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About TOSCO

Dataset #

The Telecommunication Ownership and Control (TOSCO) dataset provides data on ownership of Internet service providers (ISPs) that illustrates how the Internet is strategically built and used by governments and corporations.

TOSCO V1.0 covers 49 African countries (2000-2019), TOSCO V2.0 is currently work in progress and expected to be released in Early 2024. TOSCO V2 will provide data on ISP ownership structures in Africa (2000-2022).

Source #

TOSCO V1.0 #

Sources for the ownership of the first-level and the second-level shareholders, respectively, are saved as .pdf or .doc-file. The source is named in the following order: Name of the respective country, ISP name, source year, type of source, and, if applicable, page number. Source types include: Annual Report (AR), TeleGeography (TG), Reuters, Orbis.

For multinational companies with subsidiaries in at least three African countries, we save the sources in a specific company file that allows to harmonize all sources referring to that group (e.g. an annual report that applies to all Orange subsidiaries is saved as Orange_2017_AR, while a document that only applies to Orange Botswana is saved as Botswana_Orange_2010_other).

All source files for TOSCO V1.0 are avaliable here.

TOSCO V2.0 #

All publicly available sources are saved as permalinks, non-publicly available sources are saved as .pdf-files. The non-public source are, among others Eikon, Orbis and LexisNexis. Even though the saved copies can be uploaded on permalinks, this should not be done as it violates copyright law and the policy of Permalink. The source is named in the following order: Name of the respective country, ISP name, source year, type of source, and, if applicable, page number.

Our Team #

TOSCO V1.0 Team #

Principal Investigators: Tina Freyburg, Lisa Garbe, Véronique Wavre.

Research Assistants: Dominic Brotschi, Johannes Matt, Carlos Morado, Helen Pittam, Henry Schmees, Suen Wang.

TOSCO V2.0 Team #

Principal Investigators: Tina Freyburg, Lisa Garbe, Seraphine F. Maerz.

Research Assistants: Alessandro Cupolo, Livia Eckert, Vera Grünewald, Maria Halloran, Tobias Sauer, Moana Stadelmann, Ying Yan.

Acknowledgements and funding #

We are extremely grateful for the great data collection efforts by our Research Assistants. Research funding is gratefully acknowledged from: (1) Swiss Network for International Studies, 2016–18, ‘Telecommunications politics in authoritarian developing countries: Ownership and control in the African information and communications technology sector’; (2) University of St.Gallen, Basic Research Fund (GFF), 2019, ‘Ownership of telecommunication companies and state control of the internet in authoritarian contexts’; (3) the German Research Foundation, project number 421517935.