Major Changes to Internet Averted at Information Summit
01 Feb 2004At December’s long-awaited World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva, governments addressed an ambitious work program aimed at spreading the benefits of the information revolution more widely. However, they split over two major issues: Internet governance and the establishment of an international fund to promote global connectivity.
WSIS is a United Nations-organized event, of which the Geneva meeting represented just the first phase. The second phase will be held in Tunis in November 2005. Approximately 50 heads of state attended the Geneva summit.
ICC spearheaded business input into the WSIS process, chairing the Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors, a loose coalition of interested business associations. Participating industry groups plan to continue this arrangement through the summit’s conclusion in Tunis. In Geneva, the business delegation was led by ICC Chairman Emeritus Richard D. McCormick, Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO of Nokia, Jean-Philippe Courtois, CEO of Microsoft EMEA, Talal Abu-Ghazaleh of Jordan, Chair of the ICC Commision on E-Business and Information Technology, and ICC Secretary General Maria Livanos Cattaui.
At the summit, governments approved a declaration of principles and plan of action, both of which were seen as acceptable to business, given the political environment that surrounded the negotiations.
“The term ‘Internet governance,’ is really a misnomer, since the Internet has no ultimate governing body,” observed USCIB’s David Fares, who attended the event. He said some governments confuse Internet governance with the coordination and administration of the Internet’s name and number system, which are handled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a not-for-profit organization with international membership from a variety of Internet stakeholders.
In addition, several developing countries called for the creation of a voluntary “Global Digital Solidarity Fund” to finance measures to close the Digital Divide. This was opposed by industrialized nations, who argued that numerous funding bodies already exist and called for better coordination and more efficiency among these existing bodies. Business maintained that the only long-term solution to global connectivity is the adoption of pro-competitive policies that attract private sector investment.
Given the inability to solve these issues, governments called on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to create a working group on Internet Governance and a task force on funding, with participation from all stakeholders. The working groups will provide reports for the Tunis phase of the summit. The ICC has established a special work program to parallel the U.N. Working Group on Internet Governance.
Governments also disagreed on the role of intellectual property protection in the promotion of the information society. The final text recognizes the importance of intellectual property protection, as well as wide dissemination and diffusion of information and sharing of knowledge.
Some governments argued that existing intellectual property agreements were skewed in favor of rights holders, and therefore needed to be reopened to address their perceived imbalance. But neither the declaration nor the plan of action mentioned future discussions on the subject within the WSIS negotiations.
The road to Tunis is far from clear. The WSIS secretariat will organize a preparatory meeting in the first half of 2004 to discuss procedural rules for the negotiations and possible agreements to be finalized at the summit’s conclusion next year.
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