{"id":4468,"date":"2012-04-15T14:52:10","date_gmt":"2012-04-15T20:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4468"},"modified":"2012-04-15T14:52:11","modified_gmt":"2012-04-15T20:52:11","slug":"how-tiny-estonia-stepped-out-of-ussrs-shadow-to-become-an-internet-titan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4468","title":{"rendered":"How tiny Estonia stepped out of USSR&#8217;s shadow to become an internet titan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2012\/apr\/15\/estonia-ussr-shadow-internet-titan\">Patrick Kingsley:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Viik says you could walk 100 miles \u2013 from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu \u2013 and never lose internet connection.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,&#8221; Viik said. &#8220;So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn&#8217;t afford them at home.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.<\/p>\n<p>Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and \u2013 in some cases \u2013 a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.<\/p>\n<p>Central to the Estonian project is the ID card, introduced in 2002. Nine in 10 Estonians have one, and \u2013 by slotting it into their computer \u2013 citizens can use their card to vote online, transfer money and access all the information the state has on them.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Patrick Kingsley: Viik says you could walk 100 miles \u2013 from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu \u2013 and never lose internet connection. &#8220;We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,&#8221; Viik said. &#8220;So we built [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4469,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4468\/revisions\/4469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}