Information Society Watch

The Development Agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization reached a critical phase this month as negotiators from 93 member states and 40 observers agreed on a final list of proposals to enhance the development dimension in WIPO’s work to be recommended for action to the WIPO General Assembly in September 2007. They also recommended the establishment of a new Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) to address these issues. The process by which civil society groups and some governments have promoted the development agenda holds many lessons for advocates of a development agenda at the IGF.

Unlike the market friendly vocabulary that dominates Intellectual Property discourse at WIPO, international internet governance institutions have embraced development as an objective at an early stage. The WSIS Declaration of Principles assert “… … our common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life……”.

The process by which these aspirations are translated into concrete policy proposals is critical for the success of the development agenda in internet governance. The South Centre’s submission to Athens IGF 2006 focused on the link between Internet Governance and Development. The paper suggests that the expansion of the Internet functionally and geographically will assist the achievement of development objectives. It proposes that a democratic and participatory structure of internet governance will result in the rapid and equitable growth of the Internet and the closing of the digital divide.

The assumption that the rapid growth of the internet will necessarily lead to rapid development takes an instrumental view of the value of the internet. If we return to the analogy at the start of this post between the development agenda in intellectual property and on internet governance we will notice that a majority of the proposals at WIPO are not merely about the instrumental use of IP to advance developing country interests. Instead many proposals challenge the exclusive character of property regimes with the values of ‘public’ness and advocate the widespread distribution of valuable goods and commodities.

Developing a non-instrumental development agenda for internet governance will allow us to move beyond the national interest calculations of the developed and developing world and focus on the public policy principles which should govern core internet resources and guide the institutional framework in which these principles are formulated. The need to articulate such a development agenda at the Rio IGF meeting in 2007 both at the level of normative principles and as concrete policy proposals is a task to which civil society and concerned governments must urgently address themselves.