Talk 1: Digital Discrimination? Ethnicity and Internet Access in a Global Perspective, Nils Weidmann

The global expansion of modern information and communication technology is increasingly affecting also the less developed regions of the world. Many argue that this technology is able to spur political mobilization and dissent. In this paper, we turn the question around. Rather than asking about the effects of technology, we go one step back and ask whether governments allow their marginalized populations access to modern communication channels such as the Internet in the first place. By using a newly developed measure of Internet penetration that relies on remote network measurements and combining it with data about ethnic group settlement regions, we show that political exclusion is a strong and robust predictor of lower Internet penetration at the group level. Thus, we conclude that digital discrimination for political reasons is real, which casts doubt on the assumption that ICT-induced ethnic mobilization will be able to improve the situation of marginalized ethnic populations.

Talk 2/Demo: Estimating Global Internet Penetration from Network Measurements, Petros Gigis/Xenofontas Dimitropoulos

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provide Internet penetration statistics, which are collected from official national sources worldwide, and they are widely used to inform policymakers and researchers about the expansion of digital technologies. Nevertheless, these statistics are derived with methodologies, which are often opaque and inconsistent across countries. In this work, we make a first attempt to evaluate the consistency of the ITU/OECD Internet penetration statistics with an alternative indicator of Internet penetration, which can be measured with a consistent methodology across countries and relies on open data. We compare, in particular, the ITU and OECD statistics with measurements of the used IPv4 address space across countries and find very high correlations ranging between 0.898 and 0.978 for all years between 2006 and 2010. We then introduce inter-active visualizations of Internet growth, measured with our methodology, versus various political and economical indicators, such as 1) the GDP and corruption index of the 92 biggest countries in population and 2) the electoral results for the different states within US.