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Country Overview OTHER LINKS
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►People & Org's Online ■ Locally Relevant Content ■ ICT's in Everyday Life ■ ICT's in the Workplace Networked Society -People and Organizations Online
Venezuela's people and organizations are in Stage
3 of the CID
Framework. Stage 3 is defined as: Internet Growth and Population Statistics:
Note: GNI is Gross National Income per capita, and corresponds to World Bank data in US dollars. Venezuelan President Chávez believes that the promotion of Internet use is essential to development. Even though some reports state that President Chávez has censored the Internet, personal Internet use appears to be essentially unrestricted by current law and regulation. Internet use has been consistently rising over the years. Only 950,000 Internet users existed in the year 2000, but by 2009 there were 8,846,535 users. This is an increase of 7,896,535 users which shows tremendous progress. In the year 2000, only 3.4% of the Venezuelan population had access to Internet, while statistics show that by the end of 2009, 30% of Venezuelans had Internet access, a huge increase in large part made possible by government programs. Despite the immense growth of Internet users, Internet and broadband penetration in Venezuela are below average for Latin America. State-owned CANTV has a monopoly in the provision of ADSL, with which it dominates the broadband sector. T The only competition comes from cable modems, wireless broadband, and satellite. As a result, ADSL in Venezuela is slower and more expensive than in other Latin American countries. Internet use is strongly concentrated among young, educated city residents, with a large majority younger than thirty-five, and schooling beyond high school. As Caracas is the capital city in Venezuela, with a population of around 3.2 million (7), most users come from there. Despite programs promoting Internet use by poor and rural Venezuelans, access for this segment of the population is essentially nonexistent, and basic public education does not incorporate Internet technologies. Though access in those areas is low, CANTV has been expanding the reach of its telephone network to municipalities with no telecom services, and has been rolling out lines in under-serviced areas. The government is also working on projects to expand Internet access in those areas.
back to top Locally Relevant Content
Venezuela's Locally Relevant Content is in Stage
4 of the CID
Framework. Stage 4 is defined as: Local content is generated by citizens at all levels of society, including websites and online bulletin-board systems, Usenet groups, newsletters, and/or listservs. A significant amount of information is available through websites in local languages or a dominant Web language spoken locally. Many affordable opportunities exist for Web-related training. As Spanish is the 3rd most common language on the Internet, at more than 153 million users worldwide, Venezuelans are able to find content in their own language easily. This makes people more likely to be able and likely to use the Internet. ICTs in Everyday LifeVenezuela is in Stage
4 of the CID
Framework regarding the use of ICTs in daily life. Stage 4 is
defined as: Many members of the community use information and communication technologies for household commerce (online shopping, banking, investing) and for a variety of social and commercial interactions with other people (including bartering, consumer-to-consumer trade, online chat). Citizens without access through home, school, or work use a variety of public and private Internet access options. Internet users who log on daily tend to be upper-class individuals using home connections for educational or work research and downloading. Moderate users connect to the Internet between once and five times per week, using cyber-cafés for e-mailing and chatting. This group is generally male and represents all socioeconomic levels with the exception of the lowest income segment. A smaller portion of users connect between once every other week and once per month. These light users come again from all economic classes except the lowest class, and they almost exclusively use cyber-cafés for job search purposes. Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo are by far the most popular sites, followed by news sites and other search engines. The government has created programs to increase Internet usage. They started a project which will not only provide computers and Internet access to communities nationwide, but will also train users in computer literacy. Computer and Internet educators, sponsored by the Science and Technology Ministry, have trained thousands of Venezuelans in the basics of computer usage, ranging from simply how to use a computer to advanced Internet searches and blogging. Also, they plan to invest $11.6 million USD to open 200 new public Internet centers across the country during 2010. The government says it currently has 668 Internet centers, used by approximately three million people and expects there to be at least five million users by the end of the year. The state also announced it has installed 2,000 satellite aerials for Internet use in remote areas of the country to date, using Venezuela’s own satellite, Venesat-1. The project stipulates a total deployment of 16,000 satellite aerials. ICTs in the WorkplaceVenezuela is in Stage
3 of the CID
Framework regarding the use of ICTs in the workplace. Stage 3 is
defined as: Venezuela currently has 155,139 online hosts. The following table displays the number of domain names sorted by extensions as of May 31, 2010:
In 2000, Venezuela had approximately 240 dot-com businesses, mostly business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer. The government has been attempting to automate its processes and put its agencies and services online, assisted by a newly created agency for information technology, but these attempts have not been consistent or thorough. The government promotes use of information and communication technologies (ICT) through a regulatory framework designed to promote competition among ICT businesses, but no special programs encourage such businesses directly. They are currently trying to get businesses to move to open source software. In August 2008 the IT agency CNTI said that nearly 60% of Venezuela's government offices had switched from proprietary software to open source, compared with its target of 100% migration by year-end 2008. E-commerce in Venezuela is limited. The national media and many regional outlets have largely established themselves online. Thus, some national newspapers, like Tal Cual and El Nacional are trying to turn their websites into subscription-based services, but still not very successfully. The sector where e-commerce is developed the most is the oil industry. The state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) is cooperating with its larger suppliers via the web, however, managers still often insist on paper confirmation of the transactions. As for the banks, they're also supporting the e-commerce development in Venezuela, encouraging their customers to shift transactions online. Local banks such as Banco de Venezuela (a unit of Banco Santander Central Hispano of Spain) and Banco Mercantil have aggressively provided their online banking services.
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