Internet Governance Priorities and Practices: Thailand

Internet use in the Asia-Pacific region has grown in leaps and bounds over the last decade. Between 2000 and 2003 alone the Internet population in the region grew by an annual average of 38 percent to 250 million users, making the Asia-Pacific region the world's largest Internet community. Estimates put this number today at over 300 million and predict further strong growth. These impressive numbers notwithstanding, overall penetration rates are still very low in most countries...

A product of the Open Regional Dialogue on Internet Governance (ORDIG) project, this 29-page report shares results from a year-long process of various online and in-person consultation as well as research activities on internet governance priorities for the Asia-Pacific region. Overall, more than 3,000 individuals from over 37 countries in the region participated in some way in this initiative, which is implemented by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) in collaboration with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

Specifically, the report draws on an online survey of 57 individuals from all stakeholder groups in Thailand. It examines internet policy issues, such as how people living in Thailand regard viruses, cyber attacks, and spam - as well as governance issues and opinions about two new and emerging technologies: wireless internet and internet telephony. A selection of specific findings includes:

• Thailand has considerably expanded its international internet capacity, but relative to population size the deployed bandwidth is still limited: internet penetration rates in Thailand - through reaching almost double the level of China, triple that of Indonesia, and six times the penetration in India - are only a quarter of the average in industrialised countries in the region. Moreover, estimates by NECTEC indicate that 28% of internet usage in the country is concentrated in the Bangkok area alone, a level of concentration that has only modestly fallen over the last years.
• Virus attacks and online fraud are on the rise and becoming ever more sophisticated and spam mail has reached epidemic levels in Thailand. In response, Thailand established a computer emergency response centre in 2000; cyber crime legislation is still in preparation.
• Thai internet stakeholders rate the status quo of access and affordability of the internet considerably more positively than in other Asia-Pacific countries. The main focus of concern has shifted to issues of reliability and speed, but cost and access challenges persist outside urban areas. Although "current regulations and practices in Thailand with regard to backbone access [and] international link ownership and Internet telephony are quite restrictive and do not appear to optimally support such a dynamic service environment..., Thailand has recently made important progress by establishing an independent regulatory authority and delicensing certain types of use of wireless Internet technologies."
• Issues of controlling harmful content and protecting privacy online also feature very prominently on the priority list of the Thai internet community; privacy legislation is under deliberation and the police is filtering an increasing number of websites with harmful content.
• Thailand receives good marks on the availability of government information online, a performance that is underpinned by a constitutional guarantee for the right to information and specific freedom of information legislation.