NICT in Third World Development: Political Issues in a Transformed Telecommunications Regime

In September 1993 the U.S. government launched its National Information Infrastructure (NII) initiative. Though this was a broad and rather unspecific ‘agenda for action,’ it gave worldwide publicity to the issue of developing the NICT infrastructure, invoking the powerful metaphor of the ‘Information Super-Highway.’1 In the following year, the U.S. government extended the NII concept to an international level, calling for a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) initiative (Gore 1994). This spurred most other countries to develop their own version of a national NICT development strategy: by now, almost all Third World governments can point to some program or plan in this field.