[huridocs-tech] WSIS: On eve of UN summit, progress made on global information, tech agreements

15 November 2005 – On the eve of a major summit that aims to bridge the
“digital divide” – the gap in access to information technologies between
affluent and poor communities – the head of the United Nations
telecommunications organization said that there was already headway on
major issues and attendance had surpassed expectations.

In his opening remarks to the press on the eve of the Tunis phase of the
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), to be held from 16 to 18
November, the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU), Yoshio Utsumi, announced that by this morning, 23,000
participants had registered with 12,000 arrivals recorded so far.

About 173 countries are represented at the Summit and over 50 heads of
State and Government are expected to attend.

While the first phase – held in Geneva in 2003 – established the
principles of the Information Society and outlined an action plan, the
Tunis phase is the “Summit of Solutions,” Mr. Utsumi said.

He hailed progress in the negotiations toward that end, especially the
headway made this morning on Internet governance. Consensus seems to be
emerging on forming a forum to discuss the future of the world-wide
network. “This management should be more democratic and multilateral,” he
said.

Compromise had yet to be reached on how to implement the action plan, he
said, but he was pleased to have achieved nearly 80 per cent of the goals.
New ideas have been forthcoming from scientists, and in five years the
outlook would be quite different. He was quite confident of connecting the
world by 2015, including the 800,000 villages that remain disconnected
from information and communication technologies.

“In order to connect these villages we need about $1 billion,” Mr Utsumi
said. “Every year about $100 billion is invested in the mobile telephone
system, so only 1 per cent of this amount is needed to achieve the
target.”

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has arrived in Tunis, has
been meeting on information issues with local officials, as well as
Israel’s Foreign Minister and heads of UN agencies attending the Summit.

Shashi Tharoor, UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public
Information, expressed concerns over what he called the “content divide”
and freedom of expression, at a press conference on the World Electronic
Media Forum (WEMF) taking place in parallel with the Summit.

What passed for global media remained, in reality, the media of the
developed West, where most of the world’s Internet hosts were, he said.

“Access to the Internet is growing but is of little value if the bulk of
the information that it reveals is in a language you don’t understand or
if it fails to deal with life and death questions that affect your family
or your society,” he said.

On the issue of press freedom, Mr. Tharoor acknowledged that Internet, the
“medium without a passport” posed challenges to all governments as they
sought to find a legal environment that fostered freedom of expression
without trampling on other legitimate rights.

 


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