Maroon 305operator has become a potent symbol in the national rhetoric of success-
ful market liberalization even as Vivendi’s role in shaping the national
market has become a point of contention.^19 Adding to the sector’s privati-
zation process has been the growth of multinational ICT companies oper-
ating in Morocco, including Siemens, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Dell and
Microsoft. The successful privatization of the sector has required more
than the cementing of lucrative monetary deals; it has also required effec-
tive and transparent oversight. To that effect the ANRT has been critical to
the maintenance of reliability in the procedures for sales and licensing.^20
n sum, ICT developments in Morocco are due to four essential I
factors—democratization, market liberalization, strategic government
planning and public opinion in support of development. Thus far, ICT
in Morocco has been analyzed almost exclusively in relation to its role
in raising the political and economic status of the country.^21 Yet as much
as forecasters and hopeful observers have wanted to emphasize ICT in
Morocco as a tool for ballot box democracy or as a vehicle for economic
growth, for the moment the fact is that its power rests elsewhere, on the
moral terrain of daily life.
e government has made some effort to give national agencies an Th
online presence and to provide citizens with the ability to navigate every-
day bureaucratic procedures on the Internet. But it will clearly be a long
time before Moroccans use the Internet to fill out government forms or to
gather more than contact information on the numerous bureaucratic enti-
ties. People do use the Internet as a source of political information gather-
ing, but its role in direct legal political action remains uncharted.^22 Few
political parties have up-to-date Web sites, and neither political speeches
by independent parties nor information updates by the parties are readily
accessible online. Even if these items were readily accessible in cyberspace,
in reality there are only slightly more than four million users in a popula-
tion of nearly thirty-three million people.
e primary obstacle to the use of new computer technologies in Th
Morocco remains the high cost of owning computers and accessing the
Internet, given the average household income of $1,300 per year. Though
the number of Internet users has grown from four hundred thousand
in 2001 to over four million in 2007, this is still far from the goal of ten
million Internauts. Mobile telephone use, meanwhile, has soared to over