Planet Cafe

My latest column for the Yaletown View came out today. It’s on Internet cafes. Frankly, it’s not my best work, but columns are like goals. Some are prettier than others, but they all count. You can find all of my columns here.

One day, I will own an Internet café. It will be on one of the Greek islands—Santorini, maybe—and will look like Franka Potente’s scooter shop at the end of The Bourne Identity. My friends will come and hang out, we’ll drink beer on the terrace overlooking the ocean, and occasionally I’ll help a tourist email their photos home.

The Internet café is the 21st century’s rickshaw—cheap to start, anybody can do it and ubiquitous in the developing world. From Wa, Ghana to Pokhara, Nepal, they’re literally everywhere on the planet. There’s even one at the base camp on Mount Everest. It’s estimated that there are now over 20,000 Internet cafes in 171 countries. Irbid, a city in Jordan, lays claim to the most cafes on a single street: 131.

Café Cyberia, the first Internet café (or cyber café, as they were then known) was opened in London in September, 1994. Eva Pascoe, one of the café’s founders, offers this explanation of its origins:

One day I was sitting in the coffee shop close to City University. It occurred to me that it would be fun to have a cup of good coffee (those were the days pre-Coffee Republic), and bring in my laptop to the coffee shop to send emails while having a break from work.

We figured out that we could actually put a permanent PC connection in a coffee shop and link it to the internet. That way everybody could come in and for a small fee chat to friends and family around the world through email and Instant Messenger.

By the summer of 1995, 60 cafes had cropped up around the world. There were several thousand by 1997, and the number continues to grow exponentially. They have thrived in developing countries for two reasons: locals can’t afford computers or Internet access in their home, and visiting tourists tend to be younger and Net-savvy.

These cafes aren’t above controversy and politics, however. In 2002, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il opened the first state-sanctioned Internet café (with a Net connection through China) in Pyongyang. The original price for the service was US $100/hour. It was eventually reduced to $10/hour (still exorbitant for North Koreans) when no one was visiting the café.

Governments of some nations wage a constant battle to censor what the café users can access. China recently closed down thousands of locations ostensibly because their owners were permitting juveniles to access the Web. This follows on an incident where an Internet cafe in the western city of Chongqing was fined after two teenagers spent more than 48 hours playing an online video game, then fell asleep on a railroad track and were killed by a train.

Recently, with the introduction of wireless Web access or WiFi, Internet café and regular coffee-only kind have merged. You can now bring your laptop to any number of Vancouver cafes and restaurants and get online. For locations with free WiFi access, check out http://www.wififreespot.com/can.html. For paid access, see FatPort.

For now, though, all I want is a little storefront, with maybe a half-dozen computers and a coffee bar. I’ll help connect locals and travellers alike, and spend a few lazy years gazing at a Mediterranean sunset.