No clear view, for now
25 Feb 2004INDIA, uncharacteristically, refrained from tendering sage advice to the rest of the world. But the US ran true to fulsome form and welcomed the declaration of principles and plan of action adopted by the December, 2003, 176-nation World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as "excellent documents that reflect the views of the United States and all of the rest of the nations of the world," presumably in that order...
The US' satisfaction with these documents comes as no big surprise as it, for all intents and purposes, controls the Internet through a bunch of private sector organisations which get to make all the key decisions about standards, technology, regulation and so on, the most well known being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which has been running the global domain name system since 1988 under an agreement with the US government.
This control has, predictably, caused resentment among some countries — China, India, South Africa, Brazil and so on — which are for bringing the Internet under the aegis of an inter-governmental group such as the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU). A few among these countries have, in fact, been making vague threats about the unilateral creation of national policies and their own networks but, as of now, nobody is inclined to take them very seriously as everyone knows that they'll be too busy feuding with each other to make good on the threat.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the Internet is far too US-centric and dominated by American private industry. As Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, the Jordanian Vice-Chairman of the UN Information and Communication Technology Task Force, put it so pithily, "the world should be grateful to Uncle Sam for creating the internet" — but it's time for other countries to have some say in its governance.
That sounds terribly reasonable — but that doesn't mean it's going to happen as is all too evident from the fact that, in the course of the final round of negotiation leading up to the WSIS declaration, the US stuck to its position — the Internet should be operated and regulated primarily by the private sector while many developing countries insisted that an international body be created to govern cyberspace. The stand-off ended in the usual way with everybody agreeing to the retention of the status quo while a panel, to be set up by the UN, works on the issue and comes out with a set of recommendations, which will be presented at the second phase of the summit to be held in Tunisia in 2005.
Those dismayed by the outcome of the WSIS may be better able to come to terms with it in the context of civil society's long-standing contention that the digital divide cannot be dealt with in isolation as it is a part of the larger divisions between the rich and the poor, the global north and south and so on. While everybody is in agreement on the need for more telephones and computers — the UN member states, in 2000, had committed themselves to achieving the so-called Millennium Development Goals one of which involved the availability of a computer with Internet access for every 100 people around the world by 2015 — nobody is quite clear about who is going to foot the bill.
The developing world, as usual, believes that the rich countries must fund their development of the required infrastructure. Thus, Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, has proposed the setting up of a digital solidarity fund for the least developed countries. The leaders of other countries have also weighed in with their suggestions: Taxes on international telephone calls and the commercial use of the radio frequency spectrum, for instance. And, as expected, virtually all these proposals have been shot down by the US, the European Union, Canada and Japan on the grounds that infrastructure development should be left to private sector entities in these countries, supported by government initiatives such as deregulation. The developed world, it would appear, will be all too happy to sell the hardware and the software necessary for the development of infrastructure — but only if the ICT sector is privatised.
The Chinese government, of course, is appalled by the notion as it firmly believes that the Internet should be under its control.
Actually, this whole business of government control of the Internet proved to be another tricky area at the WSIS. While China and Russia are intent upon ensuring information security for political reasons, the US too is deeply concerned about network security in the context of terrorism. In the circumstances, it was almost inevitable that the WSIS moved away from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers. The WSIS declaration begins with a pious reference to the need to create an information infrastructure that is open and available to all and affirms the "common desire and commitment" of all the participant nations "to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society where everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life" — and then goes on to recognise as free and independent media only those which are in accordance with the legal provisions of each country.
Given these and related differences in the positions of the participants, the WSIS concluded without having resolved the question as to who, if anybody, should control the Internet.
It is unlikely that this question will be answered in the foreseeable future for the simple reason that nobody owns the Internet.
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