Redialing discord?

To describe Lebanon’s telecommunications sector as politicized would be an understatement on par with saying the summer of 2006 was eventful, or that Hezbollah and Israel enjoy a good game of tag from time to time. Since its heyday atop the pyramid of Arab telecommunication industries in the early to mid-1990s, the sector has become little more than a wounded lamb at the mercy of the packs of hyenas roaming Lebanon’s political plains. Today the sector has the dubious distinction of having the slowest average Internet speed in the world and the highest prices for those same services in the Middle East. “We are lacking so many basic things and the entire root cause of our despair is the governance of the sector,” said Riad Bahsoun, telecom expert at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) –– the arm of the United Nations that deals with information communications technology. “It’s the domination