WSIS: Summit Without A Peak ~By Joaquin Rivery Tur

http://www.periodico26.cu/english/opinion/summit112205.htm

World Summit on the Information Society: Summit without a Peak
By JOAQUIN RIVERY TUR - rivery@granma.cip.cu  -
11-22-05

Bush didn’t go. Neither did Tony Blair. And Jacques Chirac, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi and Junichiro Koizumi were all absent. The leaders from the seven riches countries were not interested in the gathering.

These are the same countries that use up the largest share of the planet’s energy; the same countries that are most advanced in information and communication technologies, the so called ICTs; the same countries that have failed to meet the promise of directing a mere 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product to help develop nations that are literally being left behind.

Despite the fact that the event was called the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), coverage by the mainstream media in those no-show countries was null. Television, newspapers, and magazines in the First World as well as many in the Third World didn’t pay any attention to the event.

The world’s richest countries sent delegations made up of representatives without any real power to implement change; delegations made up of barely a few specialists in the main areas of discussion where policies were to be made.

The world’s powerful totally ignored the gathering that took place in Tunis, Tunisia, from November 16 to 18. Even though for months these same countries had been making lots of noise in Geneva —headquarters of the International Telecommunications Organization— about how to come up with a global front to deal with the world’s widening digital divide.

Negotiators arrived in Tunis with empty hands and prolonged discussions did not lead to any solutions; not that this could have been easily accomplished. Those in control of the means to make some progress were not interested in alleviating the situation faced by the world’s poorest nations.

Representatives from the countries looking for development opportunities found themselves meeting with delegations from the G-7 countries, for example, that had absolutely no power to take any sort of decisions whatsoever. Their instructions were simply to not budge an inch in any of the key areas and to allow only for a few vague agreements without making commitments in even the most minor areas.

It was a summit only in name, which never came close to a peak of agreements. The Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action showed some positive results, such as the unification of underdeveloped countries and the rejection of unilateral measures in violation of international law that impede development and impair the wellbeing of those citizens in other countries. This last result aptly reflected Cuba’s call for the end of the US blockade and its hostile use of radio airwaves in its aggressions against Cuba.  

As a result of the futility of this summit, the so-called “digital divide” will only widen. If only a few weeks ago in the UN General Assembly the developed nations refused to give any teeth to the commitment to halve poverty in the Third World by 2015, if they are completely unwilling to help poor countries develop and change the global rule of neo-liberal policies, then what more could have been expected?

Those countries that use 75 percent of the world’s total ICTs continue to do so, they don’t feel the slightest tinge of sympathy towards the same countries that they themselves scupper back into the dark ages, as is the case in Africa. What kind of future can there be other than a widening of the digital divide?

The Cuban delegation, headed by Cuban Informatics and Communications Minister Ignacio Gonzalez Planas, raised the same point as they had in Phase One of the WSIS held in December 2003 in Geneva. Namely, that humanity would not be able to move into an information society as long as there were whole populations that suffer hunger, illness, discrimination, exclusion and illiteracy. Even if granted access to ICTs, how is a poor person, who doesn’t know how to read or write, going to operate a computer?

Its difficult to talk about modernizing the planet in a world where 5/6 of the population is marginalized; where billions of people go hungry and don’t have the resources to buy food, let alone the latest computer technologies; where people don’t have enough money to heal their illnesses, or even at times, to bury their dead. The beautiful future that information technicians envision, is only for the few. The rest will continue as always.

Those that advocate an unlimited Information Society, do so in the midst of a global neo-liberal economy designed to benefit multinational companies and millionaires. There was good reason that those attending the business forum, which took place in conjuncture with the summit, rejoiced when the US flat-out refused to let control of the Internet pass into the hands of an international committee, thus keeping it in the private hands of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (CANN).

The cybernetic business community was overjoyed with the fact that the Internet would stay in private hands and be regulated only by market terms. As usual, their primary concern is business and profits. They have absolutely no interest in finding ways to control the proliferation of pornography (of any kind) or of neo-Nazi or ultra-rightwing websites that teach young people hate, racism and xenophobia, or how to make homemade bombs and weapons. The new informatics entrepreneurs have no interest in slowing down the escalation of anti-culture on the web in favor of prioritizing art, education, enlightenment and ethics.
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Related Links ~
World Summit on the Information Society
http://www.itu.int/wsis/

WSIS Documents
http://www.itu.int/wsis/documents/doc_multi.asp?lang=en&id=2266|2267

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
http://www.icann.org/new.html

Domain Name Handbook: ICANN News and Editorials
http://www.domainhandbook.com/icann3.html

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