"Gaps in the Net"

Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde diplomatique

Geneva hosted the first World Summit on the Information Society in December, organised at the request of the United Nations by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This was an important event: in terms of the range of its remit, the issues and eventual outcomes, this summit will be as significant for communications technology as the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was for the environment.The internet became available to the public only a decade ago. In that short time, it has revolutionised political, economic, social and cultural life to such an extent that we can now reasonably speak of a new internet world order in telecommunications. Nothing is as it was before. For a large proportion of the world’s people the speed and reliability of computer networks has changed their manner of communication, study, shopping, news, entertainment, political organisation, cultural life and work. The growth of internet-based activities and email has put the computer at the centre of a network, relayed via a new generation of do-everything phones, that has transformed all areas of social activity.

But this remarkable transformation has largely been to the advantage of Western countries, already the beneficiaries of previous industrial revolutions. It is now exacerbating the digital gap between those who have an abundance of information technologies and the many more who have none. Two figures give a sense of the inequality: 91% of the world’s users of the internet are drawn from only 19% of the world’s population. The digital gap does as much to accentuate and aggravate the North-South divide as the traditional inequality between rich and poor -- 20% of the population of the rich countries own 85% of the world’s wealth. If nothing is done, cyber technologies will leave the inhabitants of the least advanced countries outside, especially in sub- Saharan Africa, where scarcely 1% of people have access, and those are mostly men.

This problem cannot be ignored by anyone hoping to create a fairer world. It was centre-stage at the Geneva meeting. For the first time, in an evident sign of changes under way, there was a UN summit that brought together representatives of governments, big business and NGOs. Not that everything went smoothly, since the NGOs complained that they had been marginalised and politically exploited.

The final statement (1) found it difficult to dodge the stalemate on the main issues. First, the proposal to create a digital solidarity fund failed because the rich countries refused to commit themselves financially. Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, who has been pressing for the fund for a long time, proposed to get round government obstructions by adding a voluntary one-euro contribution to the price of every computer sold in the world. Others suggested a one-cent increase in the price of all telephone phone calls to encourage world digital cohesion.

Other major causes for concern were the control of the internet by authoritarian regimes, including China, and the policing of private lives, via surveillance and monitoring of internet activities, in many democratic countries, including the United States, under the pretext of the struggle against terrorism. Here too progress proved impossible. Citing cyber-security, governments were unwilling to make concessions.

The third major issue was how the internet should be managed and regulated. Here, at least for the time being, the US has the whip hand (2). But Washington has realised the crucial importance of the issue, with its effects on every area of political and economic decision-making, and appears prepared to discuss it, although only within the framework of the G8, the big-power consortium that runs our world.

Initially the summit had argued for a management of the internet that was multilateral, transparent and democratic, with broad-based participation by governments, the private sector and civil society. It also flirted with the idea, defended by a number of countries, and also by the inventor of the World Wide Web, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, to transfer responsibility for the net to a dedicated agency of the UN.

Washington rejected this outright, arguing that only management by the private sector would guarantee the internet’s existence as an instrument of freedom. All these issues will be on the agenda again at the summit’s next session, in Tunis in November 2005. Meantime might it not be a good idea to embark immediately on a large-scale technological Marshall Plan?

Notes

(1) Available on the official website at www.itu.int/wsis

(2) The internet is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages the addresses and domain names of websites. It is directly answerable to the US department of trade and hence to the US government.

[Translated by Ed Emery]