world summit on information society
November 21, 2005 – 5:55 pmthe second phase of the UN World Summit on Information Society convened by the International Telecommunications Union - has just concluded last weekend - in Tunisia. the ITU is a UN agency, and the first phase of the WSIS was held ages ago ( alright in 2003) in switzerland.
the point of these fancy sounding summits was to discuss the concept of information society in general, how to ensure it is inclusive; and then lay the foundation such that issues like the digital divide are addressed, and then of course, the thorny problem of internet governance ( and money..who’s gonna pay?)
( ha ha! what a simple remit)
things have moved on somewhat since 2001 when we discussed these issues in a law class i happened to be taking at the time focusing on Internet Governance : but you know what - they ain’t really moved on THAT much! ICANN is still around..and is there actually much understanding of the governance issue? well we’ll have to see - depending on what the outcomes of the latest Tunis summit. There is a lot of research to be done to find this out - given the bureaucratic nature of these ’summits’ - and who even gets to go to these summits? a bunch of politicians/national-y representative-y sort of folks, i bet. who probably don’t know anything about the internet… probably don’t know how to use it. you know how these things are - they send their most important person - who turns out to be some old bloke in a suit. Wouldn’t matter so much if they knew what they were talking about - but summits usually have idiots attending them. they like to keep the real stakeholders - people like you and me and individuals - out of the game.
at any rate: one thing is clear - the usual spotlight on the Host Country - in this case Tunisia, which i think we can safely say isn’t very friendly to cyber-dissidents. ( well dissent in general!) More on that to come as well, but it seems to be clear - as is usually the case - that the Tunisian human rights community/activists were barred from the global conference and their attempts to meet independently didn’t really succeed.
typical - let’s leave out the people we say we want to ‘include’. PAH!
