A will to close the Digital Divide by Jennifer L. Schenker International Herald Tribune 12:09pm 15th Dec, 2003   GENEVA.December 15, 2003    To no one's surprise, the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society last week, which attracted mostly delegates from the deprived side of the digital divide, concluded that the World Wide Web is not as global as it is made out to be.    "Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no equality," Shashi Tharoor, the UN under secretary-general for information and communications, said in an interview.    Only 1 percent of people in the world's poorest countries are connected to the Internet. The 400,000 residents of Luxembourg have more Internet capacity than all of Africa's 760 million inhabitants, according to the International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency that organized the summit meeting in Geneva.    But many here maintained that the problem was not limited to a lack of technology, or even a lack of funds. Many leaders from underprivileged countries simply said that they did not have a voice in the way the Internet is run.    The only thing that both the private- and public-sector representatives at the meeting had in common was "suspicion of U.S. control," Eli Noam, head of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, said in an interview at the meeting.    "Even if it is not true, there is a perception that the U.S. government is running the Internet," Noam said.    While civil groups could successfully interact with existing Internet forums on governance issues, Noam said he feared that they would be "co-opted" into a partnership with the United Nations, "in the belief that it will liberate them from the U.S. government and Microsoft."    The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a company incorporated in Santa Clara, Cali-fornia, and under contract to the U.S. Commerce Department, became a kind of straw man for what is perceived as the U.S. government's control because it is the Internet's semiofficial governing body.    Some countries moved to put this governing body, known as Icann, along with all other types of governance issues - including spam and child pornography - under the auspices of the United Nations, within the framework of either the International Telecommunication Union or the UN Information and Communications Technologies Task Force.    But Internet luminaries like Nicholas Negroponte, as well as business leaders, used the Geneva meeting to caution against involvement by such agencies, stressing that the strength of the Internet came from the fact that it had a grass-roots approach to regulation.    The danger of a UN solution, Noam said, is that it would slow things down and "increase the weight of the Internet no-show countries who have very little participation and a low user base but are sovereign countries and therefore want full sovereignty over the Internet."    In the end, the delegates agreed that a UN working group should be set up to examine whether intergovernmental oversight of groups like Icann is necessary. A similar committee will be set up to review how connecting the world's poor should be financed.    That outcome was welcomed by the United States and some other industrialized countries, which feared that developing nations would vote at the summit meeting for the United Nations to take over the Internet, mandate a new pool of money that industrial nations would have to finance, and adopt Brazil's suggestion that proprietary software had no place in the developing world.    Industrialized countries pushed for and won an endorsement of intellectual property rights as well as of human rights and freedom of the media. At the same time, the language of the principles referring to the use of commercial software was watered down, making it more technology-neutral. And private-sector interests will not lose their stake in the way the Internet is governed.    But they will have to make more room at the table for other stakeholders.    "We are still listening, very carefully, about how that might be done," David Gross, head of the U.S. delegation, said in an interview.    The Geneva summit meeting was the first in the United Nations' history to gather heads of government on the issue. In addition to the 50 heads of government at the meeting, there were about 3,300 people from nongovernmental groups representing diverse interests such as women's rights, indigenous people and the handicapped.    Business also made its voice heard, through the International Chamber of Commerce and through executives like Jorma Ollila, chief executive of Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone manufacturer, one of the 514 businesspeople who attended. About 11,000 people attended the four days of meetings, which ended Friday.    As expected, participants, including government delegates from 176 countries, on Friday night formally adopted a plan aimed at ensuring access to television and radio services for all of the world's population by 2015 and ensuring that more than half of all people will have access to some form of information and communications technology.    They also adopted principles that could serve as a loose constitution for cyberspace, agreeing, for example, on freedom of the press and the right of individuals to express themselves. Progress is to be measured at a follow-up summit meeting in Tunis in 2005.    UN officials, including the ITU secretary-general, Yoshio Utsumi, proclaimed the conference a triumph for multilateralism, although among the missing were many Asian heads of state and most Western leaders, including President George W. Bush, and the heads of most U.S. technology and media companies.    At the meeting's conclusion, some said one of its greatest achievements was that government leaders from a broad spectrum of countries had unanimously embraced the Internet as a key to their political progress, economic growth and social development.    "Some people say this conference was boring or pointless because minister after minister and president after president stood up and said the same thing," John Gage, Sun Microsystems' chief researcher, said in an interview. "But I say that is why this is so exciting."    Gage added: "All of us in the industry have been saying that we need to link every school and every farmer for the last 15 years, but we never had the governments saying it. It can't be done without them."
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