[Ecommerce] More on WSIS: notes from a colleague in Paris and Techdaily Story

[Manon Anne Ress]

More on WSIS:
A French colleague who had attended the Paris meeting wrote:
"Civil Society Members and businesses were able to "express opinions" 
but observers' recommendations, as they appear in the various drafts 
were not really taken into account.
In reality, discussions focused on member states contributions 
only...when articles needed more attention(article 10 esp), there were 
creation of working groups.
The draft has been reduced and will be discussed again at PrepCom3 
(Geneva, September 15-26).  The goal is to get to two documents of about 
five pages."

Story in Techdaily on WSIS
July 25, 2003
Focus For Information Society Summit Turns To Sticky Issues
by William New

      Representatives from more than 150 nations have moved closer to 
consensus on a declaration for the upcoming World Summit on the 
Information Society (WSIS), but sticky issues remain, officials said on 
Friday.
      In a press briefing in Washington, Adama Samassekou of Mali, the 
head of the summit preparatory committee, chief negotiator David Gross 
of the U.S. State Department, and Marc Furrer, secretary of the Swiss 
federal office of communications, acknowledged that "controversial" 
issues must be addressed by the December summit.
      The issues include Internet governance, including unsolicited 
e-mail or spam, "open source" software (which allows users to change the 
underlying code), and the freedom and security of information. Other 
topics will be the benefits of open markets versus state monopolies and 
how to improve information infrastructure in developing countries.
      Between 6,000 and 8,000 people are expected at the Geneva summit, 
officials said. The hope is that the summit will produce specific 
partnership actions for governments and non-governmental organizations 
and companies in areas like e-government and e-education. It also will 
produce guidelines for governments to follow in developing their own 
national strategies for technology. But the results of the event will be 
non-binding.
      Samassekou cited three main goals of the summit: to spread 
technologies to those without access; accelerate the use of information 
and communications technologies as a development tool; and recognize 
cultural diversity, such as by making the Internet available to people 
in their native languages.
      But officials, particularly Gross, said the WSIS should not be the 
place to address the details of Internet issues. The draft declaration 
contains several alternate proposals on Internet governance to be 
negotiated in the coming weeks. The United States backs a principle of 
openness and free speech on the Internet led by the private sector, 
while other countries have shown interest in assigning responsibility 
for Internet matters to a multilateral body.
      Samassekou said that at last week's meeting of WSIS negotiators in 
Paris, he met on the issue with the president of the Internet 
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the private organization 
that manages the domain-name system.
      Another top U.S. objective is to include clearer commitments to 
the rule of law and freedom of information, Gross said.
      At the Paris meeting, negotiators cut about 30 pages from the 
draft summit declaration, which now stands at 12 pages. Work on the 
larger and more complicated action plan will intensify after a drafting 
group finishes preparations on the document in mid-August.
      The next formal negotiation will be a two-week preparatory 
committee meeting in Geneva in mid-September, at which Gross said he 
hopes nations will finalize the declaration and make significant 
progress on the action plan.
      Samassekou said it is important to bring stakeholders in the 
information society -- governments, the private sector and 
non-governmental organizations -- together for one purpose. "I think we 
can say there is a great mistrust between them," Samassekou said.
      The two-stage summit will occur Dec. 10-12 in Geneva and Nov. 
16-18, 2005, in Tunis, Tunisia.




-- 
Manon Anne Ress
Consumer Project on Technology
www.cptech.org
PO Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
manon.ress@cptech.org, voice: 1.202.387.8030, fax: 1.202.234.5176