7/7/1999

The 21st Century is going to look a lot like the 19th century, thanks to the internet.
A recent study in the aftermath of the Asian financial storm (“Beyond The Crisis –
Asia’s Challenge for Recovery,” Dentsu Institute for Human Studies) found that citizens of Asian countries who speak English are far more likely to be online than those who don’t. The study, conducted in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta, found that English speakers were between two and four times as likely to use the internet as their non-English speaking fellow citizens. Within each country, this is a familiar story of haves and have-nots, but in the connections between countries something altogether different is happening — the internet is creating an American version of the British Empire, with the English language playing the role of the Royal Navy.

This isn’t about TCP/IP — in an information economy the vital protocol is language,
written and spoken language. In this century, trade agreements have tended to revolve around moving physical goods across geographical borders: ASEAN, EU, OAS, NAFTA. In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods, the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common. The map of the world is being redrawn along these axes: traders in London are closer to their counterparts in New York than in Frankfurt, programmers in Sydney are closer to their colleagues in Vancouver than in Taipei. This isn’t an entirely English phenomenon: on the internet, Lisbon is closer to Rio than to Vienna, Dakar is closer to Paris than to Nairobi.

This linguistic map is vitally important for the wealth of nations — as the Dentsu
study suggests, the degree to which a country can plug into a “language network,”
especially the English network, will have much to do with its place in the 21st century
economy. These language networks won’t just build new connections, they’ll tear at
existing ones as well. Germany becomes a linguistic island despite its powerhouse
economy. Belgium will be rent in two as its French- and Flemish-speaking halves link
with French and Dutch networks. The Muslim world will see increasing connection among its Arabic-speaking nations — Iraq, Syria, Egypt — and decreasing connections with its non-Arabic-speaking members. (Even the translation software being developed reflects this bias: given the expense of developing translation software, only languages with millions of users — standard versions of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German — will make the cut.) And as we would expect of networks with different standards, gateways will arise; places where multi-lingual populations will smooth the transition between language networks. These gateways — Hong Kong, Brussels, New York, Delhi — will become economic centers in the 21st century because they were places where languages overlapped in the 19th.

There are all sorts of reasons why none of this should happen — why the Age of Empire shouldn’t be resurrected, why countries that didn’t export their language by force should suffer, why English shouldn’t become the Official Second Language of the 21st century — but none of those reasons will matter. We know from the 30-year history of the internet that when a new protocol is needed to continue internet growth, it’ll be acquired at any expense. What the internet economy demands more than anything right now is common linguistic standards. In the next 10 years, we will see the world’s languages sorted into two categories — those that form part of language networks will grow, and those that don’t will shrink, as the export of languages in the last century reshapes the map of the next one.

Published in ACM, 12/1999.

The 21st Century is going to look a lot like the 19th century, thanks to the internet. A recent study in the aftermath of the Asian financial storm (“Beyond The Crisis – Asia’s Challenge for Recovery,” Dentsu Institute for Human Studies) found that citizens of Asian countries who speak English are far more likely to be online than those who don’t. The study, conducted in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta, found that English speakers were between two and four times as likely to use the internet as their non-English speaking fellow citizens. Within each country, this is a familiar story of haves and have-nots, but in the connections between countries something altogether different is happening — the internet is creating an American version of the British Empire, with the English language playing the role of the Royal Navy.

This isn’t about TCP/IP — in an information economy the vital protocol is language, written and spoken language. In this century, trade agreements have tended to revolve around moving physical goods across geographical borders: ASEAN, EU, OAS, NAFTA. In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods, the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common. The map of the world is being redrawn along these axes: traders in London are closer to their counterparts in New York than in Frankfurt, programmers in Sydney are closer to their colleagues in Vancouver than in Taipei. This isn’t an entirely English phenomenon: on the internet, Lisbon is closer to Rio than to Vienna, Dakar is closer to Paris than to Nairobi.

This linguistic map is vitally important for the wealth of nations — as the Dentsu study suggests, the degree to which a country can plug into a “language network,” especially the English network, will have much to do with its place in the 21st century economy. These language networks won’t just build new connections, they’ll tear at existing ones as well. Germany becomes a linguistic island despite its powerhouse economy. Belgium will be rent in two as its French- and Flemish-speaking halves link with French and Dutch networks. The Muslim world will see increasing connection among its Arabic-speaking nations — Iraq, Syria, Egypt — and decreasing connections with its non-Arabic-speaking members. (Even the translation software being developed reflects
this bias: given the expense of developing translation software, only languages with millions of users — standard versions of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German — will make the cut.) And as we would expect of networks with different standards, gateways will arise; places where multi-lingual populations will smooth the transition between language networks. These gateways — Hong Kong, Brussels, New York, Delhi — will become economic centers in the 21st century because they were places where languages overlapped in the 19th.

There are all sorts of reasons why none of this should happen — why the Age of Empire shouldn’t be resurrected, why countries that didn’t export their language by force should suffer, why English shouldn’t become the Official Second Language of the 21st century — but none of those reasons will matter. We know from the 30-year history of the internet that when a new protocol is needed to continue internet growth, it’ll be acquired at any expense. What the internet economy demands more than anything right now is common linguistic standards. In the next 10 years, we will see the world’s languages sorted into two categories — those that form part of language networks will grow, and those that don’t will shrink, as the export of languages in the last century reshapes the map of the next one.

First published in FEED, 7/15/99.

The United Nations released its annual Human Development Report this week, including a section concerning the distribution of Internet use among the nations of the world. It painted a picture of massively unequal distribution, showing among other things that the United States has a hundred times more Internet users per capita than the Arab States, and that Europe has 70 times more users per capita than sub-Saharan Africa.
Surveying the adoption rates detailed in this report, anyone who has any contact with the Internet can only be left with one thought — “Well, duh.” There is some advantage to quantifying what is common knowledge, but the UN has muddied the issues here rather than clarifying them.

Is there really anybody who could be surprised that the country that invented the internet has more users per capita than Qatar? Is there really anyone who can work themselves up over the lack of MyYahoo accounts in nations that also lack clean water? The truth of the matter is that internet growth is not gradual, it is a phase change — when a country crosses some threshold of readiness, demand amongst its citizens explodes. Beneath that threshold, trying to introduce the internet by force is like pushing string — its is absurd to put internet access on the same plane as access to condoms and antibiotics.

Once a country reaches that threshold, though, there is one critical resource that drives internet adoption, and the UN desperately wants that resource to be money. Among the UN’s proposals is a “bit tax” (one penny per 100 emails) to build out telecommunications infrastructure in the developing world. While improving infrastructure is an admirable goal, it fudges the real issue: among countries who are ready for rapid internet adoption, the most important resource isn’t per capita income but per
capita freedom. Massive internet adoption of the sort the UN envisions will require an equally massive increase in political freedom, and the UN is in no position to say that part out loud.

The HDR report is hamstrung by the UN’s twin goals of advancing human rights and respecting national sovereignty. Where the internet is concerned, these goals are incompatible. The United Arab Emirates has a much better telecom infrastructure than Argentina, but a lower per capita use of the internet. Saudi Arabia has a higher per capita income than Spain but lower internet penetration. What Argentina has more of
than the UAE is neither infrastructure, nor money, but the right of the citizens to get information from a wide variety of sources, and their willingness to exercise that right. Among nations of relatively equal development, it will be the freer nations and not the richer ones that adopt the internet fastest.

The report addresses this issue by suggesting a toothless campaign to “…persuade national governments not to restrict access to the internet because of its tremendous potential for human development,” avoiding mentioning that the “potential for human development” is a death sentence for many of the world’s leaders. If the UN was serious
about driving internet adoption, the section on the internet would have started with the following declaration: “Attention all dictators: internet access is the last stop for your regime. You can try to pull into the station gradually, as China and Kuwait are trying to do, or you can wait to see what happens when you plow into the wall at full speed, like North Korea and Kenya, but the one thing you can’t do is keep going full steam ahead. Enjoy your ride.”