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Acxiom Corporation in Conway, Arkansas, has a database combining public and consumer information that covers 95% of American households. Is there anyone left on the planet who does not know that their use of the Internet is being recorded by somebody, somewhere?
Firms are as interested in their employees as in their customers. A 1997 survey by the American Management Association of 900 large companies found that nearly two-thirds admitted to some form of electronic surveillance of their own workers. Powerful new software makes it easy for bosses to monitor and record not only all telephone conversations, but every keystroke and e-mail message as well.
Information is power, so it is hardly surprising that governments are as keen as companies to use data-process ing technology. They do this for many entirely legitimate reasons — tracking benefit claimants, delivering better health care, fighting crime, pursuing terrorists. But it inevitably means more government surveillance.
A controversial law passed in 1994 to aid law enforcement requires telecoms firms operating in America to install equipment that allows the government to intercept and monitor all telephone and data communica-
207
tions, although disputes between the firms and the FBI have delayed its implementation. Intelligence agencies from America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand jointly monitor all international satellite-telecommunications traffic via a system called « Echelon» that can pick specific words or phrases from hundreds of thousands of messages.
6. «Call to Arms»
New York — Two cheers for the Chief Justice who told the American Bar Association the other day that defense against crime was as vital to national security as «the budget of the Pentagon». In fact, it's probably of more immediate concern to most Americans.
With no empty blasts about «getting tough», he said many other things that needed to be said — for example, that the great cost of lowering crime rates would be less «than the billions in dollars and thousands of blighted lives now hostage to crime». Nor is this an elitist view, since crime afflicts «the poor and minorities even more than the affluent».
We need the undoubted deterrence of «swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty, and — at some point — finality of Judgment». And to mount a real attack on crime will demand «more money than we have ever before devoted to law enforcement», as well as much rethinking of what law enforcement should be.
Still, on such a complex and emotional subject, the chief justice inevitably raised more questions than he provided answers. It's true that crime wiil not disappear «if we but abolish poverty». But it's more important that poverty and inequity and lack of economic opportunity breed crime, particularly when exacerbated by racial animosities, as in the United States. And where so much poverty exists in such proximity to so much affluence, the crime-breeding effect is likely to be greater.
The chief justice's specific proposals, moreover, will not be easy to effect, even when their validity is accepted. Trial «within weeks of arrest» is highly desirable, but where are hard-pressed cities like Cleveland and New York to find the money for the needed judges, prosecutors, police officers? And in most such cities, by far the most cases are now disposed of by plea bargaining rather than by trial.
He also proposed empowering judges to hold arrested persons without bail when « a combination of the particular crime and past record» makes it likely that the defendant will commit another crime while awaiting trial.
His argument for limiting the scope of appellate review of criminal convictions to «genuine claims of miscarriage of justice, and not a quest
208
for error» also rests on judges' questionable ability to tell one from the other.
Unlike many reformers, the speaker knows that his proposals, if carried out, would send many more people to prison. He also understands that to send them to the overcrowded, underfunded, inadequately staffed and policed prisons of the United States would negate his purpose; because more, and more frightening, criminals come out of these schools of crime and violence than go into them.
That is why he proposes prison reforms. He wants prisons to provide mandatory educational and vocational programs designed to «cure» inmates who would be released with at least a basic education.
And what good are the basic skills the Chief Justice wants to give inmates when they return to a society largely unwilling to hire them — particularly blacks or Hispanic people with a record of violence — and an economy with a declining need for low-skill labor?
Deterrence of crime — particularly speedy trial and certain punishment — is vitally needed. How best to achieve it is a subject on which thoughtful and honorable persons disagree — and on which has usefully dramatized, not settled the debate.
7. Democracy is on the March
If there has been a single, recurring theme in western foreign policy-speak since the cold war, it has been the promotion of liberal democracy — not just multy-party politics, but all the things that underpin it, such as the rule of the law, respect for property rights and the absence of police repression. Movement in this direction was assumed not just to be desirable but inevitable; the main challenge for policy makers was to hurry it along.
People may concede that Francis Fukuyama, America's guru of geopolitical optimism, was going a bit too far when — after the collapse of undemocratic regimes in the Soviet Union and South Africa — he proclaimed the end of history. But a milder version of his thesis has passed into conventional wisdom. Wherever brutish regimes persist in torturing, expropriating or otherwise silencing their enemies, the West grits its teeth and says that « progress» towards the Promised Land of liberal democracy has been surprisingly slow.
But what if no such «progress» can be assumed at all? Although the number of governments formally committed to democracy may be increasing, Freedom House, an American think-tank that measures political liberty by a sophisticated range of indicators, reckons that only 39% of the world's population now enjoys real political freedom — hardly a
209
massive leap forward from the 36% enjoying it in 1983. And even that slow rate of increase cannot necessarily be relied on. The think-tank notes «growing evidence that the wave of democratisation that began in the 1970s may have crested and... be receding.»
Looking round the world, democracy seems well enough entrenched in Latin America, even if some of its concomitants, such as clean gover-ment and due process, are not. In Asia, it is too soon to tell whether the economic crisis will embolden or weaken those who argue that «Asian values» are an excuse for authoritarianism. But elsewhere there are good reasons to fear that western political values will retreat in the near term.
Democratic institutions are hard to build, and easy to topple when not yet completed. Take the Middle East, where liberal democracy has never been in fashion. As they struggle to cope with demographic explosions and various forms of revolutionary dissent, many regimes will have to choose between being «liberal» — in other words, being secular and modernist about things like education and gender — and being democratic. The latter would entail yielding power to radicals or fundamentalists; they may, in turn give some or all of it back to the people, but it is hardly a sure thing in the short run.
Algeria is only the most extreme example of a country where unbridled democracy would assuredly bring fundamentalists to power and is therefore regarded, both by its own government and many western ones, as a dispensable luxury. To stay in office, other «moderate» Arab governments — from North Africa to the West Bank will resort to increasingly ruthless methods: using secret services to infiltrate, divide and crush opposition movements that might otherwise be unstoppable.
What about the former Soviet Union, where some of the most euphoric pro-democracy rhetoric was once heard? In the southern republics, rulers who held senior positions under communism have used the flimsiest sort of democratic window-dressing to ensure that they remain in office indefinitely. In Russia, the outward forms of multi-party politics and constitutional procedure have proved more robust; but the culture of democracy runs shallow.
And what about Africa, where a spectacular revival of multi-party democracy seemed to reach its peak around 1994? Across a wide swathe of the continent, from Angola to Eritrea, issues of political procedure are overwhelmed by war.
There are still two huge countries — Nigeria and Indonesia — where the near-term trend is towards more political freedom. But both countries face a profound challenge: is it possible for states with vast, diverse populations and acute economic difficulties to go on existing at all, let
210
alone existing democratically? To have a democratic future — which means learning to disagree amicably about particular issues — people in these countries need to develop a much stronger consensus about fundamental issues: state borders, the constitution, property rights and intangibles like national identity. And in Lagos and Jakarta, as well as Moscow and New Delhi, the rules and would-rules are faced with a fraying of consensus, not a consolidation.
8. When the snarling's over
The post-cold-war solitary American superpower, say many Europeans, has to be held in check, lest it create an unacceptably Americanised world. The mighty dollar needs to be balanced by the gallant young euro. The spread of American popular culture must be slowed, even if it is popular outside America too.
What many of these Europeans do not realise is that their grumblings are drowned by the growlings of frustrated Americans.
The arthritic economy of continental Europe, say angry Americans, leaves it to them to bear most of the burden of helping recession-hit Asia and Latin America, by buying more imports from these regions and thereby making their own trade deficit even worse. The European Union, though richer than the United States, provides a tiny and diminishing proportion of the high-tech military equipment that NATO depends on if it is to be able to fight wars without an intolerable number of casualties. Now that Europe no longer has to worry about Hitler's Germany or a communist Russia, conclude these exasperated Americans, Europe can be left to its own devices. «Deep structural forces», says Stephen Walt in the current issue of the National Interest, are «beginning to pull Europe and America apart.»
In fact, the sky is not quite that black. The expansion of NATO goes
ahead.
Nevertheless, the gloomsters could yet prove right. The Atlantic alliance may indeed collapse, unless both Europeans and Americans look forward rather than backward: unless they base their plans not on memories of the past 50 years but on a reasonable calculation of what the next 50 years will bring.
If the United States were indeed going to remain the world's only great power as far ahead as the eye can see, people believe in the danger of monopoly and the need for competition would draw the necessary con
clusion: Europe should provide a counterbalance to this overwhelming American power. But that is not in fact what the future really holds. If the
211
European part of NATO raises its eyes beyond its own borders, and sees what will probably happen out there in the next generation or so, it will understand why it still needs America and — even more important — why America increasingly needs Europe.
The one-superpower world will not last. Within the next couple of decades a China with up to 1 'A billion people, a strongly growing economy and probably a still authoritarian government will almost certainly be trying to push its interests eastward into the Pacific and westward into Central Asia, whose oil and gas this energy-poor China will badly need. Sooner or later some strong and honest man will pull post-Yeltsin Russia together, and another contender for global influence will have reappeared on the scene (unless fear of China sends a horrified Russia running into NATO's arms). The Islamist superpower that nervous people predicted a few years ago will probably never come into being, but the Muslim world will certainly continue to produce localised explosions of ideological wrath and geopolitical envy.
This is why the alliance of the democracies needs not only new members but also a new purpose. The alliance can no longer be just a protective American arm around Europe's shoulder; it also has to be a way for Europe and America to work together in other parts of the world. And those who hope to construct a politically united Europe should recognise that this must be done — if it can be done at all — in partnership with America, not to separate Europe from America.
9. They have seen the future, and they aren't very interested
Lucky Hong Kong. Its citizens have access to the Internet «in a more powerful form than 99% of users in the world», marvels Microsoft's Bill Gates. Last year Hong-Kong Telecom launched the first commercial interactive television (ITV) service in the world, offering video and music on demand, along with high-speed Internet access, to 70% of the city's homes. Mr Gates was impressed enough to fly in and announce that this network would become the chief testbed of Microsoft's efforts to merge the television and the PC, allowing users to gain access to broadcast-quality movies, PC games and pay-per-use software from the network nearly as quickly as from their own hard drives.
Mr Gate's presence threw Hong Kong into a technotizzy as the government announced a lot of Singapore-rivalling projects, from a $1.6 billion «cyberport» to efforts to make Hong Kong the region's e-commerce
212
hub. But the city's planners do not seem to have noticed that the Microsoft deal is better evidence of the service's problems than of its potential.
Ever since ITV was first put together in the early 1990s, virtually every trial has shown that viewers are not keen enough on video-on-demand to pay the cost of receiving it. Hong Kong reckoned it was different: its 6m relatively affluent and gadget-mad people are packed tightly into easy-to-wire apartment buildings, most within a few miles of Hong Kong Telecom's video servers. When the company launched the service last March, it predicted that it would have 250,000 subscribers by the end of March this year, paying an average of around $50 a month. Instead, it has only 80.000 subscribers, paying an average of $35 each, less than half of what it costs to provide the service.
It seems that although Hong Kong may be a uniquely cheap place to roll out a commercial broadband network to the home, its people are all too typical of guinea pigs everywhere: unimpressed.
Like others who have dipped their toes in the ITV waters only to have them bitten off, the firm now acknowledges that movies, music, even interactive karaoke and horse racing are not enough: it still needs the elusive « killer application». This is where Microsoft comes in.
Today, Hongkong Teleco's broad-band service offers two options, each inadequate in its own way. The service on television does not offer e-mail or PC-quality games, while the high-speed Internet service provided to PCs does not offer movies. Microsoft hopes to solve the problem by fixing the limitation in the PC service.
This would be more exciting were it not for an uncomfortable parallel in Singapore, Hong Kong's smaller wired-island rival. Around the same time Hong Kong telecoms was launching its television-based service, Singapore was rolling out its own broadband network, called Singapore ONE, based on PCs. It has been even less successful, with just 14.000 subscribers, and its video-on-demand part, Magix, has struggled. « Most people just don't want to watch movies on their PC,» explains a spokesman. So Singapore Telecom is now thinking about taking the service over to television, just as Hongkong Telecom appears to be moving in the opposite direction.
Hongkong Telecom has compounded its problems with a big strategic mistake. It chose to make the service available to lower-income apartment complexes first, because they are more tightly packed and thus cheaper to reach, and because lower social classes tend to watch more television. Since those households were also targeted by the city's cable-TV provider, they already have as much television as they want. Worse, many
213
higher-income consumers, who tend to be more spread out, cannot get the service yet.
Of course, any new technology takes time to establish itself, and telephone companies are not the obvious choice to package and market en
Firms are as interested in their employees as in their customers. A 1997 survey by the American Management Association of 900 large companies found that nearly two-thirds admitted to some form of electronic surveillance of their own workers. Powerful new software makes it easy for bosses to monitor and record not only all telephone conversations, but every keystroke and e-mail message as well.
Information is power, so it is hardly surprising that governments are as keen as companies to use data-process ing technology. They do this for many entirely legitimate reasons — tracking benefit claimants, delivering better health care, fighting crime, pursuing terrorists. But it inevitably means more government surveillance.
A controversial law passed in 1994 to aid law enforcement requires telecoms firms operating in America to install equipment that allows the government to intercept and monitor all telephone and data communica-
207
tions, although disputes between the firms and the FBI have delayed its implementation. Intelligence agencies from America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand jointly monitor all international satellite-telecommunications traffic via a system called « Echelon» that can pick specific words or phrases from hundreds of thousands of messages.
6. «Call to Arms»
New York — Two cheers for the Chief Justice who told the American Bar Association the other day that defense against crime was as vital to national security as «the budget of the Pentagon». In fact, it's probably of more immediate concern to most Americans.
With no empty blasts about «getting tough», he said many other things that needed to be said — for example, that the great cost of lowering crime rates would be less «than the billions in dollars and thousands of blighted lives now hostage to crime». Nor is this an elitist view, since crime afflicts «the poor and minorities even more than the affluent».
We need the undoubted deterrence of «swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty, and — at some point — finality of Judgment». And to mount a real attack on crime will demand «more money than we have ever before devoted to law enforcement», as well as much rethinking of what law enforcement should be.
Still, on such a complex and emotional subject, the chief justice inevitably raised more questions than he provided answers. It's true that crime wiil not disappear «if we but abolish poverty». But it's more important that poverty and inequity and lack of economic opportunity breed crime, particularly when exacerbated by racial animosities, as in the United States. And where so much poverty exists in such proximity to so much affluence, the crime-breeding effect is likely to be greater.
The chief justice's specific proposals, moreover, will not be easy to effect, even when their validity is accepted. Trial «within weeks of arrest» is highly desirable, but where are hard-pressed cities like Cleveland and New York to find the money for the needed judges, prosecutors, police officers? And in most such cities, by far the most cases are now disposed of by plea bargaining rather than by trial.
He also proposed empowering judges to hold arrested persons without bail when « a combination of the particular crime and past record» makes it likely that the defendant will commit another crime while awaiting trial.
His argument for limiting the scope of appellate review of criminal convictions to «genuine claims of miscarriage of justice, and not a quest
208
for error» also rests on judges' questionable ability to tell one from the other.
Unlike many reformers, the speaker knows that his proposals, if carried out, would send many more people to prison. He also understands that to send them to the overcrowded, underfunded, inadequately staffed and policed prisons of the United States would negate his purpose; because more, and more frightening, criminals come out of these schools of crime and violence than go into them.
That is why he proposes prison reforms. He wants prisons to provide mandatory educational and vocational programs designed to «cure» inmates who would be released with at least a basic education.
And what good are the basic skills the Chief Justice wants to give inmates when they return to a society largely unwilling to hire them — particularly blacks or Hispanic people with a record of violence — and an economy with a declining need for low-skill labor?
Deterrence of crime — particularly speedy trial and certain punishment — is vitally needed. How best to achieve it is a subject on which thoughtful and honorable persons disagree — and on which has usefully dramatized, not settled the debate.
7. Democracy is on the March
If there has been a single, recurring theme in western foreign policy-speak since the cold war, it has been the promotion of liberal democracy — not just multy-party politics, but all the things that underpin it, such as the rule of the law, respect for property rights and the absence of police repression. Movement in this direction was assumed not just to be desirable but inevitable; the main challenge for policy makers was to hurry it along.
People may concede that Francis Fukuyama, America's guru of geopolitical optimism, was going a bit too far when — after the collapse of undemocratic regimes in the Soviet Union and South Africa — he proclaimed the end of history. But a milder version of his thesis has passed into conventional wisdom. Wherever brutish regimes persist in torturing, expropriating or otherwise silencing their enemies, the West grits its teeth and says that « progress» towards the Promised Land of liberal democracy has been surprisingly slow.
But what if no such «progress» can be assumed at all? Although the number of governments formally committed to democracy may be increasing, Freedom House, an American think-tank that measures political liberty by a sophisticated range of indicators, reckons that only 39% of the world's population now enjoys real political freedom — hardly a
209
massive leap forward from the 36% enjoying it in 1983. And even that slow rate of increase cannot necessarily be relied on. The think-tank notes «growing evidence that the wave of democratisation that began in the 1970s may have crested and... be receding.»
Looking round the world, democracy seems well enough entrenched in Latin America, even if some of its concomitants, such as clean gover-ment and due process, are not. In Asia, it is too soon to tell whether the economic crisis will embolden or weaken those who argue that «Asian values» are an excuse for authoritarianism. But elsewhere there are good reasons to fear that western political values will retreat in the near term.
Democratic institutions are hard to build, and easy to topple when not yet completed. Take the Middle East, where liberal democracy has never been in fashion. As they struggle to cope with demographic explosions and various forms of revolutionary dissent, many regimes will have to choose between being «liberal» — in other words, being secular and modernist about things like education and gender — and being democratic. The latter would entail yielding power to radicals or fundamentalists; they may, in turn give some or all of it back to the people, but it is hardly a sure thing in the short run.
Algeria is only the most extreme example of a country where unbridled democracy would assuredly bring fundamentalists to power and is therefore regarded, both by its own government and many western ones, as a dispensable luxury. To stay in office, other «moderate» Arab governments — from North Africa to the West Bank will resort to increasingly ruthless methods: using secret services to infiltrate, divide and crush opposition movements that might otherwise be unstoppable.
What about the former Soviet Union, where some of the most euphoric pro-democracy rhetoric was once heard? In the southern republics, rulers who held senior positions under communism have used the flimsiest sort of democratic window-dressing to ensure that they remain in office indefinitely. In Russia, the outward forms of multi-party politics and constitutional procedure have proved more robust; but the culture of democracy runs shallow.
And what about Africa, where a spectacular revival of multi-party democracy seemed to reach its peak around 1994? Across a wide swathe of the continent, from Angola to Eritrea, issues of political procedure are overwhelmed by war.
There are still two huge countries — Nigeria and Indonesia — where the near-term trend is towards more political freedom. But both countries face a profound challenge: is it possible for states with vast, diverse populations and acute economic difficulties to go on existing at all, let
210
alone existing democratically? To have a democratic future — which means learning to disagree amicably about particular issues — people in these countries need to develop a much stronger consensus about fundamental issues: state borders, the constitution, property rights and intangibles like national identity. And in Lagos and Jakarta, as well as Moscow and New Delhi, the rules and would-rules are faced with a fraying of consensus, not a consolidation.
8. When the snarling's over
The post-cold-war solitary American superpower, say many Europeans, has to be held in check, lest it create an unacceptably Americanised world. The mighty dollar needs to be balanced by the gallant young euro. The spread of American popular culture must be slowed, even if it is popular outside America too.
What many of these Europeans do not realise is that their grumblings are drowned by the growlings of frustrated Americans.
The arthritic economy of continental Europe, say angry Americans, leaves it to them to bear most of the burden of helping recession-hit Asia and Latin America, by buying more imports from these regions and thereby making their own trade deficit even worse. The European Union, though richer than the United States, provides a tiny and diminishing proportion of the high-tech military equipment that NATO depends on if it is to be able to fight wars without an intolerable number of casualties. Now that Europe no longer has to worry about Hitler's Germany or a communist Russia, conclude these exasperated Americans, Europe can be left to its own devices. «Deep structural forces», says Stephen Walt in the current issue of the National Interest, are «beginning to pull Europe and America apart.»
In fact, the sky is not quite that black. The expansion of NATO goes
ahead.
Nevertheless, the gloomsters could yet prove right. The Atlantic alliance may indeed collapse, unless both Europeans and Americans look forward rather than backward: unless they base their plans not on memories of the past 50 years but on a reasonable calculation of what the next 50 years will bring.
If the United States were indeed going to remain the world's only great power as far ahead as the eye can see, people believe in the danger of monopoly and the need for competition would draw the necessary con
clusion: Europe should provide a counterbalance to this overwhelming American power. But that is not in fact what the future really holds. If the
211
European part of NATO raises its eyes beyond its own borders, and sees what will probably happen out there in the next generation or so, it will understand why it still needs America and — even more important — why America increasingly needs Europe.
The one-superpower world will not last. Within the next couple of decades a China with up to 1 'A billion people, a strongly growing economy and probably a still authoritarian government will almost certainly be trying to push its interests eastward into the Pacific and westward into Central Asia, whose oil and gas this energy-poor China will badly need. Sooner or later some strong and honest man will pull post-Yeltsin Russia together, and another contender for global influence will have reappeared on the scene (unless fear of China sends a horrified Russia running into NATO's arms). The Islamist superpower that nervous people predicted a few years ago will probably never come into being, but the Muslim world will certainly continue to produce localised explosions of ideological wrath and geopolitical envy.
This is why the alliance of the democracies needs not only new members but also a new purpose. The alliance can no longer be just a protective American arm around Europe's shoulder; it also has to be a way for Europe and America to work together in other parts of the world. And those who hope to construct a politically united Europe should recognise that this must be done — if it can be done at all — in partnership with America, not to separate Europe from America.
9. They have seen the future, and they aren't very interested
Lucky Hong Kong. Its citizens have access to the Internet «in a more powerful form than 99% of users in the world», marvels Microsoft's Bill Gates. Last year Hong-Kong Telecom launched the first commercial interactive television (ITV) service in the world, offering video and music on demand, along with high-speed Internet access, to 70% of the city's homes. Mr Gates was impressed enough to fly in and announce that this network would become the chief testbed of Microsoft's efforts to merge the television and the PC, allowing users to gain access to broadcast-quality movies, PC games and pay-per-use software from the network nearly as quickly as from their own hard drives.
Mr Gate's presence threw Hong Kong into a technotizzy as the government announced a lot of Singapore-rivalling projects, from a $1.6 billion «cyberport» to efforts to make Hong Kong the region's e-commerce
212
hub. But the city's planners do not seem to have noticed that the Microsoft deal is better evidence of the service's problems than of its potential.
Ever since ITV was first put together in the early 1990s, virtually every trial has shown that viewers are not keen enough on video-on-demand to pay the cost of receiving it. Hong Kong reckoned it was different: its 6m relatively affluent and gadget-mad people are packed tightly into easy-to-wire apartment buildings, most within a few miles of Hong Kong Telecom's video servers. When the company launched the service last March, it predicted that it would have 250,000 subscribers by the end of March this year, paying an average of around $50 a month. Instead, it has only 80.000 subscribers, paying an average of $35 each, less than half of what it costs to provide the service.
It seems that although Hong Kong may be a uniquely cheap place to roll out a commercial broadband network to the home, its people are all too typical of guinea pigs everywhere: unimpressed.
Like others who have dipped their toes in the ITV waters only to have them bitten off, the firm now acknowledges that movies, music, even interactive karaoke and horse racing are not enough: it still needs the elusive « killer application». This is where Microsoft comes in.
Today, Hongkong Teleco's broad-band service offers two options, each inadequate in its own way. The service on television does not offer e-mail or PC-quality games, while the high-speed Internet service provided to PCs does not offer movies. Microsoft hopes to solve the problem by fixing the limitation in the PC service.
This would be more exciting were it not for an uncomfortable parallel in Singapore, Hong Kong's smaller wired-island rival. Around the same time Hong Kong telecoms was launching its television-based service, Singapore was rolling out its own broadband network, called Singapore ONE, based on PCs. It has been even less successful, with just 14.000 subscribers, and its video-on-demand part, Magix, has struggled. « Most people just don't want to watch movies on their PC,» explains a spokesman. So Singapore Telecom is now thinking about taking the service over to television, just as Hongkong Telecom appears to be moving in the opposite direction.
Hongkong Telecom has compounded its problems with a big strategic mistake. It chose to make the service available to lower-income apartment complexes first, because they are more tightly packed and thus cheaper to reach, and because lower social classes tend to watch more television. Since those households were also targeted by the city's cable-TV provider, they already have as much television as they want. Worse, many
213
higher-income consumers, who tend to be more spread out, cannot get the service yet.
Of course, any new technology takes time to establish itself, and telephone companies are not the obvious choice to package and market en
