Tough talks to line the way to Tunis Net meeting

If the run-up talks to the world’s first global Net summit in Geneva last week were tough, those to take place over the next two years ahead of the 2005 follow-up summit in Tunis,Tunisia, could be a whole lot tougher. Plenty of money and power are at stake.

At the three-day World Summit on the Information Society, which ended Friday, more than 175 governments endorsed what Pascal Couchepin, president of Switzerland, called the first “constitution for the information age.” Although unanimously agreeing on how computers and the Internet could improve the lives of billions of people in developing nations, they failed to answer difficult technical questions such as who should pay to close the global digital divide and who should manage the Net.

These two contentious issues — funding and Internet governance — will be the focus of separate tasks forces to be established by Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations (U.N.).

How Annan plans to organize these groups and what their ultimate objectives should be is anyone’s guess. One thing is for certain: Plenty of experts have opinions, and achieving a consensus won’t be easy, as it seldom is in the consensus-driven U.N. policy making environment.

For instance, Wolfgang Kleinwächter, co-chairman of the Civil Society’s Internet governance caucus, already has a concrete vision of how the U.N. task force on managing the Net should be set up. The Civil Society is the term collectively applied to non-governmental organizations representing a wide variety of interests from human rights to free software.

The U.N. task force should consist of 18 members, with six representatives from the government sector, six from industry and six from Civil Society, Kleinwächter said. Of the six representatives in each group, three should come from developing nations and three from developed countries.

As for the body to govern the Internet, Kleinwächter believes it shouldn’t be any one organization, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, but rather a group of bodies focused on specific areas, ranging from domain name allocation and spam control to security issues and IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) coordination.

“We definitely need to have a multi-stakeholder approach,” Kleinwächter said. “Governments can’t manage the Internet alone, nor can private industry.”

By contrast, Paul Verhoef, head of the “international aspects” unit at the European Commission, argued in favor of having as many governments, business and Civil Society groups as possible involved in the Internet governance task force debate. “People need to air their frustration and get the issues out,” he said. “This will be a complicated process but it’s a very important process to get started because the Internet has evolved beyond just being a technology. It requires governments to be involved. The question is to what extent.”

Many experts warn of making hasty decisions that could jeopardize the Internet’s stability. “The Internet is arguably U.S.-centric,” said Kenneth Cukier, a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But it works, and it works better than a lot of people thought it ever would. The U.S. government is understandably weary of handing over control to some international inter-governmental body that could mess it up. And governments of most other industrialized nations generally agree.”

The other battle to be fought over the next two years is funding expansion of the Internet to the some 90 percent of the world’s population without access. Pleas by developing nations such as Senegal to set up a “digital solidarity fund” were largely rejected by developed nations, notably the U.S. and the 15 members of the European Union (EU), which favor using existing funding programs and voluntary contributions.

Even if funding and Internet governance are the focus of special tasks forces for the next two years, other issues will continue to draw attention. Security is one of them. Viruses, worms and various forms of fraud, already nibbling away at the security of the Internet in industrialized nations, will come to developing countries, too.

Free open-source software will be another issue. Although the U.S. succeeded in having proprietary software added as a software model in the declaration of principles, numerous poor countries view open source as a means to develop their own technology instead of having to import it at a price many can’t afford.

Granted, the declaration of principles and the action plan adopted by government heads in Geneva aren’t legally binding. Nevertheless, they signal a political will to achieve certain goals, such as ensuring that more than half of the world’s population has access to the Web, telephone lines or some other form of electronic media by 2015.

To some, these goals may seem unachievable, considering the general position of developed countries to maintain the status quo. To many others, however, who agree that where there’s a will, there’s a way, they are within reach .