing-at-a-distance. This provides management with new options in designing work processes and the workplace. They can ask their workers to work at home, or they can gather previously decentralized functions like decision-making and put them all in one central unit, decentralizing some functions and centralizing others, in whatever mix they find most advantageous to the company. ICTs have also made the virtual firm possible, an enterprise that outsources much of its requirements and relies on ICTs to hold the organization together, enhancing its flexibility, efficiency, and competitiveness. Outsourcing tends to transfer jobs from large companies – which become virtual firms – to smaller firms, which are more difficult to unionize and tend to violate labor laws more often. One effect of outsourcing is labor contractualization. The key, it seems, lies in the decision-making that leads to ICT use. Invariably, it is management which decides when to introduce and when not to introduce ICT into the workplace. Thus, the criteria for ICT use will be management criteria, not labor criteria. From the management point of view, machines and computers are very often preferable to human labor. Machines don't form unions; they don't go on strike. Machines can be upsized, downsized, rightsized or whatever-sized anytime; they can be run faster or slower, longer or shorter. Machine outputs are more consistent and reliable, resulting in better quality and lower cost. ICTs, therefore, enforce the automation paradigm. Where the use of human labor instead of machines remains more profitable, management will obviously stick to human labor. They can relocate where human labor is cheap and maintain control through ICTs and telemanagement. The logic of profitability, however, will continue to reassert itself; as soon as it becomes profitable to do so, management will eventually switch to machines. It is true that machines and computers may require new skills, and therefore create new jobs (computer operator, technician, Web page designer, Webmaster, Java programmer, etc). However, this job creation is an incidental part, while job elimination is the intentional part of the logic of computerization and automation. Also, the jobs destroyed are actual people with real families, while the jobs created are potential jobs. To qualify for these new potential jobs, job-seekers have to go through a long and often expensive process of retraining. Furthermore, the same logic of automation will also apply to the new jobs that ICTs create – these jobs will also be replaced (by automated software, expert systems, etc.) when it becomes profitable to do so. As the pace of technology development increases, the pace of job elimination and replacement also speeds up. Even those who might have the skills to acquire new jobs are under constant threat of replacement or displacement. (Can Pascal or Dbase programmers still find jobs next year as easily as last year?) While the net quantitative effects of ICTs may still require detailed research, their qualitative effects are clear: they are making human labor more replaceable and jobs less secure. Unexplored impacts on physical and mental health We are not quite sure how staring at a radiation source several hours a day will affect our eyesight. But many computer "techies" wear thick glasses and are practically blind without them, which is not at all reassuring. It is in fact downright scary, considering that many governments plan to require computer courses in secondary, if not elementary, levels. Health concerns have also been raised with respect to the low-frequency (in the 50-60 Hz area) and ultrasonic emissions of video monitors. Neither would persistent reports of a link between cellphones and brain or ear tumors go away. We do know that high-frequency radio emissions at higher powers do disrupt cell and genetic functions. What is the safe threshold? Is there any threshold at all? As the technology increasingly relies on mobile and wireless computing, these health concerns must be confronted squarely. The automation paradigm has another side-effect. When cars and other machines were first invented, we thought they were all wonderful gadgets because they saved us a lot of physical effort. But people who depended heavily on cars and other machines got less physical exercise and therefore became prone to obesity, hypertension, heart disease and other degenerative diseases common to modern populations. If reliance on machines for physical labor leads to physical problems, isn't it worrisome what reliance on machines for mental tasks could lead to? Computer users, in fact, are already complaining today how they have grown dependent on their word processors, unable to go back to traditional forms of writing using paper and pencil or even a typewriter. After years of word processor use, the screen and keyboard have become an integral part of their thinking and writing processes; they are lost – unable to think and to write – without a screen and keyboard in front of them. Is this what we want: people who can't think without a thousand-dollar machine in front of them? Computers may impair thinking in another way. Their multi-media and video capabilities, with future promises of three-dimentional display and virtual reality, will provide an increasingly full sensory feed to the user. However, engaging the senses totally may also encourage passive reception of the data feed and discourage imaginative thinking and highly symbolic thought, raising questions about the computer's educational value. Authors Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, for instance, have called attention to a report, "Fool's Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood," released last September 2000 by the Alliance for Childhood, a group of more than 75 educators, child-development and health authorities. The report called for: * a moratorium on the further introduction of computers in early childhood and elementary education – except for special cases – to "create a climate for a broad national discussion about the serious developmental risks" posed by computers in childhood. * a comprehensive study by the U.S. Surgeon General on the physical, emotional, and other developmental hazards that computers pose to children. * spending money less on computers and more on "proven educational interventions for children at risk of school failure, including smaller classes and smaller schools, higher salaries to attract and retain good teachers, and early attention to nutrition, high-quality child care and health care, and safe housing." An interactive idiot box More than 50 years ago, a technology was born that inventors promised would revolutionize education, raise to new heights the cultural level of millions, and abolish ignorance. This technology was not the computer; neither was it the Internet. It was television. TV, claimed its original proponents, would usher a new era of low-cost access to education and learning for the masses. Today, the TV set is called an "idiot box". Those who expect the Internet to usher a new information age should look at our experience with TV. Television technology turned into its opposite due, among other things, to the following factors: * Governments tightly restricted who may set up TV stations, facilitating a monopolistic ownership structure in the industry. * With few exceptions, many governments privatized the television industry. This put profit-making ahead of other informative, educational or cultural considerations. * Those who controlled TV content made it a marketing medium. TV became the medium for selling products, services, and life styles. * Compared to radio, its non-visual predecessor, television – particularly color TV – was a highly sensory medium. The technology could feed the viewer with sounds and visuals, with little need for response, interaction, or additional imagination. This turned the viewer into a passive recipient of program material. * Television merged fiction and reality on the same screen. Coverage of real wars intermingled with war movies that were meant for entertainment; violent films were shown side by side with news about violent crimes. This slowly dulled the viewers' sensitivity towards real-life suffering and injustice and blurred ethical judgments about right and wrong. Even before the Internet, computer technology had, in a way, already evolved its own "idiot box": the game machine. Many parents, concerned that their chil dren were being left out of the computer revolution and fooled by marketing hype, rushed out to buy a computer, many of which ended up as game machines. They had worse than zero educational value; they exposed children to excessive violence, distorted their values, led to game addiction, and interfered with real education and learning. Exactly the same trend is happening with Internet cafes, which in many areas are fast becoming centers of child addiction with violent games and other forms of escapism. Today, on the Internet, the same factors that turned television into an idiot box are also emerging, or have in fact become the dominant trend. Indeed, the Internet today is sometimes seen as the television of the 21st century. It is true that the Internet, unlike television, is an interactive medium, where information can flow back and forth, and to that extent it continues to be useful, particularly for information searching. In many sites, however, the quality of the interaction has deteriorated, simpl y requiring from the user "click"/"no click", yes/no, accept/cancel decisions which are not much different from the "next channel"/"previous channel" decisions made on the TV remote control. Web gurus today speak of "push technologies"; these mechanisms automatically determine a user's taste and preferences based on earlier selections he had made on the Internet, and then feed him with more of the same, with no additional prompting necessary. This will supposedly enable the user to go back to his couch, relax, and enjoy the influx of Web entertainment and advertising – making instant purchases along the way with a few clicks – in much the same way that he enjoyed yesteryear's television. We have become contemptuous of television as the 20th century's "idiot box". The way many use the Internet, however, simply makes it TV's interactive version. Drawing resources away from real problems Because the seductive powers of computers and the Internet are so compelling, they have been drawing precious talents and material resources away from the major intellectual challenges of our time. These challenges include: * Persistent poverty in the midst not only of plenty but of scandalous wealth, occuring not only in poor countries but also in the richest. * Gradual disintegration of societies battered by globalization. In the richest country in the world, there are more prisoners than farming families. In a poor country like the Philippines, more and more mothers and fathers leave their families behind to work abroad in search of decent employment. * Unabated destruction of our ecological base. The ozone layer, our forests, natural habitats, and wildlife species continue to disappear. Our natural world is disintegrating. * The flood of poisons into our life. Our working and living environment as well as our supply of air, food and drinking water are increasingly polluted by millions of tons of poisons that industries release every year. We are irrationally fouling our only ecological home. These are life-and-death issues. Are the world's best intellects working on them? What intellectual challenges occupy our youth today? Web design? Internet programming languages? Hacking? MP3? Online transactions? Much of the online world, virtual reality and cyberspace life is going to be a very expensive diversion from the real pressing problems that humanity should be confronting squarely today. Private space controlled by rentiers In fact, the Internet will lead to changes much more fundamental and intrusive than what TV brought about. Today, we are being seduced every moment of our waking hours to use the Internet to conduct our lives – to teach our young, to buy our needs, to find new jobs, to keep informed, to amuse ourselves, to seek healing, to meet new friends, to find our mate, to search for God, and even to express dissent and launch protests. Virtual communities, virtual learning, virtual democracy, virtual revolutions, virtual sex. Everything in cyberspace. This is the promise. The reality is that the seduction is drawing us away from public platforms, where we are in a stronger moral position to insist on our basic rights, towards private platforms where any rights are constrained by the fact that we are on private property, leasing time or space from the rentiers who own it. Going – imperceptibly and in some places nearly gone – are the public spaces, commons and domains where we used to conduct our lives: the public schools, public markets, community sites, public libraries, public theaters, public hospitals, social gatherings, public parks, churches, streets, plazas and town halls. The Internet, for a while, seemed like a fresh beginning for a public space, where people can socialize, work, transact business and govern themselves on a public platform. Whether it was an information highway or plaza, the image was that of a public facility, maintained by public funds and open to all. That is nearly gone too. Much of the Internet today is increasingly privatized, controlled by the emerging propertied class of the information economy: a landlord in cyberspace, a cyberlord. They are rentiers who own the communications channels, the routers and servers, the service providers, the search engines and the portals and who rent out space or time to those who want the privilege of using their facilities. Even the domain name system (DNS), where name conflicts require dispute resolution systems that used to be the preserve of community and public institutions, has been largely privatized. Because of convergence, even media which rely on public spaces like the radio spectrum are now getting caught into the private maws of the Internet. To conduct our lives in cyberspace is to step into a private matrix where our rights are circumscribed by the often superior property rights of the rentiers who own or control this matrix. The Internet is turning out to be a trap in more ways than one. Deeply centralist elements Much is often made of the highly decentralized nature of the Internet, that it is not subject to censorship or control. Not quite. The Internet contains deeply hidden centralist elements that tend to negate its democratic and even anarchistic claims. In at least three areas, such centralist elements can exercise powerful influence in the content and direction of the network: * Corporate ownership of the hardware and service infrastructures. The preceding section has referred to the privatization of much of the Internet's communication lines, routers and servers, service providers, search engines and portals. Those who control of these facilities wield enormous powers and hold practically unassailable negotiating positions. They can easily force newcomers to shoulder the full cost of Internet expansion and new connections; disconnect recalcitrant portions of the network; deny service to unwelcome subscribers; target specific Web sites to make them nearly invisible to search engines; exclude network addresses from routing tables; and so on. Consolidations in the industry further concentrate these enormous powers into fewer corporate hands. * Assigment of IP network addresses. Without a network address, one cannot run the TCP/IP protocol that defines who is part of the global internetwork called the Internet. Much of the available class A, B and C network addresses have been cornered by corporate entities and the the power to allocate the remaining addresses available for assignment reside in a few institutional and largely corporate-controlled centers, who assign many of these addresses in blocks to large ISPs who then assign them to smaller ISPs, in a very top-down hierarchical manner. * The domain name system (DNS). Nearly every top level domain name – .com, .org, .net as well as the country domain names – are controlled today by private entities not accountable to any public but themselves or their corporate sponsors. Domain names are probably even more important in acquiring a personality in cyberspace. Thus, those who control domain name assignments wield as much power as those who assign IP addresses or who own the hardware infrastructure of the network. The Internet may appear democratic and anarchistic, but deep within its bowels lurk control elements which are normally unnoticable while used benignly. But they can be used anytime to make life extremely difficult for the network citizen who is perceived to be a threat. Embedded globalist bias It was appropriate technology advocate E.F. Schumacher, of Small is Beautiful fame, who once said that technologies often carry a built-in ideology which is so deeply embedded that one can't have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant. Some of the ideological paradigms embedded within the Internet include: automation and job-saving; monoculture based on the English language and its corresponding Anglo-Saxon culture; and a bias for globalism. Hidden in the Internet's design, for instance, is a built-in subsidy for globalization, and all Internet users are forced to contribute to this hidden subsidy, whether they like it or not. Before the Internet, most telecommunications fees were distance-dependent, because the costs are distance-dependent. One paid more to call another country than to call one's neighbor. In fact, one often paid a lot more, because many governments adopted the policy of making international communications subsidize local expansion. The trend today, however, is to reverse this idea that international traffic should subsidize local traffic. The U.S. was the first to push back internati onal rates, its lower rates serving as platform for pressuring other countries to bring down their international rates as well. In the Philippines, for example, international charges are going down, while local charges are going up. In fact, at the rate charges are being adjusted, we may soon reach a point where local traffic is subsidizing international traffic, which can lead to a perverse situation where the phone companies make higher margins on poorer users, to subside the richer users. This perverse situation is already the norm among Internet service providers (ISPs), which charge either a flat rate, by the minute, or by kilobyte, regardless of destination. Whatever the scheme, an email to another user in one' s server costs as much as an email to a business contact on the other side of the world. Accessing your own server's website costs as much as accessing a website anywhere else. Yet, Internet traffic which do not use an international gateway definitely use less resources than international traffic. If the costs were properly assigned, such local email should cost less than a similar international email; and an email to a user on the same provider should cost even less, because it uses less resources. Yet, the charges are the same – a clear case of local traffic subsidizing international traffic, a hidden subsidy for globalization. ISPs don't charge lower for local traffic because distinguishing by destination for accounting purposes would cost too high; it is cheaper to charge the same rate regardless of destination. Here is a technology with a built-in bias against the local in favor of the global, whose very design spares the global the burden of paying for the full cost of its communications, makes it impossible for the local to use its natural competitive advantage of nearness, and forces the local to subsidize the global. Today, the various media, communications and data technologies are converging towards a single Internet backbone. So, it is not far-fetched to assume that similar hidden subsidies for globalization – together with the monoculture that it carries – will soon emerge in telephony and the media, if they are not in fact already in place. Schumacher was right. Together with technological transplants, we are getting ideological ones. ––– [Other articles by Roberto Verzola: “Towards a Political Economy of Information ” (1996); “Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector” (1997); “ Globalization: The Third Wave” (1998); “The Internet: A Second Opinion” (1998); “Low-cost Strategies for ICT Deployment in Developing Countries” (1999); “ Information Monopolies and the WTO” (2000). He may be reached at 108 V.Luna Road Extension, Sikatuna Village 1101, Quezon City, Phils.; Tel. 921-5165; rverzola@yahoo.com.]