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Contributions from
the Column
Studies and reports
Development driven by technology?
So far only a vague prospect
AIDS vaccine: no breakthrough
Interview with Michael Krakowski
Poverty reduction strategy papers:
donors still dominant
Sovereign debt restructuring:
IMF proposal does not go far enough
Fresh water
Foreign investment: democracies preferred?
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World Summit on the Information Society
Development driven by technology?
So far only a vague prospect
By Arne Hintz
The ambitious goal was not achieved: the second meeting of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) for the World Summit on the Information Society, which ran from 17 to 28 February in Geneva, was supposed to produce draft proposals for a final declaration and action plan that could be more or less rubber-stamped at the summit in December. Instead, the participants only managed to deliver two provisional and very general working documents.
One of the problems is the complexity of the subject. Defining it is one of the summit’s primary goals – but it is not an easy task. At present, the conference papers that will eventually become the summit’s final documents contain only vague assertions. The future final declaration, for example, will state that the digital gap presents a fundamental obstacle to development and needs to be bridged by the creation of technological infrastructures in the poor countries and linkage into information networks. Knowledge and information – “the fundamental sources of affluence” – need to be made globally available by Internet access for all. Formulations like that show the high-tech euphoria of the 1990s tinged with frustration in the light of the meagre progress made to date in the effort to reduce global poverty. So far, a practical roadmap for achieving the Millennium Development Goals by harnessing high tech is nowhere to be found in the action plan for the future. Instead, one finds a list of targets of questionable feasibility and dubious utility – such as connecting every village (no matter where) to the Internet by 2010.
Education and the preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity are other priorities set out in the two papers – priorities that were basically included at the insistence of the numerous NGOs represented and a number of developing country governments. In the contentious area of ‘intellectual property rights’, civil society and developing countries scored a partial success in getting the present version of the final declaration to call for “a balance between copyright and public interest”. African countries in particular had appealed for open technology standards and open source software.
Data security and safeguarding privacy figured hardly at all in the official negotiations but they were given a higher profile by the civil society actors, for whom this PrepCom marked a first. For the first time in the history of preparations for a world summit, their comments were appended to government documents and thus granted official status. Some governments fought to the bitter end to prevent this upgrading but others readily adopted the NGOs pragmatic and professional papers. The next ordinary PrepCom meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society is scheduled for September; prior to that, however, an extraordinary meeting will be held in July to make up the ground not covered at the meeting that produced the present meagre results.
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