Riyadh Al-Balushi

The Telecommunication Regulation Authority has made it very clear in a recent press release that it has no intention of allowing the providers of unlicensed voice over internet protocol services (VoIP) to operate in the Sultanate – in other words, the TRA is saying that you should not expect Skype to be unblocked anytime soon.
The TRA does not technically ban VoIP services, instead, it requires that all providers of VoIP services apply for a license before they are allowed to provide such a service in the country. For example, Nawras is properly licensed to provide VoIP services in Oman, and it does offer VoIP through a dial-in number to have reduced rates to make calls to the Indian subcontinent. These rates are reduced, but they are not cheap, and they are obviously not available for other countries around the world.

It is great that the TRA thinks that consumers would be more protected against fraud and other wrongdoings that may be done by the provider, and there is no doubt that the economy could benefit from the taxation of the profits of those who register to provide VoIP services in Oman, but the fact is that Oman is such a small market and it is very unlikely for the big players to find it worthwhile their time and effort to come all the way here just to register to satisfy the legal requirements of the TRA.

The loss of the opportunity to make profit out of the Omani market is negligible to international businesses; the real losers here are us the Omani consumers. We have to pay extortionate fees to stay in touch with our family and friends outside the country, even those in places as close as the UAE and Qatar. Every day new technologies come out that make use of VoIP in one way or another and we never get the opportunity to make full use these technologies like the rest of the world because of the TRA’s policy to block all VoIP applications. Just think of the iPhone’s FaceTime and the hundreds of other applications on new smartphones for voice and video chat. While we do have an extortionate alternative to Skype (just use your regular phone to make an international phone call), the same cannot be said for all these new and crippled technologies which we are not allowed to use. Oman Mobile and Nawras are not capable of providing us with an alternative to FaceTime even if we pay them for it.

It is widely believed that the real reason why Skype is blocked is because the TRA wishes to protect the interests of local companies and help them make money off international phone calls, this will not be hard to believe if you think of the incentive the TRA would have to cut off this revenue stream from Omantel, a company in which the government still holds a very significant share. This desire to protect the business of making phone calls is very short-sighted. It is true that the widespread of VoIP could lead to a reduction of the use of regular voice services, but it will surely help promote the use of data services which are needed to use VoIP and any other technology used to communicate over the internet.

The TRA has to reconsider the way VoIP is regulated, Oman cannot seriously consider transforming itself into a knowledge-based economy when the basic means of communicating this knowledge are blocked and crippled for the sake of providing local businesses with an opportunity to make money off old and inefficient services.

The greatest achievement from the protests taking place all around the country, in my opinion, is the fact that people now feel that they can freely express themselves and say what is on their mind without fear of prosecution. The Basic Statute of the State has stipulated freedom of expression as a guaranteed right, yet the majority would not dare to practice that right due to their lack of awareness of the extent to which they can do so and cultural and societal barriers against publicly criticising other people and government officials. That is no longer the case as the current situations has proved that the government is willing to tolerate a great level of freedom of expression, especially as we now see people at the “Speaker’s Corner” of the Shura Council, the reports on TV and newspapers, and the hundreds of videos on YouTube showing Omani people criticising publicly government officials and telling corruption stories of former Ministers.
At the same time as this great step for freedom of expression in Oman, surprisingly, and for the first time, an Arabic Omani blog was blocked from being access in Oman presumably because of some leaked documents that were published on that blog. The blog of Ammar Al Maamari has always been one of the most controversial Omani blogs, as he has again and again published confidential documents suggesting the corruption of certain government officials. This time Ammar got his hands on a sound recording of the former Minister of Interior threatening in to use brutal force to remove the protestors from Sohar Roundabout; a number of very old documents showing that a formal order was made by the government to tap the phone calls of a Omani political activist, and some medical records of the victims of the incident of police clash at Sohar Roundabout.

The sound recording of the former Minister of Interior was not really confidential and all those invited to that meeting were supposed to inform the public that force will be used if the protestors do not leave the roundabout – that was the whole point of the meeting. The Minister of Interior was also removed from his position and a now Minister has been appointed, so there really isn’t anything to worry about relating to this issue. The second set of documents regarding the order to tap phone calls of the activist is a really old matter and it is not relevant to anything happening right now. What I am more concerned about is the last set of documents relating to the medical records of those injured at the roundabout. In reality, these documents did not contribute to the uncovering of any major government secret – the government made a statement that one person was killed and the leaked medical records say that.

I do not support the illegal disclosure of confidential documents, especially those that relate to private confidential matters of individuals, especially as this leak seems to be made for the sake of getting some attention and causing more chaos, yet I still believe that it is wrong to block someone’s website. In this situation it might have been difficult for the authorities to take legal action against the blogger because he is not based in Oman, but that does not really make blocking the website justified because even if you block it the content will just be republished elsewhere – we still read what he posted even after the blog was blocked. Censorship should never be an option because it just does not work.

I do not know if the decision to block this website was made by a low-level officer or someone really senior, but as the Cabinet of Ministers has gone through a major restructure last week, I do hope that the government reconsiders its position in relation to internet censorship so that it goes in line with the new expectation in society to be able to freely express yourselves and share your point of view with everyone else.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

A new Cybercrime Law was recently issued by Royal Decree 12/2011. This new law criminalizes a very wide set of activities that relate to information technology systems and websites. Prior to the passing of the Cybercrime Law, issues of cybercrime were somewhat fragmentarily regulated by the Criminal Law and various bits and pieces of different legislation. This new law has a comprehensively wide scope and makes offense a variety of activities that may be performed using technology ranging from accessing a website or an information system without authorization and defacing a website, to using information technology methods for the purpose of money laundering, trafficking in people, and organizing terrorist groups – just to mention a few of the things specified in the Cybercrime Law.
A very interesting aspect of the new Cybercrime Law is the new offense of using the internet or any information technology means such as camera-equipped mobile phones to violate the sanctity of private and family life of individuals through the capture of photographs or spreading news, sound or video recordings connected to it, even if the information disclosed is true.

I do not believe that we ever had a provision in the law in Oman before which explicitly addresses the issue of privacy in such a manner. This provision is distinct from defamation or insults as the act will be considered an offence even if it exposes a true fact about the person – as long as that fact is private. The true scope of the provision is unknown yet, and even though it is limited to situations involving information technology, the fact that it now exists is a great accomplishment for the Omani legal system in attempting to protect basic human rights such as the right for privacy and family life. It is unfortunate though that the law seems to be limited to the mere concept of privacy to have sensitive information about your life not exposed and does not extend the right of privacy in the sense of having the right to be left alone which could have helped regulate the practice of sending unsolicited commercial messages and spam.

Another interesting provision in the new Cybercrime Law is the prohibition of using the internet or information technology methods to produce, display, distribute, make available, publish, purchase, sell, or import pornographic material as long as that material is not made for a scientific or a licensed artistic purpose. While the prohibition of pornographic material is not really something new, the fact that the law provides for an exemption for using what could be normally considered as pornographic material if that material is licensed to be used for an artistic work. This indicates a positive movement towards a generally more flexible system where people can be given the opportunity to experience artistic works in their original form without being censored or modified in order to abide by traditional rules of what is appropriate or not. The law does not go into detail as to what sort of works will qualify as artistic works or even the authority that is responsible for issuing this license, but at least we know now that censorship is not the only option.

The new Cybercrime Law is a comprehensive piece of legislation that touches upon a great number of offences and is clearly a move in the right direction.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

A couple of weeks ago the status of human rights in Oman was examined at the Universal Periodic Review of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the international community praised the efforts Oman has made for the continuous development of the country, but also pointed out that a lot can be done to help improve a number of human rights such as the existence of the capital punishment in Oman, the treatment of foreign labour, the formation of civil associations, and the freedom of expression. Oman stated that it will consider some of the recommendations made at the review and that it will report any actions it will take in regard to these recommendations.
Article 29 of the Basic Statute of the State of Oman guarantees the freedom of expression within the limits of the law. There is no such thing as an absolute freedom of expression because our right to freely express ourselves should not infringe on the rights of other people not to be insulted or defamed. The problem in Oman is that the scope of the offence of defamation is not clearly defined and the Criminal Law does not provide any helpful defences to protect those who have a legitimate reason to criticise others. In addition to this, the Telecommunication Law holds owners of websites strictly liable for comments made by other people on their website regardless of whether or not the owner of the website had a chance to look at that comment or whether or not the owner had any reason to think that this comment would be offensive to others.

The current recognition of freedom of expression by the Basic Statute of the State is not very helpful because we do not know its actual scope in real life, the law can certainly benefit from a revision that clearly defines what defamation means. Defamation should be considered as such only when someone makes an untrue statement about someone else that lowers the opinion of that person in the mind of other people. If a statement is true then there shall be no reason why someone should be punished for making that statement, even if that statement harms the reputation of a person. The concept of defamation should distinguish between expressions made as a statement of fact and expressions of opinion. Everyone should have the right to state his opinion regardless of whether people liked that opinion or not, but no one should be able to claim something as a fact when it is not.

What is even vaguer than the concept of defamation in the Criminal Law, is the concept of “a message contrary to public order and moral” specified in Article 61(4) of the Telecommunication Law and for which a webmaster can be held liable even if posted by other people on his website. The law should specify exactly what sort of messages would be offensive (defamation of people, insulting a religion, spreading racial hatred, etc) and then provide a workable mechanism for webmasters to have a defence against that defence in the situations where the webmaster did not have any reason to think that such a message was offensive or did not have any reasonable opportunity to remove the offensive content once he knew that the message will be considered as legally offensive.

The great thing about the Universal Periodic Review of the UN’s Office of High Commissioner of Human Rights is that it puts governments under the spot and forces them to at least consider ways by which they can improve human rights in their countries. It will be interesting to see how Oman officially responds to these recommendations, especially as one recommendation specifically suggested that Oman reviews its Telecommunications Law to help empower people to practise their right for the freedom of expression.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

It might be appropriate to consider Facebook and Twitter as the world’s latest tools for bringing about social and political change as they enable young change leaders to coordinate collective action, seek and connect with others who share the same belief, spread information to all these willing to take action, and share their experience with the rest of the world in real time.
It did not take the Egyptian government long to realize that Facebook and Twitter are fundamental resources for the opposition and decided that in order to suppress the opposition their mobilization tool had to be crippled – so the government decided to block internet access to Facebook, Twitter, and other viral websites, which unsurprisingly proved to be inadequate because proxies can easily be used to bypass such restriction, so Egypt decided to take a seriously extreme measure to ensure that the opposition does not take advantage of the resources of the internet: pull the internet plug for the entire country so that individuals, businesses, government offices, hospital, banks, and everyone else relying on public internet service to providers to connect to the internet does not have any access to it at all.

As crazy as it sounds, but that was the only way for Egypt to have absolute control over how its people use the internet. Due to the way the internet is structured, you cannot attempt to automatically or manually censor the internet. If you block access to a certain service the users will always find a way to bypass this restriction by using one proxy technology or another. The only efficient way to truly censor the internet would require the authority to disconnect the country from the whole world wide web exactly like Egypt did and consequently damage its communication infrastructure and bring about chaos to society.

To the current regime in Egypt disconnecting the whole country is in their opinion probably justified as they would do anything now to (b) stop protesters from being able to communicate with each other and (b) stop the rest of the world from learning about what the government does to its people.

We are witnessing what is probably the most modern form of being held captive – living in an information black hole – a country with no mobile phones, SMS messages, or internet access. Thinking about this from the comfort of our homes in such a peaceful country, we might declare that we also cannot survive without our internet connections (which we primarily use for entertainment purposes) but to the people of Egypt the internet is, in fact, vital at this point to their very survival. It might not be too far-fetched to claim that having the right for internet access may qualify as a human right to these people when you realize that many of the universally acknowledged human rights, such as the freedom of expression, the freedom to peacefully assemble, and the right to have access to knowledge and information, can barely have any significant meaning outside the internet at this day and age.

It is true that governments should run on the basis of openness and transparency, but confidentiality is still a fundamental tool that every government needs to use in order to operate. We all need some sort of secrecy in our lives, individuals need to have a private life that they would not like the world to know, companies need to use trade secrets and nondisclosure agreements in order to compete, and governments also need to use secrecy to deal diplomatically with the rest of the world, they need secrecy to protect minors and to make sure that our security systems are not compromised by terrorists.
That is not to say that secrecy should be the default for all government transactions, the government should be open and transparent and it should use confidentiality as an exception to achieve a certain specific goal. When the government starts to use secrecy excessively and without justification then there is a clear problem that needs to be addressed.

I do not consider the Wikileaks US embassy cables leak to be a whistleblowing case. Whistleblowing is the action by which a person decides to breach his duty of confidence in order to report a serious specific wrongdoing. The US embassy cables were not leaked to report a specific wrongdoing but were leaked in hope of creating chaos and jeopardizing the system by which confidentiality is used.

Wikileaks claims to be a fighter for making the government more transparent by providing the public with a system for allowing them to anonymously upload confidential documents to their web servers so that they are shared with the rest of the world, but now with the US cables leak incident, is Wikileaks helping make the system more transparent? There are tens of thousands more documents which are not out yet, so we cannot predict what we will learn about the dealings of the US government, but the majority of these documents are of low confidentiality levels and none of them is a document classified as “Top Secret”, so really we should not expect most of these documents to have any groundbreaking revelations.

The natural consequence of this leak would be that foreign governments will be way more careful when they communicate with the US government, the US government will also surely increase its security measures to avoid having another leak by introducing new technical measures for tracking unusual data access and by reducing the pool of people who have access to this information. The amount of information recorded by writing would also be reduced to avoid the risk of it ever leaking. So how can any of that lead to having a more transparent system?

The only way in which the US cables leak is contributing in making the system more transparent is by keeping the discussion of the whole topic of government transparency alive at the moment – we need to talk about the problem in order for us to figure out a solution for this problem.

I do not necessarily agree with people who consider Assange to be a terrorist or who think that he should be prosecuted, but I do not necessarily think that he is a hero. Confidentiality has a role to play in government and society and it will be impossible for countries to be able to have honest negotiations if confidentiality cannot be guaranteed.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

Earlier this month, Saudi Arabia finally passed its new electronic publishing regulations that introduce new controls on all forms of Web media. So from now on, all websites, blogs, discussion forms, advertising services, newsgroups and other Web services are regulated by the same principles that govern traditional publications such as newspapers and magazines.
In addition to this, no one in the country can possess a domain name for a news, advertising, video or audio content website or any broadcasting service on the Internet without acquiring a license from the authorities in Saudi Arabia. The license may be given only to Saudi nationals who are 20 years of age or older.

While blogging per se does not require a license as it has been explicitly mentioned as belonging to another category, bloggers and owners of forums can voluntarily register with the authorities in Saudi Arabia if they want to – even though the law does not really provide any incentive for them to do so.

The implications of having all forms of electronic publications governed by the same law that regulates traditional publications are huge, as this means that all these websites are required to have the promotion of ‘Islam and good morals’ as one of their aims. The new regulations also make it clear that news websites are required to have an editor-in-chief who has to be approved by Saudi authorities, and who will be liable for all the content on the website.

It is unfortunate to see that Saudi Arabia seems to consider the Internet as a major threat and not as a platform for learning and promoting innovation. Any law that attempts to regulate the Web should not aim to restrict its use to the greatest extent possible, but instead, provide individuals and companies with clear rules that specify the limit of their liability in the most concise manner so that they know exactly what they should and shouldn’t be doing.

It is quite ridiculous to make a webmaster personally and fully liable for every single thing published on a website – especially when the content is written by others using the website – without providing him defences that can protect him. There can be a case in which he may not know about the violating material, or he may not get a fair chance to remove the material in a timely manner. Unfortunately, the Omani law isn’t much better than Saudi’s in this aspect, as our Telecom Law makes webmasters fully liable for the content of their websites without giving them any proper defences.

Another fundamental problem with Saudi Arabian law is that it makes some classification of Web content which doesn’t exist on the real Internet, because of the massive convergence of all forms of media on the Internet. A blog may be focused on delivering news, and may use audio and video content as the primary method for delivering that content. Would this make it part of the first category of websites that require a license, or would it still remain a blog that doesn’t require a license?

The law also does not seem to acknowledge the existence of social networks and micro-blogging platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, both of which are increasingly becoming more significant than older forms of Web publications, yet do not clearly fall under any of the items listed in the new regulations.

Oman’s own publication law is badly in need of an update, but thankfully the general consensus is that it doesn’t apply to blogging and other new forms of Web publishing in their current state. It is very unlikely that we will take the path Saudi Arabia is taking, but our legislators have to be careful when drafting any new law to regulate the Web.

This post was originally published as a column on Muscat Daily.

Copyright law is one of the most outdated laws worldwide and it is badly in need of reform. The main rationale behind the existence of this legislation – the desire to provide authors with an incentive to create new works while providing society with the ability to make fair use of these works – is still an important issue that needs to be addressed, but copyright law today does not seem to fulfil this need.
A fundamental issue with copyright law is that it tries to achieve its goals by regulating the act of ‘copying’ – while this is the core of the ‘copy’right, this concept does not properly fit in the digital world where every single use of the work requires creating a copy, whether it was in the process of copying a song from a CD to an iPod or copying an application from the hard drive of a computer to its RAM to run that application. All these acts are regulated by copyright and will by definition require the approval of the copyright owner for the end user to carry them out – obviously this extensive scope of copyright is not a proper development of the copyright law, but an unintended result of the extension of the law to new technologies.

Another peculiar feature of copyright is that it is automatic in the sense that the author does not need to take any action upon the creation of the work to be granted protection, while this may seem like an advantage, it also grants copyright protection to many works whose authors do not necessarily care about copyright protection and makes it hard to access copyright works whose authors are dead or unknown.

A more philosophical problem with copyright law is that it does not acknowledge the major shift in the creative culture brought by technology as the tools for creating high-quality video and audio became democratized and accessible to any person with a computer. Few people in this generation express themselves by writing a poem or a short story and instead rely on rich media such as videos and graphics to communicate and express their thoughts. It may not be necessary to create such rich content by building on works of others, but the majority of people express their creativity by taking small bits of different works, editing them, and remixing them into a new work that has in this remixed form its own unique value. This is what you see when going on YouTube and look at all the parodies, tributes, and short films made up of remixed scenes and soundtracks taken from famous movies.

The majority of these remixed works by young people are not made with the intention of making money and do not have the result of lowering the commercial value of the original works they are building upon, yet copyright law does not make special provisions for such uses and requires the user to seek the approval for every single piece of copyright work he has used in his work. The reality, of course, is that the users do not acknowledge copyright because it is impossible for the system to work in their favour and businesses cannot practically enforce their copyright against every single violator on the internet making the law nothing more than written words that cannot be practically enforced. The sad result of this is the lack of respect for the law by young people as they do not understand how their innocent participation in the remix culture violates the law and their definite knowledge that the law is incapable of being enforced.

There have been independent attempts to work around the drawbacks of the law through initiatives such as the creative commons, but that will not solve the fundamental problems of the copyright law. Unfortunately, copyright law is regulated by a number of international treaties that make it very difficult to change the basic principles that govern the system. Our only hope is that governments realize that copyright law is a fundamental aspect of today’s global economy and international efforts have to be made to help make the system fairer.

In hope of increasing the Internet penetration in the country, the TRA is currently studying the possibility of introducing a new policy for regulating the use of wifi hotspots in public places that allow the users to freely access the Internet.
We already have more than a few cafes and restaurants that already offer internet for free, some of them, like Starbucks, have deals with Omantel and use sophisticated systems to track and regulate the free use of the guests of the cafe. The purpose of this new policy would be to figure out ways to encourage this sort of activity where businesses and other institutions can find a method by which they offer free wifi to the public while still able being able to make profit from their primary business activity, in the case of cafes for example the idea would be that wifi would be paid off for through the sale of beverages, other businesses models where no actual product is sold could monetize the free use by injecting advertisements on the pages viewed using free wifi so that the provider of the free wifi can still make money even if no incidental product is being sold.

The most interesting part of the policy in consideration is the possibility of having the government step in and help in funding free wifi hotspots in areas where it might not be commercially viable to have a wifi hotspot. This is interesting because it is the first time the government here has started considering the availability of internet as a public utility.

The government provides a number of utilities to the public free of charge on the belief that these utilities are fundamental to help citizens and business get on with their daily lives better. Roads are provided for free to the public because they are fundamental for the operation of society, it is possible for the government to charge us for driving through over the highway (they already do that in certain places like Dubai) but the government chooses not to because the public good in having this utility for free is greater than the financial gain that could be made by charging for it.

While the internet at home might be affordable to many people, the same cannot be said for mobile wireless internet which allows people to connect when they are outside their houses. If free public wifi was available, a person waiting in line for an assistant to help him at the Ministry of Housing would be able to check his mobile phone bill and pay it on his phone using that free wireless connection, another person visiting a public library would be able to do research from his desk on material referred to in the book he read, another person going on an independent trip to one of the forts could read up information on what he is seeing in that fort right through his phone. Businesses will also benefit greatly from the availability of free internet to the public as they can build mobile web applications and offer location based services to these people to help promote the brand of the business or sell more of its products and services.

There are many cities around the world that do provide free wifi as a public utility, it would great for Muscat to be one of these places where the internet is really ubiquitous. It’s good to hear that the government is considering this as another method to help increase the penetration of the internet, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that they do end up doing it for real.

I recently got to use the video chat feature on the iPhone 4 called FaceTime. This feature basically lets you with a press of a button start an internet video chat conversation with any of your contacts who have an iPhone 4 or a have the FaceTime application installed on their Mac computers. The service is currently only available if you are connected to a wireless network and is not available for use directly on the phone’s cellular data service. It is really simple to use, the quality of the video and voice is amazing, and it will surely help people chat with their family and friends all around the world without having to pay for international phone calls, except in Oman – as usual.
That last sentence is not true, at least yet, because even users in Oman can still use it, but we all know that sooner or later FaceTime will be blocked here – just like every other voice over IP service that was ever invented. The current way the regulation works is that providers of VoIP services must be registered in the country in order for them to provide their services here, and of course as Oman is a very small market for big international players, we do not matter for them, or more realistically we do not exist at all on their radar, so nobody would really bother to come here to spend time and money to register. The result of this is that we as consumers have no option but use the local telephone operators who charge outrageously expensive rates for making international calls even to close places such as the UAE or Qatar. Expats in the country think that this is all part of a big a plan done just to take advantage of them as they pay crazy amounts to stay in touch with their families back home, but the truth is even locals need to make international phone calls to stay in touch with members of their family who study abroad, work in another country, or just to communicate with the rest of the world! We are all adversely affected by the fact that VoIP is blocked in Oman.

If it is true that VoIP is regulated this way in order to protect the interests of the telecom operator then that would be such a short-sighted goal. While it is obvious that having VoIP would mean that fewer people would be using regular telephone services, this is a natural aspect of technological development because as new technologies come old industries would have to die in order for all of us to move along. Secondly, the fact that we are not using cellular voice service does not mean that we will not be paying for cellular data services which are needed to use VoIP and any other technologies used to communicate over the internet. These companies should focus on bringing us faster and more versatile methods for using the internet which will gladly pay for instead of forcing us to rely on old expensive services which nobody would use if we had a choice about it.

Instead of focusing on such short-term benefits we have to look at the bigger picture and the myriad of industries that can be built on top of the availability of VoIP. It is ridiculous to think that we can become a ‘knowledge-based economy’ when a primary pillar for communicating knowledge via the internet, voice, is not allowed to be used in the country just because that will be detrimental to the margins of telecom companies.