Riyadh Al-Balushi

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.

I cannot really claim that I was surprised when I heard that the Ministry of Culture and Information of Saudi had declared its intentions to pass an amendment to its law regulating publications so that it extends its scope to cover web publication in a way that will require all website owners, bloggers, and forum administrators to register their websites with the Ministry of Culture and Information. I was shocked, but I was not surprised to hear that come from Saudi. Fortunately for our Saudi neighbours after the web went mad over this announcement, the Saudi government reached to international news agencies denying that the new amendment will cover blogs and forums and that it will only extend to news related websites.
In the original announcement of the new amendment the Ministry of Culture and Information claimed that the new regulation is intended to help protect the Saudi public and does not intend to restrict the freedom of expression. The statements made by the official spokesperson on TV explicitly mention blogs and forums, so we do not know if it is safe to believe that the regulations will only cover news related websites.

It is very difficult to imagine how this upcoming regulation would be able to distinguish between news related “websites” and blogs. There is no technical definition of what a blog is – it is obviously a website, and it can be dedicated to publishing blog posts about news, so what that make it a news related website? Or would blogs written in a personal capacity with no commercial interest be excluded on that basis? We do not know, what we know for sure is that freedom of expression cannot be seriously enforced or even promoted when you require anonymous individuals to disclose their personality and register their names and addresses with the government. It is clear that the motive of the law is to make it easy to catch anyone who writes something improper on the internet.

I think it is reasonable to regulate websites when they relate to a specific industry in a specific region, for example, the sale of pharmaceuticals should be regulated whether offline or online. The law should be amended (if needed) to address the change of technology in the way those activities are conducted. However, there are certain aspects of our lives which have been totally revolutionized by the internet and the principles by which they had been governed just do not work anymore in this new web based reality. You still should be able to hold people accountable, but governments will not be able to stop people from publishing what they think and sharing that thought with other people. This ease at which communication is spread over the internet is a fundamental aspect of it and that cannot be stopped without rendering the internet totally unusable.

Creating a culture of accountability does not necessarily mean censorship and restricted access, this culture can be reached if we put clear rules in place that specify the rights and responsibilities of each one of us and have these rights examined and enforced in courts of law that are impartial and just.

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

The TRA has published a public consultation paper declaring its intention to regulate the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) in Oman. The new regulations would require corporates to apply for a permit to use VPN and would completely prohibit the use of VPN by consumers.
A VPN is a secure private network accessible through a public connection – it is widely used by businesses to exchange information between their external branches using public internet services while having all that information securely tunnelled through the VPN.

Besides the straightforward use of VPNs by businesses, the use of VPN by consumers has increased over the years either to avoid ISP censorship or to access geographically-restricted web services from a non-qualifying location (e.g. Hulu and the BBC iPlayer).

In countries like Oman where the internet is censored, VPN technologies can be used to bypass this censorship. The majority of consumer users of VPN in Oman use it to overcome the prohibition of using unlicensed VoIP services such as Skype. This is possible through VPN as users can use their restricted connection to tunnel all their communications through a private network that is connected to an unrestricted ISP service on the other end. So as long as the user can connect to the VPN, all restrictions imposed by the ISP become irrelevant.

The draft regulations of the TRA clearly attempt to stop consumers from bypassing the various restrictions imposed on the internet in Oman, the regulations seem to acknowledge the need for businesses to use VPN to securely communicate as any business can apply for a permit, however, the TRA will still retain the right to reject any request by a company to use VPN if the TRA is not convinced of its need to use VPN. Consumers may be fined up to RO 500 if they are discovered to use VPN.

The upcoming ban of VPN will upset a lot of people, but it is hard to argue against this specific new regulation as the majority of consumer uses of VPN in Oman involve carrying out prohibited activities (e.g. using VoIP). However, that is not to say that VPN doesn’t have any legitimate uses by consumers at all. VPN is used by universities are abroad to provide students with access to the university’s network when they are abroad, this is fundamental for students on distance learning programs or those doing a research in Oman. Many universities subscribe to countless electronic academic journals which can only be accessed through a secure connection as required by the publishers of these journals. Students may also need to connect through a VPN to submit their assignments to the electronic blackboard system or any other electronic learning system.

Besides the need for students on distance learning programs to use VPN, the wide definition of the term “VPN” in the new regulations could be problematic as it will capture any instance where a private network is created over a public connection, for example, remote access technologies such as ones that would allow you to retrieve files from your desktop computer through your phone would fall under this definition as you have to establish a private network with your computer over the public internet connection to do this process. Some gaming services could fall under this definition as well as a “private” network would have to be established to enable the players to play against each other.

There is no doubt that the prohibition of VPN is inline with the country’s general policy on the prohibition of encryption tools and the way the internet has been regulated this far, but the internet has developed in a way that makes security and encryption fundamental aspects of many new applications. Attempting to strictly regulate all these technologies that involve encryption could render the internet in Oman seriously crippled if this regulation goes too far.

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

BlackBerry phones are different from other mobile handsets because RIM, the manufacturer of these phones, provides, in addition to the hardware, a special service infrastructure that allows users to share instant messages and e-mails easily through a very secure platform. This high level of security, along with the ease with which messages can be composed on BlackBerry devices, has made BlackBerry very popular in the business world.
However, this same popularity of BlackBerry devices, and the high level of security they provide, has recently stirred up many issues of national security in a number of neighbouring countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and even India, as even network operators are not able to intercept the messages exchanged by BlackBerry devices. This is especially because governments worry that terrorists may take advantage of these secure communication methods to plan their activities.

Communication is protected in the majority of countries around the world, and network operators are not allowed to eavesdrop on the communications of their users, but courts in any country would be entitled under certain conditions to make an order to intercept communications of some individuals on various grounds such as national security.

The problem with BlackBerry devices is that the messages of their consumers are routed through the servers of the company in Canada, and any court order in the UAE or in Saudi would not directly have an effect in Canada, due to legal jurisdiction issues.

It is not exactly clear what governments such as those in the UAE and Saudi want. RIM offers a number of services, one of which is the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, used by companies and governments to communicate using a high level of security, which RIM itself cannot decrypt as the data would go through the servers of each company that subscribes to the service.

The other service more commonly used by consumers is the BlackBerry Internet Server, which provides a lower level of security that RIM is able to decrypt if asked to do so.

The governments of the UAE and Saudi are in talks with RIM, and they seem to have requested local servers for users registered in each country. This would ensure that if a court of law orders the communication to be intercepted, the order can be fulfilled.It is still unknown whether an agreement has been reached, as no official statement regarding the recent status of the ban has been made.

Looking at the issue from the perspective of national security, it is reasonable for any country to seek to have that level of insurance available in the case of an emergency. However, the truth is that BlackBerry is only one of the many available methods of communication which cannot be intercepted by local service providers. E-mail, instant messaging and all sorts of other web-based communication are encrypted and routed through servers located all over the world.

It would be unrealistic to ban every single method of secure communication or to ask every company to establish servers for local users in every country, especially as it might not be commercially viable for international businesses to establish local servers in small markets such as ours. The solution to this problem is not an easy one. Regulators should assess the impact strict regulation could have on innovations that could be built on these communication methods and must consider the benefits these communication methods provide to small businesses and society at large.

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