What is WSIS?
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is a United Nations (UN) conference managed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The aim of the WSIS is to develop a global framework to tackle the challenges posed by the information society. In accordance with how it was originally conceived, the WSIS differs from other UN conferences in that it is a two phase process culminating in two "world summits", the first of which took place in Geneva from 10-12 December 2003, the second was held in Tunis from 16-18 November 2005. In contrast to previous UN conferences, the idea was that the deliberations to take place at the WSIS should be of a consensual nature, incorporating the viewpoints of multiple actors (reflecting government, private sector and civil society interests).
During the first phase of the summit in Geneva, the two questions that had caused the most friction between governments during the preparatory process - Internet governance and the creation of a Digital Solidarity Fund for Africa - were resolved with the creation of two working groups within the orbit of the United Nations to examine these issues. As no clear response to these problems was reached in Geneva they were reexamined in the second phase of the summit, in Tunis in 2005.
Internet governance and the Digital Solidarity Fund are the two major outcomes of the WSIS talks.
The Internet governance issue is related to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers /ICANN/. Created in 1998 as a private, U.S.-based corporation under the sole political authority of the United States, ICANN constitutes a nascent global governance regime for the Internet and regulates the domain names in the Internet. Changing this regime was in the focus the WSIS discussions. After enduring debates in Tunis was decided the domain administration to remain in ICANN, but to be created an Internet Governance Forum, an international multi-stakeholder body with the purpose to give political recommendations to ICANN’s work.
The Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) for Africa was supposed to address issues commonly known as the “digital divide” by transferring wealth from rich countries to poor. The final outcome of WSIS was that the fund was set as “an innovative financial mechanism of a voluntary nature”. “In its current incarnation the DSF seems little more than a face-saving mechanism: those states who initiated and supported it won a nominal victory; and developed countries avoided adding insult to injury by ridiculing an African effort to finance ICT development and at the same time not making any concrete commitments to addressing the growing gap in access to ICT tools and infrastructure”, said APC in its comments on the WSIS outcomes.
During the preparatory process, as time passed and no agreement was reached on the documents, the possibility of the summit being a failure began to loom large as yet more meetings had to be squeezed on to the agenda. At the last minute the feared "Cancunization" of the Geneva conference was narrowly avoided by the active intervention of the Swiss government. As a result, the government delegations arrived at the meeting with the main points of the documents agreed on, and these were subsequently unanimously approved in the plenary session and included in the Declaration of principles.
The civil society organizations participating in the process launched their own Declaration at Geneva, which marked clear conceptual differences from the governments’ notion of what kind of information society should be promoted. Although part of the content promoted by civil society was included in the official documents -for example, references to the defense of human rights - a detailed analysis of the text reveals a vision of technology promoted by commercial interests, in contrast to the conception held by the majority of civil society actors of technology as a tool for egalitarian development. Powerful pressure groups, such as the corporate media, left their mark on the documents, which locate other more democratizing forms of communication, such as community-based media, on the margins of the information society.
Nor have the documents approved in Geneva resolved the conflictive issues pertaining to "intellectual property rights". The Civil Society Declaration maintains that existing international regulatory instruments, including the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and instruments of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), should be revised to ensure that they promote cultural, linguistic and media diversity, and contribute to the development of human knowledge.
The decision of choosing Tunis to host the WSIS Second phase led to heated arguments and was challenged as a controversial one, because of the cases of flagrant violation of the human rights and the freedom of speech in the country. On the eve of the beginning of the conference the mood was lowered because of journalists and human rights defenders in Tunis manhandled, insulted, and beaten.
Limiting the Internet access by the authoritarian regimes was also in the focus of the public attention. The authorities in Tunis managed to restrain the access to many web-sites and to censor them by blocking numerous IP addresses. Web-pages dedicated to the freedom of speech and the human rights protection, including such ones of many international non-governmental organizations were blacklisted. The Tunisian government clamped down the free speech and by prevention from happening the Citizen's Summit on the Information Society, a WSIS side-event organized by a group of international organizations in partnership with Tunisian human rights and media freedom groups.
The Tunis phase of WSIS concluded with the adoption of two documents:
