Geneva, Switzerland
The guns could not have been any bigger.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the presidents of Switzerland and Nokia.
All here, with almost 11,000 other delegates, at the World Summit on the Information Society, trying to fix the problems of the Internet.
Oh, you didn’t know it was broken? Well, think about the dramatic increase in spam filling your mailbox. Reflect on the futility of trying to hunt down bad guys who pull scams from the other side of the world. Note how hate groups are able to get domains on the Internet and spread venom and disinformation with ease and impunity.
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| WSIS photo |
| UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke against the digital and gender divide at the conference. |
One part of the Internet is running well. That’s the technical side, administered by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. They even have a good way to sorting out disputes, so Celine Dion gets celinedion.com and you don’t.
You can now be www.joes artgallery.museum, but there is no “dot Al-Qaeda” top-level domain, nor is there likely to be as long as ICANN is a U.S.-based entity.
ICANN’s only real problem is that they’re running out of IP addresses. But with a new scheme called IPv6, they’ll have enough numbers to assign one to every 40,000 molecules from the Earth’s surface up to one kilometre high. (That should allow your salt shaker to tell the household robot when it needs refilling.)
Unfortunately, the policy people and lawmakers lag way behind the techies. That’s partly because the Internet was never planned. It just happened, rising out of a U.S. military experiment in robust communication.
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, vice-chairman of the UN Information and Communication Technologies Task Force, calls the Internet “the greatest gift the U.S. has ever given to the world.”
But he suggests that it’s now time to look that gift in the mouth. “We can no longer talk of the No-Man’s Land of cyberspace with no one in charge,” he says, “because this No-Man’s Land is handling global e-business and many other important functions.” There appears to be an intricate series of plots and counter-plots to wrest control of the Internet from its U.S. cradle.
Developing nations bristle at the “American domination” of the medium, with almost 70 per cent of websites in English. They don’t like the high interconnection fees that small countries have to pay to be on the Internet backbone, which translates to high user costs. One commentator from Bangladesh points out that it would cost him $3,500 a month to enjoy the high-speed Internet access that we take for granted at well under $100 a month.
If someone should “run the Internet,” just who would that be? The thought of a UN-style bureaucracy scares the bejeebers out of many here, but that could be what Kofi Annan has in mind. In his conference opening speech, he bemoaned the digital divide, noting that there is also a gender divide, “with women and girls enjoying less access to information technology than men and boys.”
He also sees a “commercial divide” because if you can’t handle e-commerce, some companies just won’t do business with you.
Then there’s the good old “Who pays?” issue. African countries want an international “digital solidarity fund” to cover their ICT costs. Big donors such as the U.S. and Japan want to keep control through existing aid channels.
The non-decision reached at the summit was to consider setting up a fund, without actually agreeing to do so.
No report on the summit would be complete without a mention of the large and lively group of protesters who set up their own counter-summit called “We Seize.” After being booted out of their original space by Geneva police in riot gear, the protesters set up in the hallowed if grotty halls of L’Usine, a place that became famous when the G8 was in town.
Everybody going into the official summit was scanned with airport style X-rays and metal detectors.
One delegate reported being detained and questioned because he was carrying a copy of Adbusters magazine.
The irony of having the next phase of this summit in Tunis has not been lost on people who point to Tunisia’s less than stellar record on human rights. As I entered the hall today, I was handed both pro- and anti-Tunisia propaganda.
A piece of advice: if you go to Tunis, leave the magazines home and read them online, preferably through an anonymizer site.
Web watch:
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
