Almost 60 heads of state attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, Switzerland from December 10 to 12, 2003. The summit was the largest and most prominent international initiative in the field of technology and communication and resulted in a declaration and an action plan to ensure that at least half the world’s inhabitants have access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) by 2015.
Objectives include connecting rural villages around the world with the Internet, connecting all local and central government departments to the Internet and establishing websites and email addresses so that citizens can learn about and communicate with them, ensuring that all of the world's population has access to television and radio services, and facilitating the presence and use of all world languages on the Internet.
Despite this agreement, however, participants at the WSIS clashed over three key issues—the proposal by developing countries to give the United Nations authority over the Internet; a call by various non-democratic governments for more control over media coverage, which democratic counties viewed as a threat to the principle of a free press; and developing countries’ argument that open-source software (i.e., without intellectual property protection) should be promoted by the world’s governments.
Many countries saw the Summit as a way to wrest power over the Internet from the United States. The U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) is the public-private partnership responsible for maintaining the stability and integrity of the Internet, generally, and coordinating the Internet’s domain name system, specifically. Its structure is supposed to reflect that of the Internet and its users, with participants including governments, technology specialists, registries, businesses, academia, consumer representatives, and the non profit, non governmental sector. ICAAN's responsibilities, which it calls “limited technical functions,” include management of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers including Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, domain name system management, and root server management functions.
Countries such as China, Brazil, South Africa, and India, however, favor Internet oversight by an inter-governmental group, such as a United Nations organization. They oppose ICAAN as exclusive and biased, and fear that it gives ultimate power and influence over the Internet to the U.S. government. They claim that the United States could use ICANN politically, such as erasing an entire country’s Internet presence by removing its domain name for any reason, such as being terrorist sponsors.
This conflict prohibited progress at the summit and the idea was assigned to a UN-established working group for study and a report to be delivered at the next WSIS meeting in Tunisia in 2005. It is unlikely any significant changes will result from the study and report, however. Similarly, a proposal from Senegal to establish a fund to finance technological pursuits in poor countries, informally called a “Digital Solidarity Fund,” was all but disregarded by the United States, Japan, and the European Union. The summit declaration merely obliges participants to complete a study of the proposal before the second meeting in Tunisia.
The level of freedom of expression through ICTs was another divisive issue at the summit. A few countries notoriously repress Internet use, monitoring and censoring their citizens’ access. For example, China shuts down access to websites that the government fears threaten its control, within minutes in some cases. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries do the same.
Timothy Balding, president of the World Association of Newspapers, therefore called on countries to make good on their declaration that freedom of expression and the free flow of information are central and crucial to the information society. He cited persecution of cyber journalists and others who “facilitate this free flow of information,” including imprisonment, corporeal punishment, and murder, in Myanmar, Iran, Eritrea, Syria, Cuba, China. He placed greater importance on closing the divide between countries who allow democratic debate and free flow of information and those who repress it than the digital divide, because, while technological deficiencies can be overcome with resources, “freedom of expression and the free flow of information are a fundamental precondition of durable economic, political, social, and cultural progress and stability.”
Another contentious issue raised at the summit was the conflict of open source software versus intellectual property rights. This debate pits the developers and patent-holders of technology, who hope to profit from their innovations, against those in the developing world who want technology at an affordable price. Brazilian diplomat Samuel Guimaraes told government representatives at opening sessions of the summit that software is crucial for developing world because it would permit poorer nations to develop their own technology instead of having to import it. Brazil, with support of India, South Africa and China, therefore wanted the meeting's delegates to endorse open-source software as the best way to bridge the technology gap. Industrialized countries, however, where most of the software developers hold patents, object to letting their intellectual property be used for free.
Thus, although the summit participants cooperated enough to produce a declaration and a plan of action, a sense of common purpose on how to bridge the international digital divide was missing. The differences between the developed and developing countries were similar to those reflected in the collapse of the Cancun World Trade Organization negotiations in the fall of 2003, a sobering warning that the divide between rich and poor nations affects a range of issues in global policy-making. |
