A Summit of Opportunities

The first ever World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) intended to articulate positions on how to bridge the digital divide between the developed and developing world was held over three days in Geneva.

Organized by the United Nations through its specialized agency, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the summit will be held in two phases. The first phase of WSIS took place in Geneva hosted by the Government of Switzerland from 10 to 12 December 2003. The second phase will take place in Tunis hosted by the Government of Tunisia, from 16 to 18 November 2005.

The World Summit on the Information Society provided a unique opportunity for all key stakeholders to assemble at a high-level gathering and to develop a better understanding of the digital revolution that is sweeping through the globe and its impact on the international community. It aims to bring together Heads of State, Executive Heads of United Nations agencies, industry leaders, non-governmental organizations, media representatives and civil society in a single high-level event. The roles of the various partners (member states, UN specialized agencies, private sector and civil society) in ensuring smooth coordination of the practical establishment of the information society around the globe was also at the heart of the Summit and its preparation.

We are going through a historic transformation. Everything is changing about the way we live, the way we learn, the way we work, the way we communicate and do business. We must do so not passively, but as makers of our own destiny. Technology has given birth to the information age. Now it is up to all of us to build an information society

The anticipated outcome of the Summit was to develop and foster a clear statement of political will and a concrete plan of action for achieving the goals of the Information Society, while fully reflecting all the different interests at stake. However in the countdown to the summit, the preparatory stage was bogged down by disagreements on such issues like Internet governance, intellectual property rights, the financing of an inclusive global Information Society, open-source software, freedom of expression and opinion and the role of the media. These issues expected to have been resolved at PrepCom 3.

Africa’s proposal for the setting up of a digital solidarity fund, though well received by many countries, was vehemently apposed by the United States and other developed economies who say such fund would be an unnecessary duplication of existing sources of funding already put in place for the continent. According to the original proposal made by Senegal, the industrialized world will donate money to the fund which will then distribute the money to where it is most needed in order to develop IT access.

The South African delegation, led by Lyndall Shope-Mafole of the Department of Communications, focused primarily on the Internet governance, or who sets policies for and administers the Internet. Currently, Internet structures are administered by a California based corporation known as ICANN. The South African government and many other developing nations believe that the entire system should not be subject to the laws of a single country, but should rather be administered by an international body such as the United Nations. They believe that the UN should set up a special agency to run the Internet.

The U.S. delegation, realizing that it was fighting a losing battle, tried to delay the discussions by deferring the issue until 2005 when the second phase of the summit is due to be held in Tunisia. However, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced a decision to set up a working group already that has been tasked with drawing up plans for a new UN agency to be approved in Tunis.

Also, the role of the media has turned out to be one of the most divisive issues in the preparatory process for the summit. The divisions on whether or not the media is a unique stakeholder in the Information Society were serious enough to block the consensus required for a Draft Declaration to be presented to the heads of government at the Geneva summit.

Preparatory meetings in Geneva this week have been bogged down every time the role of the media and freedom of expression have been raised. China argues that since the WSIS meeting is about the Information Society, it is purely a technical meeting, and as such, the media certainly has no special role to play.

Chinese delegates methodically bring proceedings to a halt every time any aspect of press freedom is raised. Supported by Venezuela, Mexico and Egypt, the Chinese are effectively wearing down other delegates who believe that media has a key responsibility in the Information Society. An observer at the proceedings noted that even the United States, one of the more vocal supporters of press freedom, appears to have lost its passion for including the media as a stakeholder.

The Media Caucus of the Civil Society issued a press release expressing its dismay that the governmental negotiations for the draft texts “appear to have broken down over statements reaffirming freedom of expression and press freedom”. The statement said, “This is like planning a conference on agriculture without farmers. The Media Caucus affirms that an Information Society without the media is meaningless.”

The Media Caucus also referred to the high-handed way that the ITU restricted media access to the Summit. The statement said that the Caucus was shocked over the “virtual exclusion of freelance journalists from accreditation to the Summit”. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemned the restrictive conditions for the accreditation of freelancers aiming to report on the Summit. The Federation described the ITU decision to bar freelance journalists from the Summit as a “bureaucratic blunder”.

The ITU has imposed a number of unprecedented requirements on journalists seeking accreditation for the summit. It will not give accreditation to reporters unless they are attached to a particular news outlet. “It is bizarre that this rule has been introduced,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. “It appears to be an attempt to exclude bona fide journalists just because they have no confirmed commission.”

In preparation for the summit, a High-Level Summit Organizing Committee (HLSOC) was established under the patronage of Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General and Chairman of the United Nations System Chief Executive Board for Coordination (CEB formally ACC) to underscore the importance of the summit in the UN calendar. The Summit was expected to offer a unique opportunity for the global community to reflect, discuss and give shape to its common destiny in an era when countries and peoples are interconnected as never before.

The first phase of the World Summit in Geneva addressed the broad range of themes concerning the Information Society and adopted a Declaration of Principles and a Plan of Action, addressing the whole range of issues related to the Information Society. The second phase of the World Summit in Tunis (16 to 18 November 2005) will focus on development themes and will assess progress that has been made and adopt any further plan of action to be taken.

Kofi Annan’s Opening: Opening the first-ever global summit on information, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed to world leaders to share the benefits of powerful information and communications technologies (ICT) with the poorest countries and to shape their use to fight worldwide problems such as illiteracy and poverty.  “From trade to telemedicine, from education to environmental protection, we have in our hands, on our desktops and in the skies above, the ability to improve standards of living for millions upon millions of people,” Annan told the Heads of State and government in the audience of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. But an open, inclusive information society that benefits all people will not emerge without sustained commitment and investment, he added. “We look to you, the leaders assembled here, to produce those acts of political will.”

Over the three days (10 – 12 October 2003), nearly 14,000 representatives from government, science, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), industry and media worked to forge a global commitment on ways to harness the power of ICTs towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of measurable and time-bound actions adopted by world leaders in 2000 to combat such global ills as poverty and hunger, inequality in education and diseases such as HIV/AIDS, all by 2015.

Among the goals included in the Summit’s Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action is connecting all villages, schools, hospitals and governments by 2015 for half the world’s people within reach of ICTs, and for more multilingual content and programming. The roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders, including government and industry, are outlined in the plan, which will be reviewed at a second phase of the Summit in November 2005 in Tunisia.

“We have all of this potential. The challenge before this Summit is what to do with it,” said Nitin Desai, the Summit’s Secretary-General and Annan’s Special Adviser for the conference, and Shashi Tharoor, UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, told a press briefing that the event was a “Summit of opportunities.” It also was about democracy and development, Desai added, and contentious issues had been “thoroughly discussed and happily resolved.” He stressed that the emphasis was on the use of ICTs for development and the media were key actors in the process. Tharoor noted that ICTs had the potential to improve the lives of people everywhere, but pointed out that the digital divide was actually several gaps: technological, content, gender and commercial in one.

In his address, Annan also stressed that while information and communication technologies were “not a panacea or magic formula, they could improve the lives of everyone on this planet.” “We are going through a historic transformation. Everything is changing about the way we live, the way we learn, the way we work, the way we communicate and do business. We must do so not passively, but as makers of our own destiny. Technology has given birth to the information age. Now it is up to all of us to build an information society,” he said.

Internet Governance: One would have thought that after two years of preparatory talks, the first round of the WSIS should not have been contentious. Rather than demonstrate a harmony of global interconnectedness, however, the conference revealed serious divisions in the way the governments of rich and poor nations think about the Internet.

The first stumbling block was the attempt to address the “digital divide”. This term describes the inequality of access to computers and the Internet in developing countries compared with the rich world. Some countries, notably in Africa, called for the creation of a special fund by western countries and technology firms to help subsidize hardware and software for poor countries. The idea got a frosty reception. The compromise reached is for a voluntary fund, if it goes forward at all.

The very idea of a digital divide, though it may suit western firms eyeing new markets for their wares, is misleading. For one thing, it makes greater sense to focus on the more important divides in development, i.e. literacy, hygiene and medicine. The gap is also narrower than most people realize. One reason is that it has traditionally been measured in terms of infrastructure, such as telephone lines or PCs per person, which undercounts access to the Internet through schools, offices or cybercafés. The UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which co-ordinates the global telephone system, made this point in a new study.

The second big bone of contention was how to run the Internet’s addressing and numbering system: the top-level domains (such as .sg for Singapore) and their corresponding numerical Internet addresses, which are used to route digital traffic. The system is currently controlled by a private body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has weak representation from governments and operates under the authority of America’s Department of Commerce. Some countries believe the co-ordination of the Internet’s core infrastructure should be placed on a more multilateral footing under an international treaty organization such as the ITU.

Ironically, ICANN itself was set up in 1998 in an attempt to internationalize the management of the Internet. It was established as a private body to avoid bureaucracy and political wrangling. Yet America is wary of a completely intergovernmental approach, since it might jeopardize the Internet’s capacity for free speech and technical innovation. Some of the countries that want more of a say—China and several Middle East and African nations—have dubious records on transparency, human rights and press freedom. They seek more power not to preserve the Internet’s character as an open medium, but to control it better within their borders. So although ICANN has many flaws, America is reluctant to change things too quickly. The business delegation also expressed its support for the status quo.

With no clear solution, the summit’s declaration called for the establishment of a UN working group to develop policies on how to govern the Internet in time for the summit’s second round in Tunisia in 2005. It may cover everything from top-level domains to spam and cybersecurity.

A fudge, in short. But it is a positive sign that countries are discussing how to run the Internet, since it requires global solutions to its problems. Clearly, the old utopian dream that the Internet would undermine the very notion of the nation state belongs in the dustbin of history. The reality is rather more mundane: the sorts of disagreements that characterize other global issues such as trade, the environment and human rights, are now migrating to the network, as the Internet becomes part of the fabric of everyday life.

Hard Bargaining: Delegates agreed to have the Secretary-General of the United Nations (Kofi Annan) establish a committee to study the issue of Internet governance; and even though it was difficult to reach any hard decisions on this issue in Geneva, but most delegates agreed that it was an excellent decision to have the Secretary-General of the UN establish a working group on Internet governance. The mechanism for creating the committee will be an open process; it will not just be a governments-only organization. In addition to governments, the committee will be open to the private sector, Civil Society and other inter-governmental organizations. In effect, it will be open to everyone and anyone.

The primary focus of the group is to do one very limited thing—to create a report. One thing the delegates learned during the preparatory talks is that there is a great deal of misunderstanding of the issues, including Internet governance. If you have five delegates in a room and ask them to define Internet governance, you get five different views. Some people think that Internet governance is synonymous with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). Others think of Internet governance in a much broader sense, to include a host of other issues. So the objective of the report is to help define the term Internet governance and identify the public policy issues associated with it.

Some thought the ICANN could take on the role of an international, inter-governmental body governing the Net; but it is currently impossible to predict the impact the working group will have on ICANN in the future. ICANN plays a very important role but very carefully defined role with regard to Internet governance. One of the functions of that role, for instance, is top-level domain name allocation. ICANN is not an organization designed to address Internet governance issues as many broadly define that term.

The key to this issue is believed to be a multi-stakeholder approach. Multi-stakeholders include governments, Civil Society and the private sector. We have long believed and continue to believe that efforts to manage the Internet should be private sector led for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that Internet technology and issues are changing so rapidly that Internet governance really needs to be led by the private sector because of its ability to change and modify things so quickly.

Funding was another thorny issue. The delegates also agreed to push this issue to a committee. They agreed to the need to study the feasibility of a new fund and determine if such a fund is needed as compared to modifying existing funding schemes. The U.S. has a presidential initiative—the digital freedom initiative. It focuses on countries that are investing in their people and that have the right regulatory and legal environment. The initiative is a public-private partnership, which provides a combination of money and capacity support. By capacity support, I mean groups like the Peace Corp. teaching people.

The U.S. delegation was opposed to early wording in the declaration of principles document on promoting free open-source software. Proprietary software has since been added to the list of software models. Since these documents (the declaration of principles and the action plan) are forward-looking, it is important to reflect in them the opportunities that different types of software have for governments, both as users and what they promote for people. In our view, there is an appropriate role and place for all types of software. It’s not a zero-sum game. The U.S. government itself uses a wide variety of different types of software, such as proprietary and open source. The document reflects that different types of software have a time and place, depending on application and cost. Our view is that all types of software should be available.

The group negotiating intellectual property rights (IPR) supposedly met the most often and argued the most intensely. The final wording of the paragraph on IPR in the declaration of principles avoids concrete details. Despite some disagreements, most were pleased with the paragraph on intellectual property. It does two things: first and foremost, it explicitly recognizes that intellectual property rights are an important component to the information society; and second, it explicitly recognizes that diffusion of information is a critical element in the information society. It’s about people around the world having access to information, which they may pay for or which may be provided to them.

The issues surrounding existing IPR are being actively decided in appropriate technical forums, such as the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and WTO (World Trade Organization). Existing intellectual property agreements appropriately reflect the interests of both users and content producers. The declaration of principles is designed not to address existing agreements of any nature. It is a forward-looking document that should focus on things that will withstand the test of time. The details, such as particular agreements, are important, but they are the details. They are not the vision, which is the primary purpose of the declaration. The declaration of principles is supposed to be visionary—not an encyclopedia. Freedom of expression was another key issue of the summit and it is right up front in the document. The agreement on freedom of expression is critically important, as is the role the media plays in the information society. 

President Khatami’s Presence in WSIS: Iranian President Seyed Mohammad Khatami, heading a high ranking delegation went to Geneva to deliver a speech to those gathered at the Summit and hold talks with other Heads of States on the major regional and international issues. Observers believe the summit provides a good opportunity for professionals involved in information dissemination to exchange views on the technical points of their task. They are convinced that the need for better access to information and clarifying the legal, political and security aspects of the issue makes it necessary for the intellectuals, thinkers, scholars and politicians to come into a consensus on ways of adapting to the present conditions.

President Mohammad Khatami termed as important the Declaration of Principles and its companion Plan of Action that were presented at the WSIS. Khatami said Iran has made clear efforts toward those documents, and thanked the Minister of Post, Telegraph and Telephone Ahmad Motamedi and his deputy Nasrollah Jahangard for their efforts in that connection. He said the documents highlighted the need to provide easy, fast and cheap information to all, and also covered a variety of religious, moral, cultural, social and political considerations to that effect. Khatami said the summit also underscored the need to refrain from unilateralism in the area of information and communications technology, and to respect moral and religious values.

Khatami said that the results of his visit to Geneva had been fruitful. He also stressed that the summit had highlighted the need for the international community to look for new ways to keep pace with the developments in the area of information and communications.

The Geneva summit is said to be the biggest international gathering after the United Nation’s meeting to mark the third millennium. President Khatami pointed out that the flow of information has transformed the today world and while this has benefited contemporary human life, much careful thought should be given to this sensitive issue.

Officials from over 175 world countries, about 40 heads of states and nearly 14,000 representatives of industry and non-governmental organizations took part in the gatherings which aimed at reaching a universal compromise over the issue and taking commitments towards providing immediate, unbarred and all-out access to information by all countries. These meetings also explored issues thrown up by the growing use of technology—such as mobile phones, the Internet and electronic media—to access information.

President Mohammad Khatami’s Special Envoy in Information Technology Affairs Nasrollah Jahangard said that President Khatami’s participation in the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) reveals the extent to which Iranian authorities pay attention to the information technology.

Jahangard said Iran has actively took part in the process of formulating the instruments related to the summit and has played a key role in the compilation the Summit declaration which can be found at http://www.itu.int/wsis/. He noted that the Summit organizers including the Swiss President and other high ranking authorities have thanked Iran for its important efforts in this regard. He went on to say that the WSIS was the most important event of the century and a source of great changes and policy-makings in the future.

He said the speech of President Khatami would provide a good and historical opportunity for Iran’s executive officials to have recourse to in order to influence the international community’s decision on the global issues.

UNESCO’s Symposium: The question of how can the world community move towards building open, pluralistic and equitable knowledge societies was debated by political and intellectual world leaders at the High-Level Symposium on “Building Knowledge Societies - from Vision to Action” that UNESCO organized in Geneva, Switzerland, at the World Summit on the Information Society.

UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura opened the Symposium on 9 December 2003 on the eve of the WSIS opening. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was invited to take part. Adama Samassékou, President of the WSIS Preparatory Committee, described the Symposium as “a call on world leaders to ensure that cultural, ethical and intellectual dimensions are a key part in the summit process.”

Leading experts and intellectuals who took part in the Symposium were: the economist and sociologist Gary Becker, Economics Nobel Prize Laureate; Monkombu S. Swaminathan, Chairman of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation of India which seeks to harness science and technology for environmentally sustainable and socially equitable development; Lawrence Lessig, of the Stanford Law School, a leading expert on Internet legislation; Valdas Adamkus, Former President of Lithuania and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the Construction of Knowledge Societies; John Gage, Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office of Sun Microsystems, which advocates software diversity and open-source software; and Abdul-Muyeed Chowdhury, Executive Director of BRAC, formerly known as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

Two heads of states delivered keynote addresses at the Symposium’s two panels: Joaquim Alberto Chissano, President of Mozambique and Chairman of the African Union; and Vaira Vike-Freiberga, President of Latvia. Government ministers from New Zealand, Thailand and Tunisia also attended the meetings.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has designed the symposium to build a holistic vision and a clear developmental perspective of the issues at stake at the World Summit on the Information Society. The Symposium addressed four key questions: How to ensure universal access to information? How to achieve equal access to quality education? How to foster freedom of expression in cyberspace? And finally, how to achieve pluralism in knowledge societies?