Orbicom, PAN-IDRC, UNDP-APDIP and Southbound launched in September the Digital Review of Asia Pacific which provides a quick overview of how ICTs are being deployed across the region to facilitate socioeconomic development. Two editions of this publication are planned. The 2003/2004 edition focuses on nine areas about the Internet: local online content, online services, industries, key local and national initiatives, enabling policies, regulatory environment, open source movement, research and development, and trends.

The publication covers 27 economies in the region. There is also a special chapter on the Pacific Islands which overviews 14 island states. Thirty authors, who live and work in the region, contributed towards the researching and writing of the 28 chapters found in the book. Many of them are digital pioneers who played active roles in extending the Internet across the Asia Pacific.

The Digital Review of Asia Pacific found the region to be a fascinating testbed of a wide range of strategies for Internet governance, publication of local content, and provision of online services. The variety of business and regulatory models being evolved reflect the diversity of the region which range from some of the economically and technologically most deprived countries to others which are world leaders and trendsetters in the digital industry.

Asians became the largest Internet user group at the end of 2001. An estimated 160 million users had gone online across Asia Pacific by then. They accounted for 33 percent of all Internet users in the world and nudged North American users from the top spot by just one percentage point.

What is significant about this is not Asia Pacific taking first place, but that the region had done so with such a small proportion of its population having Internet access to begin with. The most populous nations in the region also happen to have some of the lower Internet-user densities per 10,000 inhabitants - 68 for India, 191 for Indonesia, and 256 for China. The potential for the region is therefore vast.

However, Asia Pacific, as the largest user group in the world, exercises surprisingly limited influence on how the Internet is run at important forums such as ICANN. Asian participation is just as weak in legally binding international negotiations which determine how intellectual property is protected and exchanged. The publication urges more active engagement by Asians in such international governance issues. The attention in the region is presently overly focused on national Internet governance issues.

On the content front, the publication found that "linguistically-isolated" countries had the most active local content sectors. China, Japan and Korea all have thriving content providers within their countries publishing online information in their respective national languages. The other countries, with significant proportions of their population fluent in English, had less active content providers because their populations tended to turn to foreign sources of information.

Among the developing countries, the lack of commonly accepted electronic fonts for their languages remains a major impediment to the publication online of information in their national languages. Some of these counties have taken to publishing such information as very large pieces of graphic images which take a long time to download and clog up the limited bandwidth they have access to.

The text-based nature of Internet technologies is preventing about one fifth of the region's population, or about 614 million people, who are illiterate from ever making use of the Internet even if access is provided free-of-cost to them immediately. Development organisations in the region have conducted experiments on how illiterate Asians can be served by the Internet. The results of these experiments are encouraging and often involve broadcasting Internet content over community radio stations or community-based public address systems.

Visit the website of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific at http://www.digital-review.org for a more comprehensive introduction to this wide-ranging publication. The overview chapter and reports of various authors' working groups are available for free download at this website.

The UNDP-APDIP Digital Review project document can be found here.