The government has denied report that it would block quite a number of social media networks in reinforcement of last year’s infamous Cyber Crimes Act that was condemned by the local human rights activists, the European Union (EU) and the United States of America, saying it infringes media freedom.
The new law that became effective in line with the start of the campaigns ahead of the October 25 general election, was allegedly behind what the political opposition believe was a vote rigging campaign engineered by the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM).
The public was awash with speculations as of late that plans were underway for the government to ban social media networks it deems unfit.
But Minister for Works, Transport & Communications Prof Makame Mbarawa allayed fears of the massive blockade, saying the government would focus on boosting the social media in acknowledgement of their crucial role in bringing about development.Prof. Mbarawa said this yesterday while launching a new product for Tanzania Internet Infrastructure dubbed “Akamai Content Cache” aimed at increasing the speed of the Internet infrastructure, insisting it is the illegal users of the Internet who would be taken to task with the help of the law.
Citing an example of an illicit use of the Internet, Prof. Mbarawa only a handful of its users in Tanzania download important materials from the Internet, with the vast majority dealing with either useless or illegitimate downloads.
He said the ministry was collaborating with other regulatory and enforcement agents including the police, national security organs, regulators and other law enforcing institutions in nabbing illegal users of Internet.
He said the government has so far invested $12.2m in Information Communication Technology (ICT) to enable the public use the infrastructure for knowledge and other benefits.
Chairman of Tanzania Internet Services Provider Association (TISPA) Vinay Choudar said Akamai being one of the top Content Delivery Networks (CDN) Providers, has entered into service contracts with many Internet giants including Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo.
He said through Akamai, the services are localized at Tanzania Internet Exchange (TIX), an important part of the national infrastructure, and that they have been able to provide similar services through Google from April 2015, saying it has been a clear demonstration of the benefits of data localization.
In the same token, Akamai has "collocated" caching servers within TIX to reduce the international bandwidth costs to all service providers.
“These services help to improve healthy competition in the industry resulting in the reduction of end user prices for Internet. This in turn will help the growth of Internet penetration and consequently become a key element in the economic growth of the society. This also helps in the increased revenue to the service providers and ultimately more taxes can be collected for improving the infrastructure,” he said.
“In the near future, we’ll be expecting similar initiatives from other content distribution networks (CDNs) like Limelight and Amazon's Cloud to provide local caching services at the TIX as well,” he said.
These services at TIX will complement the other National Infrastructure Projects like NICTBB, National Data Center (NDC), government projects and COSTECH.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
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