*Talking to the world for free, or talking at the world’s expense

The marketing line of Skype, the internet telephony phenomenon, is “The whole world can talk for free”. That one line captures so much that is thrilling about the internet. Somehow the novelty of being able to cross boundaries, communicate and network in ways that weren’t possible before never seems to wear off, especially with new innovations popping up almost daily. Yet that one line dreamed up by the marketing experts also highlights the problem faced by the internet. This lies in the fact that unless you have a computer with broadband access you can’t talk to the world, or if you can - using traditional telephony - you certainly can’t do it for free. And because this goes for the majority of the world’s population, that means that those of us that do have access and can talk for free certainly aren’t talking to the world. We are in fact, talking to ourselves, at the expense of the world.

The theory goes like this: Providing information and communications technologies will enable people to access and create opportunities and is therefore key to development, although it’s a moot point as to whether development comes first and ICTs later. But this is why the digital divide – the gap between the information have’s and have-not’s - is such a disaster, because there are so many people without access that the development potential of the internet can never be truly realized. Only 1% of the world’s internet users are Africans, for example.

And to really drive the point home: Africa - the continent that everyone knows is the poorest in the world - has to pay seven times as much per kilobyte of data transferred via the internet than do the advanced capitalist countries.

It’s little surprise therefore, that the digital divide is one of the major themes of the WSIS process. This is not to say, though, that a solution is in hand, with historical differences of opinion over how to fund a closing of the gap leading to a lack of decisive action. Any previous suggestions for a global tax, for example, to fund the closing of the gap, has previously been opposed by those who state that that the market must take care of the problem, despite evidence that spending is down and that in the last two decades the gap has shown no signs of shrinking.

At the previous WSIS meeting in Geneva in 2003, a Digital Solidarity Fund was proposed as one way to bridge the digital divide. As a result the final Geneva summit declaration acknowledged that funding for investment in ICTs was an important issue, and requested the UN Secretary General to establish a Task Force to review the current availability of funding and report to the second part of the Summit, in Tunis. This Task Force on Financial Mechanisms for ICT for Development presented its report in December 2004. Although the idea of the Digital Solidarity Fund did not receive universal backing at WSIS, it continued to gather support, and the Fund was set up in March 2005, with a secretariat based in Geneva, but the challenge lay in collecting enough funds to make it viable. More information on this issue can be found by visiting www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/, where the information for this paragraph on the Fund was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit No. 3 on ICT’s.

While how to finance the narrowing of the digital divide is a key component of the Tunis summit, who governs it was the topic of the moment in the lead up to the event. The key debates centre around a concern that if corporate interests gain control of the internet it will have serious implications for the extent to which access is made available to all. But calls for reform of internet governance – currently residing under the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) – have raised fears that some governments might seek to control the internet at the expense of freedom of expression.

There are therefore two main views on internet governance. Firstly, there are those that want to maintain the status quo, with some reforms. The other view wants to see the internet come under control of the international system as a way to ensure more transparency and accountability. Increasingly, there is also a feeling that the ultimate power of the US government over Icann, even if it is only potential and not actually used, is an obstacle to a fully international, open and equitable system. This information on Icann was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit on ICTs, No1, available from the website www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/.

The US, however, is strongly opposed to reform and believes that the internet is best served by maintaining Icann as the current system. This deadlock has meant that predictions in the lead up to the summit were that it would pack up without concrete agreement. This has indeed been the case, with civil society generally disappointed with the outcomes of the summit and weak language expected from governments in the final summit statement – essentially language designed to cover up the failure of the summit.

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