UAE Petrol Crisis. The Mystery Deepens

I retain my sense of wide-eyed amazement that this situation could be possible: a fuel shortage in an oil producing country. Today's newspapers are full of the story and a remarkable pattern is emerging of silence and mind-boggling mendacity on the part of the distribution companies being hit by the shortages.

In fact, The National (James Bond's favourite Middle Eastern newspaper, dontcha know) leads with 'Empty filling stations and the great fuel mystery', gleefully reporting that retailers Enoc and Eppco (two brands of the same company, in fact) have cited pump upgrades to their 167 stations across the country as being the cause of their empty forecourts. The newspaper's reporters visited a number of the stations and confirm what you already possibly suspect: there is no sign of any work going on to upgrade anything in any way whatsoever. I have personally seen closed stations opening again once a tanker has visited, so there must obviously be some degree of indecision regarding which stations to upgrade.

Gulf News contents itself with unquestioningly repeating the statements made by Enoc/Eppco regarding upgradation to the petrol pumping network facility terminal equipment. By the way, you can just juggle up the words from the last sentence as you see fit because whichever way you place them, they mean the same thing. Emarat has maintained a dignified silence throughout.


Meanwhile Dubai Eye Radio's The Business Breakfast interviewed an 'expert' who spent his time on air speculating that this could be some sort of pipeline issue.

Inside The National, we see mention of the issue of subsidies, regulated prices and supply that many are speculating is actually the issue behind the shortages - at current government-set prices and with oil prices hovering around the $100 mark, it's hard to retailers to do anything other than make massive losses - The National quotes Enoc's CEO as saying that selling fuel at the regulated price cost it Dhs1.5 billion last year - despite two very unpopular price rises taking place over the year. Adnoc, of course, refines its own fuel and so has been unaffected by the need to upgrade its pumps.

This remains speculation, however, as the retailers who have run out of fuel (sorry, who are upgrading their pumping infrastructure) have for weeks now either maintained a stoical silence or thrown out chaff in the shape of vague and arguably mendacious statements. That policy, so popular here but increasingly unrealistic in the age of online and social media resources, has led to a risible situation - everybody knows that something is very, very wrong but nobody is allowed to talk about it officially. It does rather remind me of the burrow in Watership Down where the society of well-fed, sleek rabbits who are being snared by the farmer who's feeding them are prohibited from using the words death or snare.

Where's Ze Betrol?

Queues during the last 'fuel crisis' here in  2008, when ADNOC was selling fuel for 

Dhs10 a gallon less than Dubai's filling stations. Story here.

It was a funny weekend. After being turned away by EPPCO and ENOC stations, we finally joined the snaking queues at ADNOC and bustled our way through the jostling and aggressive throng of cars competing to get to the ranks of pumps.

'Why no petrol?' I asked the EPPCO guy.
'Government issue, maybe.' He grinned.

Gulf News ran a report on the situation the other day, but has obviously continued to receive nothing but the traditional filibustering, half-truths and downright dis-ingenuousness from spokespeople. For instance, this little classic from ENOC, reproduced by Gulf News:

"Enoc is managing its fuel supplies to meet the current demand. This involves a two-pronged approach of regulating the distribution of fuel through our network, as well as upgrading selected stations."

Luckily, GN has got hold of some third party analysts who confirm that the issue is actually that of subsidies, with petrol distributors in the country losing money for every litre they sell. This has led to problems underwriting the ongoing loss and so we find ourselves in the odd position of living in an oil-producing nation where the petrol pumps have run dry. The assertion is one made by commenters to this here post on the issue back in April - we must have reached some sort of crisis point last week.

You'd think ADNOC would be pleased at the increased business, but looking at the economics, they're just losing more money faster than anyone else.

I can feel a petrol price hike coming up. Now, given I fill my Pajero for a sum of Dirhams that fills a small hire car in the UK in pounds (we pay per gallon what you pay per litre, people), you'd be forgiven for whipping out the world's smallest violin and playing us all a lament. But an increase in fuel would have a huge knock-on effect on things like food prices here.

Even Pepsi and Coke have put up their prices recently. Grief.

The TRA Responds

You may remember this post last week, in which I noted that the UAE's TRA, or Telecommunications Regulatory Authority was making efforts to get onto social media. They had arguably got a tad ahead of themselves by suggesting that everyone else might like to have a go at 'getting social'.

Finding the TRA on twitter, I rather grumpily asked, "Is there any move to regulate against the currently unusually high broadband charges levied by operators in the UAE?"

The TRA Tweeter duly directed me to their online query form. As I hadn't had my cup of tea that morning and was feeling unusually quixotic, I repeated my query on that form. You can find the TRA's query form here. It does ask for rather a lot of data from you, but then I suppose that could help to cut down frivolous inquiries from grumpy smart-alecs who haven't had their tea. I had absolutely no expectation of getting an answer back from them and, in fact, had forgotten all about it and moved on - specifically, I went and made a cup of tea.

Nestling in my inbox this morning was the response below:

Dear Alexander,

Thank you for contacting the TRA

The TRA does not directly set the retail prices for Telecommunications Services in the UAE. Retail prices are set by the licensees and approved by the TRA. This is because information relating to the cost of each service is best known by the operators themselves. The TRA believes that retail prices will fall as competition increases. To that end, the TRA is currently mediating negotiations between the licensees for each operator to share the other operators network. This will allow Etisalat and du to compete in the provision of fixed-line services on a national basis. The operators are at an advanced stage of testing the enabling technology and systems and the TRA expects competition in the provision of Broadband services to start at the end of this year. The TRA further expects that such competition will result in a decrease of the associated retail prices. This type of service based competition (as opposed to infrastructure based competition) is common in telecommunications regulation and will result in consumer choice.

Hopefully, the above clarified your inquiry.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, impressed the cotton socks off me.

FIFA Own Goal: Blatter Battered

I have just witnessed the most amazing press conference I have ever seen in a life peppered with colourful events. Sky News gleefully transmitted a live feed of the entire Sepp Blatter FIFA press conference and it was a display of the most breathtaking arrogance I have ever seen in my professional life. I only regret the camera stayed on Blatter and didn't register the appalled, shocked and angry press in the room.

I simply couldn't believe it - why the entire press corps didn't walk out when a disembodied voice announced 'one question only will be answered please' and the mic was switched off on a journo asking infuriated follow-ups after Blatter had simply refused to answer his (perfectly valid) question was a mystery to me. Blatter's refusal to take the first question of the entire Q&A on set the tone for the whole event. His grimacing, scrunched-up face spat defiance throughout his whole haughty peroration.

How marginal media were brought in among heavy-hitters, apparently an attempt to steer away from the 'big questions' was amazing. Blatter was strutting, incredibly formal and arrogant beyond belief. His performance screamed old skool; a man obviously beyond question by us mere mortals. At one stage, he seemed to suggest that FIFA was a nation and he was its president.

The messy break-up of the whole debacle was glorious: Blatter lecturing the media on 'respect' as they shouted back at him, the final German journalist having a good old go but eventually being silenced in what must stand as an all-time low point for football. The poor old PR guy trying to get Blatter off the stage (having cut short the entire awful thing, obviously leaving an incredulous press contingent with most of their questions still unanswered) must have died a million deaths as the man grabbed the mics and started to have a go back.

At one stage, at the end, Blatter's spittle-flecked antipathy gave rise to: "Yes, you may laugh!" Wonderful - until then, we didn't know the press was laughing at him. Now we do.

I don't care much for football - I only caught this because we were having a take-away and Sarah was watching TV. But I do care passionately for communications and our media. If for no other reason than his management of tonight's appearance, it is clear that Blatter has been too long accustomed to having too much power with too little accountability. Journalists at the event, talking on air after it blew apart, were enraged and rightly so - but they really should have stood up, as a man, and left.

He must, clearly, go. He's not fit, as the Sex Pistols tell us, to shovel anything...

The UAE TRA: More Front Than Brighton

The UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, or TRA, has called for increased use of social media services. The most immediate result of this announcement was me spitting tea out all over my long-suffering (and terminally ill) notebook.

The story, carried by Gulf News today as a 'Gulf News Report' rather than, more truthfully, a subbed WAM file, is linked here. It really is a quite remarkable display of doublespeak.

"The emergence of social media has opened gateways of communication with the rest of the world," said Mr. Al Ghanim. "It is always a good idea for a company to use social media to connect with communities they serve because it improves media coverage. In addition, social media encourages user participation, openness, conversation, connectedness and a sense of community."

Go to http://www.orkut.com from the UAE and you'll find it is blocked. Yes, it's not the most brilliant social media site in the world, but it is blocked by the TRA because of the content that people have put up on it. The TRA has had a long history of blocking 'dating', sorry, I mean social media sites. Twitter was blocked until August 2008, retarding the platform's adoption in the UAE. Flickr was similarly, until relatively recently, blocked in the UAE. Blogs have also been blocked by the TRA, including the still-blocked Secret Dubai Diary.

Take a look at the little beauty above: it's a snapshot of tweets from @theuaetra and it's totally representative of the 102 tweets that the organisation has pinged out into the Twitterverse in a one-way sputtering of informational spitballs. There has been no interaction at all - although it'll be interesting to see how today goes.

The TRA's YouTube channel contains nine videos uploaded three days ago, two three weeks ago, three a month ago and so on. Started at the end of December 2010, it initially drew quite high views (total views of its uploaded videos just top out the 5,000 mark) but the last batch of videos have earned one or two views each. Rather charmingly, comments are enabled, but I couldn't find any actual comments, even on videos that have attracted over 200 views. The channel has eight subscribers and one friend.

The TRA is also on Facebook, where it has garnered a remarkable 63 Likes. Again, the information flow is pretty one way with no Likes, Comments or Discussions. The oldest post I could find was dated the 2nd March. There is precisely one consumer interaction on the Facebook page and I reproduce it below. Beyond this, I have absolutely nothing more to say on the matter.

"Social media encourages user participation, openness, conversation, connectedness and a sense of community."

Who's Afraid Of A Regulated Web?

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out and said he wants a regulated web - "You need to hear our limits, our red lines" he told an audience at the two-day 'e-G8' conference. The AP report is linked here. His is not the first whiff of regulatory sulphur, of course - only the other day I posted about the British culture secretary sending out a clear 'enough is enough' message regarding privacy on the Internet after Twitter 'made a mockery' of that Great British Institution, the super-injunction.

Of course, it should come as no surprise to hear those who govern us (all too often, you can't help but think, forgetting they're supposed to be representing us) starting to talk about regulation. Wikileaks was a massive wake-up call to governments, followed by the wake-up call of the 'Arab Spring'. We now know two things we did not fully appreciate a year ago.We have to redefine privacy, secrecy and transparency and we have to redefine governance, the aspirations of people and the way in which they are represented.

But redefining these things doesn't necessarily mean micro-regulating them, at least in part because it's so fast moving out there you'd be hard put to keep up - and that's a key problem governments have found in the past: you can't create legislation that keeps up with innovation. The Microsoft vs DOJ case showed quite clearly that an entire technology market, let alone platforms and applications, can change during a single action in the courts, let alone the time taken to draft and pass a piece of well defined legislation.

Establishing a set of principles might be a nice approach to take, but then we've been doing that ourselves: up to now, morality and behaviour on the Internet have been largely a function of communities - we all know what the rules are (if you use someone else's link on Twitter, you include in the tweet that it was via them; if you send unwanted emails to people you'll be called a spammer and face consumer unhappiness; if you hijack a hashtag, you'll get pwned all over the place and so on) - or are in the process of coming to terms with changes and defining rules as a pretty much consensual process.

Of course, regulating the Internet in the name of privacy and responsibility is all very well, but we also have to be wary of regulating discourse - even when that discourse is uncomfortable for us. And here's the issue at the heart of government discomfort with that discourse: the ability for people to share opinion and organise in shows of public opinion that are not ordered through the representational process that has put the people in government where they are.

I mean, imagine a world in which everyone's voice could be heard! How insane would that be? A world where everyone had access to a viable way of voting instantly on any given topic, of canvassing opinions and sharing information without fear of corporate interference, lobbying or governmental mendacity, a world in which we didn't actually need to be represented by politicians because we have the mechanisms in our own hands to represent ourselves.

Why do I need an MP to vote on my behalf in parliament when I can register a vote on a website instantly and have that vote counted in picoseconds? What if the Internet could slim down government in the same way it has slimmed down other disintermediated processes?

What if?

Raise The Sea Mermid!

The Sea Mermid and Lady Rana washed up on the beach down the road from our house after the late winter storms we had in late January and early February this year, ending up on the same stretch of sand some ten days apart in what must be a million to one coincidence. I posted about this event, giving an entirely more accurate account than Gulf News and The National, incidentally, both of whom stuffed the story up.

For months now, the two ships have been sitting just as the were the day they were beached by their captains, guarded by a solitary Sharjah policeman. They eventually even installed a plywood hutty thing for the sentry.

Last week cranes and other materiel started appearing on the beach front, joined by a large winch and lots of other bits and bobs. It started to look like a serious cargo cult had arrived into town. Now they've hauled the poor old Sea Mermid right up onto the beach and they've started breaking her apart, cutting her up for scrap. After that, they'll do the same with the Lady Rana - apparently the Sea Mermid (it's actually registered under that name believe it or not, wrecking my theories about dyslexic maritime sign writers!) is the better of the two ships, but they're both to go.

A source close to the matter who declined to be named as his Tufty Club membership hadn't come through confirmed that both ships were being scrapped by Dubai Shipbuilding & Engineering. So there you go!

Ebooks Outsell Booky Books. So What?

Image by englishpen via FlickrWith the news that ebooks have now outsold booky books, we can perhaps now recognise the tipping point has been reached.

One fascinating report I’ve seen of this year’s London Book Fair neatly paints a picture of an industry reeling as it comes to terms with the ferocity of the changes taking place around it. More and more writers are taking to putting their works up on the Kindle store and other self publishing platforms rather than go through the relentless round of submissions and rejections that getting published entails.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, speaking at the LBF, called this time 'a watershed'. Murray was noting that sales of a number of HC's front list titles were running at over 50% on ebook formats - he also noted that the growth in e-readers (to 40 million) was having a disproportionate effect on the market because e-readers had reached 'core' readers, people who buy over twelve books a year.

There are reports of Amazon employing editors and seeking an editorial director. This is interesting precisely because if Amazon decided to have its own imprint, it could pick from the many new titles being uploaded to the Kindle e-book store and take the best of them and place them under its powerful marketing wing – with editors guaranteeing the quality of books under that imprint.

That would address one major complaint of the post-ebook era - the lack of qualitative guarantees where so many authors now have direct access to the market without the checks and balances of editors and the like.Yes, this gives a more egalitarian market with greater choice for readers (and less Katie Price schlock being pushed in our faces), but it also atomises the market (there is such a thing as overwhelming choice) and makes it potentially hard for readers to work out when a book is total rubbish. I have to confess, of my current crop of 34 Kindle books, one non-fiction title turned out to be a rip-off project.

But with editorial input, an imprint, Amazon could possibly create something a little like Authonomy done right. Everyone’s uploading their books, the best of those books are plucked out and given a sheen by Amazon, which could sell books under its imprint at a premium (because you know they’re good) and effectively become its own publishing house. Now a publishing house that owns the majority of the distribution medium becomes interesting. It would be like one publisher owning every high street bookstore (remember them?).

It’s also potentially massively anti-competitive, but that’s another kettle of frogs.

Big Bang (Blowing up Paradise)

As if you needed any, above is incontrovertible proof of my long-held assertion that Modhesh is evil.

Yesterday, largely unheralded, was the 55th anniversary of the first airborne hydrogen bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini atoll. Life magazine, in commemoration, has released a remarkable 35-slide set of images from the bomb tests of the cold war, including one that scared me more than even the awful plume over Muraroa atoll - an image of a group of sublimely insouciant nut-heads cutting into a mushroom-cloud shaped cake. What tremendous idiocy it must have taken to celebrate this dubious 'achievement' in this way.

Take a look at the picture set, linked here,do - it's really quite stunning.

Of course, the 36th picture never made it to Life's pages. It's the one above, exclusive to Fake Plastic Souks, that proves what we've always known about the little critter...

We are all publishers

Image by noobbaru via FlickrThere’s been a lot of talk in the UK about super-injunctions, triggered by the seeming inability of anyone in public life to behave with even the scantest degree or morality or decorum. I suppose when the world’s most powerful man goes around inserting himself into interns, the Governor of California lives surrounded by his secret children and the head of the IMF seems to be channeling Casanova, you could forgive a certain laxity among the minor stars in our firmament.

The problem, of course, is that while they all like doing these things, they don’t like us knowing about them. I think, actually, part of the fun of doing it in the first place is the frisson of danger it involves. When the brown stuff really does hit the fan, using some of one’s hard-earned millions to brief a brief and gag the media seems to gaining in popularity. In the UK and elsewhere, ‘the media’ includes a clamorous pack of newspapers casting ever further afield to find salacity and scandal to reverse their plummeting sales figures and so taking an unusual interest in any scraps they can find.

What’s making things so much more fun these days is while you can use your power and wealth to gag a newspaper, you can’t gag the Internet. Once stuff is out in the wild, it’s game over. The publication of the names on Twitter of six people seeking “super-injunctions” to stop media publishing their names caused an outbreak of great wailing and gnashing of political teeth, with British Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt telling The Independent:

"We are in this crazy situation where information is available freely online which you aren't able to print in newspapers. We are in a situation where technology, and Twitter in particular, is making a mockery of the privacy laws we have and we do need to think about the regulatory environment we have.”

The problem is, of course, that Twitter, Google et al are all arguing that they are not the publishers of this material, they are merely a medium, a tool of communication. It would be like suing a telephone company because someone said something bad over the phone or sent a libellous fax. Or suing the paper mill because its product was used to commit a libel.

This is one reason why Goog and friends are so very hesitant to take judgement calls over content posted on their platforms – the second they do so, they become editors and therefore publishers.

Governments are less than happy about this – and it can only be a matter of time before legislation is brought to bear on the free-for-all aspects of online platforms. The UK government is already making a racket about legislating against online platforms (Hunt was paraphrased in the Indy story linked above as saying there "may be a case for converging the regulation of traditional and new media"). If the industry won’t regulate this content itself, governments are arguing, then legislation must be brought to bear defining the responsibilities of platforms for the content they carry. This’ll potentially create an odd situation where communication platforms are forced to become, effectively, publishers by law.

Until that happens (and I fervently hope it doesn’t), the responsibility for creating, moderating, curating, sharing and publishing the content we post online actually belongs to us. We are all publishers.

You’d have thought democratic governments, the representatives of the people, would be happy that we’ve found a medium of open expression which gives us all the opportunity to take responsibility and use the power of free communication. But then those in power (as I found when I had that spat with German state secretary for the Federal Ministry of the environment, nature conservation and nuclear safety, Matthias Machnig) believe only they understand, and therefore should wield, power.

Including the power, as public figures, to behave awfully in private then gag the public.