Arun Mehta Presentation, 10 October, 1998

Convergence is an ongling process by which the Internet finds ways to take on tasks that were already being done in some other way. It happened with mail, then publishing, and is now happening to telephony, radio, commerce as a whole, soon TV -- wherever electronics goes, the Internet will follow.

The impact of convergence is quite dramatic: proprietary systems get replaced by open ones, volumes climb, profit margins start to disappear. Industrial empires have been built on fat profit margins of the kind charged by banks and telecom companies, and the only alternative these companies have to going on a low-profit high-volume diet, is to get the government to intervene.

Governments in any case are finding it hard to leave the Internet alone. The areas that the Net "trespasses" on are ones that governments regulate, quite differently in each case. The Internet, on the other hand, resists regulation. A few examples from India:

The Indian government has banned Internet telephony. Not only that, the monopoly ISP VSNL also blocks access to the sites of companies involved with Net telephony. So, from my mailbox in India, I can't even send mail to Vocaltec or Net2Phone. I've taken VSNL to court on this issue. We are also putting together a team that will likewise take the Net telephony ban to court as well.

Another interesting example is radio. We have hardly any non-governmental radio broadcasts in India. Minority communities feel neglected by the state-run media, and would like to have their own facilities. For instance, the Jamia Milia, a Muslim university in Delhi, has for decades been trying unsuccessfully to get a broadcast licence for radio and TV. Some of us are now trying to propagate the concept of community radio via the Internet, where you have one Internet connection in the village, and the poor only have loudspeakers in their homes -- cable radio, you might say.

Both examples are from the medium of sound, and only scratch the surface of the possibilities there. So far, sound is treated by the Net as just so much baggage. Intelligent processing only takes place of text -- which is why the Net is still largely a text-based medium. Yet, all of us are handicapped to some degree, when it comes to processing text. Many are illiterate, others cannot type, and only few can write interesting enough material that others actually might want to read. Then again, there are times when you drive or bathe, during which text-based communication is impossible. Few people have these problems with sound -- the poor woman selling vegetables on my street is as powerful in her ability to communicate orally, as is President Clinton.

Once voice recognition improves and the Net allows you to search for keywords in spoken text, it will become far more important than it is today, for that is when the Net will be ergonomic, in that it helps you to communicate in a manner that you like, rather than forcing you to use text, which the computer so far prefers.