1 week Ago By Mondu Alfa
Internet development in Nigeria started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It has now become an integral part of our lives, changing the way we communicate, work, learn, and access information. Knowing the importance of internet connectivity for national development, the government established a regulatory body, the National Communication Commission (NCC) for the telecommunications industry.
The Commission has since been facilitating internet development in the country through the implementation of policies and regulation to encourage investment, competition, and infrastructure development. This saw the emergence of private sector internet service providers (ISPs), offering internet connectivity services to businesses and individuals. The internet development in the country also saw the landing of sub-marine fibre optic cables along the country’s coastline.
These cables such as the Main One Cable, GLO-1, and the West African Cable System (WACS), significantly increased the country’s bandwidth capacity and improved internet speed and reliability. With the launching of the National Broadband Plan in 2013, the government looks forward to providing broadband connectivity to at least 70% of Nigerians by 2025. Nonetheless, the question is how can Nigeria and other countries ensure their sovereignty in this era of total digital transparency – opening data and providing functionality for processing the data using all kinds of websites.
It is in this regard that the dominance of the United States on the internet becomes a complex issue. While some observers argue that the US internet giants like Amazon, Apple, META, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Google have remade the world in their own image, others point out that the US software industry was stimulated by the free-wheeling exchange of ideas and contributions from programmers. But the point is that the global internet is being managed by US-based organizations dominated by US-based businesses and led by US tech companies.
It means the security of the United States becomes the beacon for the behavior of all other nations and international organizations operating in the cyber space. That is why the US is lobbying, according to observers, for the dominance of American IT firms in the domestic markets of other countries. That means that other nations would have to abandon their own independent support for their cyber capabilities, since the ‘’Supreme Defender’’ has already taken care of everything.
Surprisingly European governments openly confronted American IT corporations on this score, in particular Google and Microsoft. In each case, it was for something different. For example, for Germany and Greece, it was connected with the Google Street View project, a feature of Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate through 360 degree horizontal and 290-degree vertical panoramic street level images of various cities around the world.
For France it was with attempts to digitize its library collections But in each case the European nations tried to put a barrier to the immense digital presence of the US on their territories. The point is that they want to rely on their own IT companies, which on one hand, ensures their economic growth, on the other the security of their nations. The Nigerian government recently drafted the country’s first National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS).
The country’s goal in that draft to lead in AI is hinged on the pillar of developing a solid infrastructural foundation and enhanced computing capacity. That pillar emphasizes investing in AIspecific hardware and software, particularly through domestic solutions to reduce reliance on foreign technology. In fact the Chinese did what seemed impossible a long time ago.
They ousted American IT corporations from their domestic market, and are now actively buying them up. Lenovo bought IBM at one time and now is eyeing the Blackberry. Chinese So, the first principle of prohibiting access ta a foreign platform makes it possible for citizens to use the national one.
The second principle is to identify a set of key topics that can affect the life of the country in a destabilizing way. The goal is not only to secure the country’s cyber sovereignty but to abort cyber incidents and breaches that multinationals and nation –states could suffer, culminating in monumental financial loss, with the attendant implications for business continuity..
