Town of Kraskovo coat of arms (from the official site)

Russian activists gathered in Kraskovo, a small town near Moscow, to call for increasing broadband Internet access and protest against Internet provider monopoly.  The activists also talked about superficial regulations that slow down the development of wide Internet access in the country.

The story goes back to the beginning of 2008 when an Internet service provider (ISP) “CDMS, Ltd” ( “Creative Direct Marketing Solutions”) announced its plans to offer broadband Internet access to the residents of Kraskovo.  Russian laws require an ISP to obtain a permission from municipal authorities before offering its services in any town. An ISP also has to get an approval of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and install a hardware that would potentially allow to sniff the Internet traffic.

With 10 years of experience in business, the CDMS got used to all sorts of bureaucratic hurdles. The vice-president of the company Vladimir Korvatsky (lj-user korvatsky [RUS]) writes on his blog that minor problems with local authorities are nothing new but Kraskovo case is different.

According to a Russian newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets [RUS], when the CDMS applied for a permission to install Ethernet-network in Kraskovo, Mikhail Chuiko, a newly elected mayor, sent the application back with a note that the process should be coordinated with the FSB “to ensure protection against terrorists.” When the FSB finally authorized the application, the mayor requested another approval from the security service. This time he wanted the FSB to investigate the company.

This shouldn't surprise anyone in Russia. Government officials usually come up with many excuses to delay the approval process so they can make businesses pay a bribe to speed it up. But, unlike in many similar cases, the Kraskovo authorities did not want any bribes from the CDMS. They stopped all contacts with the company representatives and showed that they did not want the CDMS to enter local ISP market.

Kraskovo currently has two ISPs offering a broadband access: netts.ru and avk-wellcom.ru. Korvatsky states [RUS] that his and other companies are not allowed into the town because of strong ties and commercial interests uniting local ISPs and the town authorities.

Vladimir Korvatsky and the youth organization “Our Yard” organized a protest against the status quo with ISPs in the town:

The Moscow Region Anti-monopoly Service recently issued a statement [RUS] declaring that the Kraskovo authorities violate anti-monopoly law.

This case is far from being unique. There are thousands of small Russian towns where people don't have a luxury of the broadband services. Very often geographical isolation and the lack of initiative are just excuses for widespread corruption of local administrations in those towns. The example of Kraskovo shows how ISPs try to overcome those issues by taking public actions. At the same time,  it gives an additional reason for local authorities to accuse the ISPs of astroturfing.

Beckii Cruel started to gain popularity at the end of this year thanks to some videos posted on YouTube where she appears dancing in her room, to the tune of anime songs, attracting the interest of inveterate fans of anime and manga.
After becoming a celebrity on the Internet as user xBextahx, she was invited to perform in Akihabara, the district in eastern Tokyo that is widely acknowledged as the symbol of the otaku culture [en].

bluecafe09k48 sums up Beckii's profile for us.

イギリス・マン島在住の美少女、１４歳ですね～。
マンガ「フルーツバスケット」を読んで以来、
日本のオタク文化に嵌ったのが３年前とのこと。
ベッキー・クルーエル自身が日本のアニメソングなどで踊っている動画を
ＹｏｕＴｕｂｅで公開したのが今年の３月くらいから。
「男女」がニコニコ動画に転載されたのが５月頃で、人気が爆発。

PV of Danjo (男女)

Beckii Cruel's popularity is certainly a Japanese phenomenon, as demonstrated by the fact that the only Wikipedia entry on her is in Japanese. However, the word of mouth has spread also among those foreigners who are passionate fans of Akihabara and the otaku culture in general.

GodLen, at Animevice. com, for example, comments with a bit of mock jealousy on the British idol's career.

Beckii Cruel, oh how I wish I were her, for she is the Cinderella story of the otaku world. This 14-year-old girl from England has won over the hearts of moe-loving otaku in Japan by posting videos of herself dancing to anime and Jpop songs on youtube. Yesterday she had the opportunity to dance in front of over 600 fans at the Enta Matsuri in Akihabara; amazing, and it all started with a youtube video. Now she has a DVD coming out in Japan (which you can pre-order now) that features her dancing her dance, and being overall moe.

Sankei News interview to Beckii Cruel at Akihabara Enta Festival

Beckii Cruel, who was recently chosen by candy and sweets maker Lotte to promote the Fit's Dance Contest together with other celebrities, performed live for the first time at Akihabara Enta Festival on October 25 [here are some pictures of the show].

First rumours showed up on microblogging platforms such as Blip.pl. One of the users - shunkiano - wrote this (POL) on Nov. 1 :

Am I wrong, or OdSiebie doesn't exist anymore?

Then it was that OdSiebie.com was being shut down, and final confirmations started to show up on blogs. Paolo wrote (POL):

[…] Free hosting portal OdSiebie.com is rumoured to have been shut down. We are getting reports that the police have arrested its owner and creator [Łukasz Ć.], and also confiscated 200 CDs [with illegal copyrighted material] and four hard drives. The police have also secured userlogs. […]

Users started to be scared because the police said that they also had access to user logs of OdSiebie.com, and another rumour emerged - this time that users might be arrested as well. On Blip.pl, user frk wrote (POL):

Owner of OdSiebie.com was arrested. Police have user logs. Let's be careful.

There was much reaction to these actions in the blogosphere and throughout the Internet in Poland. First of all, it led to a protest organised by other users, which was highly popular on Wykop.pl (a service similar to Digg):

And here's a comment (POL) from Piotr Vagla, a blogger who writes about legal issues and the Internet:

Creators of YouTube have never been arrested, but I've read that owner of OdSiebie.com has just been arrested by police. Łukasz Ć. gave public interviews, saying that his portal was cool, and was making plans for the future. He also stated that the whole affair around the Swedish [The Pirate Bay] site was only a result of them not cooperating with any anti-piracy group. I don't know whether he worked with such a group but it seems that if he did, it didn't help him much. […]

At this moment, it's not clear whether the police are going to make arrests of OdSiebie.com users, although some people say so. No one has been arrested yet.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be used to support and encourage cultural diversity and to preserve and promote the language, distinct identities and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes in a manner which they determine best advances these goals. The evolution of the information and communication societies must be founded on the respect and promotion of the rights of Indigenous peoples, nations and tribes and our distinctive and diverse cultures, as outlined in international conventions. We have fundamental and collective rights to protect, preserve and strengthen our own languages, cultures and identities.

But can ICT truly preserve and protect distinct identities and culture? Does ICT by its very intervention introduce an element of westernization amidst the indigenous culture that it purports to preserve and protect? What is the optimum balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture? The cultural debate surrounding deployment of ICT in the field of indigenous/ knowledge and culture simply refuses to die down.

According to Mark Oppenneer, “the implementation of ICTs in service to indigenous peoples in development settings is a double-edged sword”, as both the critics and proponents of ICT4D have seemingly irreconcilable perspectives.

Questioning the cultural neutrality of the ICT medium, Charles Ess, in his paper “Questioning the Obvious? Ethical and Cultural Dimensions of CMC and ICTs” states that

[..]. Far from serving as value-free or morally-neutral tools, CMC (Computer mediated Communication) technologies themselves appear to embed and foster the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers. As a first example: South Africa has attempted to establish Learning Centres intended to empower indigenous peoples by helping them take advantage of the multiple potentials and capacities of ICTs. A series of observers have noted, however, that these Centres repeatedly fail – in part, because of basic cultural conflicts. Briefly, the Centres reflect their designer’s Western emphasis on individual and silent learning – in contrast with indigenous preferences for learning in collaborative and often noisy, performative ways (Postma 2001). This conflict is also captured in Edward T. Hall’s distinction between high and low context cultures (1976). In this schema, contemporary societies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Germanic countries show a preference for literate (i.e., textual), high content (but low context) information transfer – while societies such as Arabic cultures, indigenous peoples, and many Asian cultures prefer instead more oral, low content (but high context) modes of communication.

[…] Similarly, Western Group Support Systems (GSS) that favor anonymity as a feature intended to encourage open and direct communication proved disastrous in the Confucian cultures of South Asia, as this indeed succeeded in encouraging subordinates to make comments that were culturally interpreted – and condemned – as attacks on one’s “face” (Abdat and Pervan 2000). These and multiple other examples make clear that CMC technologies carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences - ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains.

Secondly, because these technologies thus clearly embed and foster specific cultural values and communicative preferences - the initial enthusiasm for these technologies inadvertently but powerfully only aids and abets a form of “computer-mediated colonization” that threatens to override diverse cultural values and communicative preferences with those defining the dominant economic and political powers of the West.

While Ess, worried about the medium defeating the intended purpose of preservation, calls for a more culturally-aware framework, others have pointed out that such concerns are not entirely correct.

In response to a query by David Sasaki, director of Global Voices' Rising Voices section, as to whether or not helping under-represented communities join the online global conversation inevitably leads to their westernization/Americanization,  Álvaro Ramírez and Diego Gomez, co-founders of the HiperBarrio project, spoke of the community adapting Western culture to their own needs, infusion of new knowledge and broadening horizons.

Citing the example of hip-hop music, Alvaro pointed out that for the community, while there was definitely some US influence, the issue was not so much Americanization as adapting something western to their own needs. So it was not only about getting influenced but exerting influence as well, giving birth to something new, new knowledge or culture. Diego noted that the project had also opened up other doors of communication beyond westernization.

I think that in this project especially they have been influenced not just by Americans they now begin to think about India, Dubai, and other cultures that they didn't know existed before. Or they didn't have much reference.

Projects such as the E-Bario project in Malaysia, Community project of the indigenous Ngalia and Badimaya people of Western Australia, the Alan - Gluban project in Taiwan are a few cases in point.

In the final analysis, as Mark Oppenneer points out

…the critics are right: misguided ICT4D implementation that doesn’t take into consideration a wide range of cultural factors and explicitly or implicitly imposes Western processes or structures upon indigenous recipients does constitute a new form of computer-mediated colonialism. And yes, the proponents of ICT4D are right: ICTs, when implemented thoughtfully and respectfully – keeping the needs of the recipients at the fore – can be powerful agents of change in the fight to reduce poverty and improve the lives of marginalized peoples in developing nations.

In his 2008 presentation, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - The Role of ICTs, Jesse Fidler listed various possibilities for ICT to actively engage the indigenous communities and realize their visions.

And as far as preserving the pristine, isolated local culture is concerned, Professor Amartya Sen perhaps summed it up best in his talk at the 3rd IDRC/ Harvard Forum on the future of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) when he said that there is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture”, or ”culture that exists in isolation”.