 | |
| |
TechnologyDaily Mobile
Russia Offers Hope For Flagging High-Tech Firms
By William New
U.S. high-tech firms showed up in droves to a meeting with potential partners from Russia late last week, apparently seeking ways out of their economic straits, according to Trevor Gunn at the Commerce Department.
Gunn, deputy director of the Commerce Department's Business Information Service for the Newly Independent States, said his office brought nearly 200 high-tech companies from the United States and Russia together in San Francisco last Friday to swap problem-solving experiences and discuss opportunities.
"The real issue for us is that government has opened up private sector to private sector dialogue on IT issues," Gunn said in an interview. "We're dealing with a lot of issues ill-defined in U.S. law" that are likely to be ill defined in Russian law as well, he said. The Russian government has been "fairly hands-off" in terms of business, Gunn said.
The get-together came at a good time, as U.S. industry is mainly focused on job cuts, he noted. Russia's multibillion-dollar IT market is rapidly growing in areas such as the Internet, e-commerce and mobile-phone usage. Opportunities also exist in hardware, software and semiconductors. The market for Internet technologies alone is estimated at $500 million by 2002, according to the Commerce Department. In 2000, e-commerce revenue rose 900 percent over the previous year, reaching $90 million.
U.S. companies attending the meeting included Sun Microsystems, Motorola, Intel and Corning.
The U.S. government may not be wholly bent on throwing its arms open to Russia, however. In a mention of the U.S. missile-defense program in a media roundtable Tuesday, President Bush appeared to send a cautionary signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"[Missile defense] is the beginning of focusing resources on the true threats facing America. Russia is not a threat, an enemy," Bush said. "Let me rephrase that. Russia is not an enemy. They may be a threat, if they decide to be, but they're not the enemy. And it's going to be very important for my administration to make that very clear to Mr. Putin."
A Good Bedtime Story?
Mary Harney, the deputy prime minister of Ireland, uses glowing terms to describe her country's miraculous economic turnaround in recent years thanks to the digital economy. But in her speech to the Global Internet Summit at George Mason University in Virginia, she injected a new realism in the story, noting that, "despite our recent success, in a rapidly changing environment you really are, as they say in football, only as good as your last game. We know that in a world of 'Internet time,' flexibility is at a premium."
But creativity happens to be an Irish strongpoint, she noted, which gives her confidence the nation will endure global economic difficulties just fine. Ireland has the highest percentage of people younger than 35 in Europe and now has some 1,200 foreign companies, half of which come from the United States, she said.
Her message is that the government is not leaving the future to chance because it is bolstering education programs, pouring funds into research, technology and innovation, and advancing telecommunications. Ireland also has become a major location for Web hosting, capitalizing on its up-to-date infrastructure.
Harney also said the government is maintaining a business-friendly, "light regulatory touch" — except where it could provide a legal underpinning for digital transactions. She said Ireland is pushing a business-sensitive approach in the various legislative fronts affecting online activity, such as jurisdiction, intellectual property rights, data privacy, cyber crime and cyber security.
EU Internet Users Close To U.S. Levels
The number of Internet users in the 15 EU countries rose 55 percent between March and October of last year, and Europe now has nearly as many Internet users as the United States, the European Commission reported this week.
In an analysis of its e-Europe program released in advance of the EU Summit in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 23-24, the European Commission found that the biggest contributor was a drop in Internet access prices and a rapid rise in school connectivity. But the region is lagging in use of the Internet to conduct business, it found.
The report identified several future priorities for the program, including more e-government to provide basic services to citizens online, and rapid movement to implement e-commerce and e-signature directives. It also proposed an early warning system on security problems, more computers for students and continued growth in mobile-phone penetration.
Separately, the European Commission has announced that it will launch a forum for law enforcement officials, Internet service providers, consumer groups and others to discuss ways to combat cyber crime. The forum may begin work as soon as May, according to EU Justice Commissioner Antonio Vitorino.
Let's Not Labor Over Trade
President Bush has said the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will be a key component of his trade agenda, but negotiations have hit a stalemate over the inclusion of labor standards in the agreement. In preparation for the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in April, an international group of policy experts has developed a working paper called "Breaking the Labor-Trade Deadlock" that makes several suggestions.
The paper was published jointly by the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and was written by Scott Otteman of the IAD, Staci Warden of Carnegie, Sidney Weintraub of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Phil Potter of the NAFTA Institute, in consultation with a broad swath of hemispheric trade experts.
The authors argue that using trade sanctions to enforce labor standards is misdirected and unfair. They concluded that after years of trying, it is clear that the United States cannot get the 32 developing nations of the hemisphere — out of the 34 democratic nations — to agree to such sanctions in a trade agreement. Developing countries fear sanctions will be used in a "protectionist" way by the larger economies.
Instead, the authors propose an approach that stresses cooperation over confrontation, and enforcement mechanisms without sanctions. The approach also should make national compliance with core labor standards the main objective, respect diversity between nations and target the wrongdoer with specific penalties, they argue.
The authors back the view held by many business groups that labor standards should be addressed within the U.N. International Labor Organization rather than the World Trade Organization. They propose an independent work program on labor issues that would run parallel to trade negotiations, using the FTAA process as a testing ground.
"This is an effort to put together, in the most specific way possible, some ideas that can truly contribute to the incremental but real progress on labor standards and their enforcement in developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere," Otteman said in an interview, "while at the same time allowing trade negotiations that can help foster the economic growth that developing countries need to raise their living standards to proceed."
India To Introduce IT Convergence Law
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said this week that his government soon would enact a law to facilitate the convergence of information technology, telecommunications and broadcast technologies. He offered few details at this time.
NEW FEATURE
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
