WIA Report

While many governments are working to improve their information infrastructure, a significant number of governments throughout the world do not have the capacity to host their own websites. A third of all countries maintain websites with commercial hosting services in the United States. One-quarter of all countries maintain government websites on servers in other countries. (more…)

For several decades, international lending agencies have encouraged African governments to reform their telecommunications sector by privatizing the public telephone services, separating and depoliticizing the agencies that regulate the telecommunications sector and opening up competition in the consumer market for telecommunications services. During this period, Africa’s share of the world’s internet hosts and secure servers has declined. (more…)

Political life in Muslim countries is surprisingly wired. In 2000, fewer than 50 political parties from Muslim countries had Web sites. By 2007, there were more than 200 parties online, the majority of them secular. The expansion of politics online in the Muslim world is out-pacing that of the rest of the developing world. (more…)

The computer hacker is one of the most vilified figures in the digital era, but to what degree are organizations actually responsible for compromised personal records? To examine the role of organizational behavior in privacy violations, we analyze 589 incidents of compromised data between 1980 and 2006. (more…)

Many developing countries have a rapidly growing online news industry.  Controlling for the number of internet users, hosts, and print newspapers,  which countries have a surprisingly large online news industry? (more…)

A decade into the information society, computing and communication technologies should be dispersed among a large number of countries in the world. But key computing and communication technologies are actually more concentrated in fewer countries, not more diffused across many countries. (more…)