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Toward A Bond With Brazil, Uruguay
by William New
The senior Commerce Department official for the technology industry traveled to Brazil and Uruguay last week to "look for ways to deepen the relationship in science and technology" that exists between the two nations.
The trip by Phil Bond, Commerce's undersecretary for the Technology Administration, came shortly before a U.S.-Brazil business summit in Washington on June 19. Bond said in an interview Monday that the trip particularly focused on what the governments can do to help small and medium-sized businesses, a stated interest for Brazilian President Ignacio (Lula) da Silva.
Bond was in Sao Paolo on Tuesday and Wednesday, Brasilia on Thursday and Rio de Janeiro on Friday. In the large, industrial city of Sao Paolo, he met with people from technical universities, with officials from Lucent Technologies and the American Chamber of Commerce, and with the Sao Paolo science and technology minister.
In Brasilia, the nation's capital, Bond met with Sen. Aloizio Mercadante, who is close to da Silva and a co-founder of the Workers' Party to which da Silva belongs. Bond also met with the vice ministers of communications, science and technology, and development, industry and trade.
In Rio, he toured INMETRO, the Brazilian equivalent of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is within the Technology Administration. He also met more officials from the ministry of development, industry and trade, and the American Chamber of Commerce.
Bond also visited a Microsoft-Hewlett Packard facility in Brazil where 7,500 people will be trained over the next three years to write the XML Internet code.
Plenty Of Issues To Discuss
Issues of discussion included da Silva's program for expanding to all Brazilians access to digital products and whether Brazil will adopt the U.S. standard for digital television despite lobbying from the European Union and Japan to adopt their standard. Bond said he also heard from Brazilian officials that patent approvals in that nation are backlogged.
Brazil is working on intellectual property legislation, and Bond said there is a lot of interest in cooperation between the United States and Brazil on that front, though he noted that "the question is always going to be about enforcement" of the law. With the works of Latin American recording artists being widely pirated, the incentive for those governments to prevent piracy is growing.
Officials also discussed the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative, Bond said, and the Brazilians voiced interest in a U.S. law that encourages intellectual property protection for research and development that helps turn research to commercial products. Mercadante also expressed interest in attracting to Brazil a fabrication plant for semiconductor chips.
The visit commemorated two milestones: 30 years of partnership between NIST and the Polytechnic Institute on metrology (the science of measurement) and policies to support it, and 25 years of partnership with INMETRO.
Bond said discussing Brazil's high tariffs on some foreign-produced technology was not a centerpiece of his visit, but he said he carries President Bush's message on the issue that free trade is good for all. That is noteworthy because of an apparent split in U.S. industry over Brazilian tariffs. The split is between those companies that now produce technology within the country and those that have to pay the tariffs to ship goods there.
Bond was in Montevideo, Uruguay, on Monday and saw the workforce touted as the most literate in South America. He said Uruguay has strengthened its intellectual property laws to near the standard in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement currently under negotiation.
Bond discussed Uruguay's potential to become a "major player" in the software industry and noted that it has attracted investment from a large Indian software company called Tata. In Montevideo, he met with seven of the country's 30 senators. He said it is important for a country to develop its own copyright industry so it can protect intellectual property.
The trip came as U.S.-Brazilian relations have reached a critical juncture in the FTAA talks, but Bond said his visit was not directly related to that negotiation. An official from Commerce's International Trade Administration accompanied him, and other senior Commerce officials have recently gone to the region or plan to go.
E-Government Leaders Meet At White House
Senior e-government officials from 20 countries met Monday at the White House Office of Management and Budget to discuss using technology to improve governance. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) organized the symposium.
The OECD recently published a report called the "The E-Government Imperative," which outlines 10 guiding principles for using technology to improve governance. One key issue is how to ensure the security of international data exchange.
"Modernizing services using e-government has become an essential part of the arsenal countries have at their disposal to remain economically competitive," OECD Deputy Secretary General Richard Hecklinger said. He was scheduled to report on the results of the symposium and of the OECD's e-government efforts at the forum in Washington on Wednesday.
Tidbits From Around The Globe
The Japanese Diet has enacted a new law banning Internet solicitation of sex with minors, the Japan Times reports. The law is aimed at reducing child prostitution and blackmail cases, which are rising as access to sex-service Web sites grows thanks to Internet-capable mobile phones. Fines will be imposed on offenders regardless of age or sex. In Japan, a minor is someone younger than 18. The law takes effect in three months.
Elsewhere in the world, China has given licenses to a number of state-owned businesses to open Internet café chains, a move seen as aimed at raising the government's control over Internet access by making it easier to track users online, Reuters reported this week. Chinese officials said the move is to "standardize" the industry. Some 95 percent of the 110,000 Chinese cafes are in private hands. Most of the 10 newly licensed firms are government owned.
In India on Monday, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini urged the country to accelerate the adoption of Wi-Fi, a wireless technology that allows high-speed Internet access within a few hundred yards of an access point. According to the Deccan Herald, Otellini said India's success with software and "back office" activities such as call centers for technology support needs to be coupled with wireless capabilities to improve the country's infrastructure. He said there are 27,000 new access points in the world every day, and India has only 100.
The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has launched a Web-based initiative called Youth Digital Creators for young people worldwide to express their creativity and connect with each other on societal issues such as HIV/AIDS, urbanization, linguistic diversity and the history of Africa. The project uses software to allow youth to create a series of textual, musical, visual or multimedia materials. The creation of digital art will be synchronized with online discussion forums. Virtual and live exhibitions and concerts also will be organized.
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