Information Society Watch

July 2004, Audrey Selian & Kenneth Neil Cukier, Information Technologies and International Development

The article focuses on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva in December 2003. It highlights the problems being faced by WSIS, which had lofty goals of bringing together people and governments from all countries in order to make the Internet an entity to be shared by one and all. There have been significant fault lines along the issues of intellectual property, free press and human rights, and the digital divide, as well as resentment of the control exercised by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The authors emphasise that building consensus among differing factions as well as a greater positive interaction among the advanced and developing countries is the only way that WSIS can play an effective role in fostering the the growth of a truly inclusive Internet.

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