Secondly, to ensure an active public participation in the creation of the information society. A few days ago, the Minister for Energy, Telecommunications and Posts, Datuk Leo Moggie said that the drafting of a Multimedia Convergence Bill had been delayed till the end of the year as the government wanted to learn how other countries are dealing with the convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications and computing.
It is not just the government, but the whole citizenry, which must keep abreast with the latest IT developments all over the world so as the better to influence the transition to a information society in Malaysia.
There can be no dispute that Malaysia lags behind many other countries in IT-literacy. For instance, according to the World Competitiveness Yearbook 1996, Malaysia is ranked number 29 for �computer power per capita� - i.e. MIPS (millions of instructions per second) per 1,000 people out of 46 countries, while the Global Competitiveness Report 1996 ranked Malaysia as number 26 for �computers per capita�. Last year, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ranked Malaysia as number 28 in terms of their �multi-media readiness�by comparing the provision of telephone lines and the uptake of televisions and computer per head.
There is also a need for Malaysians to be generally informed of the latest IT developments and to understand how they would impact on our information society plans, for instance, the move by the United States into High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology and the Next Generation Internet and the US$9 billion plan by American company, Teledesic Corp. to provide planetary high-speed Internet access through a constellation of 840 satellites covering the globe.
Public involvement in the evolution of an information society is a vital condition for national success in the information age, as with the glut of information, the government�s role as the end-all, be-all and know-all is even less sustainable.
In fact, there are those who predict that the information society will lead to the end of nation-states in a few decades as the new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat it had ever faced.
The argument is that microprocessing has created entirely new horizons of economic activity that transcend territorial boundaries and as technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals and alters our perceptions.
One of the eight flagship applications of the MSC announced by the Prime Minister last August to be �an environmentally beautiful and highly convenient financial haven with direct multimedia links to the Labuan International Offshore Financial Centre and the world's financial centres� has been quietly deferred so as not to compete with Labuan for offshore funds.
However, cyberspace and the cybereconomy, which might be the world�s largest economy by the second decade of the new millennium and be the greatest economic phenomenon for the next thirty years, might emerge as the ultimate offshore jurisdiction superseding all tax havens constructed by nation-states - with unimaginable consequences for all nation-states.