Open content gurus Lawrence Lessig and Jimmy Wales are optimistic about the role SA can play in promoting the concept of free content, but are dismayed at the lack of bandwidth availability.
Lessig, Creative Commons founder, and Wales, founder and CEO of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, are in the country to speak at the Digital Freedom Exposition, hosted by the University of the Western Cape.
Both men are exponents of reducing digital rights management to bring knowledge to every person in the world. This means "free culture" is distributing resources at a grass-roots level, freely and unlicensed.
They also acknowledged connectivity is a major problem for Africa. They puzzled over why the continent's governments, particularly SA's, have not allowed for the development of a situation where bandwidth is cheap and freely available by using free-market principles.
"I am frustrated and optimistic," Lessig said. "The cost of IT infrastructure in Africa is far too high. On the other hand, I am encouraged by the rate of adoption of cellular phones, but something needs to be done to allow for broadband prices to come down."
Backward telecoms politics
He said it was understandable for some countries that depended heavily on the revenue their telecommunications utilities generated, but for SA this should not be the case.
"It is a case of backward telecoms politics. I am surprised it has taken so long for SA to act. There is no good justification for the situation," Lessig said.
Almost five years after the partial privatisation of Telkom, to prepare the country for telecoms competition, SA still does not have an effective second national operator and consumers pay connection fees that are up to 139% higher than in other countries.
This has left only 2% of SA's more than 27 000 schools with broadband connectivity. Lessig said this hampers the distribution and creation of free resources to the people who need them.
Wales said Wikipedia has attempted to create an offline version by burning CDs, but this had proved unmanageable.
"Wikipedia just keeps growing and we now have more than 1.5 million articles in English alone, with articles in more than 180 languages now. It is also difficult to use over a cellphone, but we are working on that," he said.
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