Internet Summit Under Way
Leaders from more than 50 countries gathered Wednesday for a summit on the expanding use of the Internet, with some developing countries trying to put control of the U.S.-dominated system into the hands of the United Nations.
But most of the contentious issues, including media freedom, were resolved in negotiations before the summit or deferred, and U.S. officials said they were satisfied.
The World Summit on the Information Society is helping by drawing the world's attention to "the importance that new technologies, whether the Internet or other mechanisms, have for helping people around the world," said Ambassador David Gross of the U.S. State Department, head of the American delegation.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was opening the meeting Wednesday afternoon, urged leaders to reaffirm media freedoms and the right of ordinary people to stay informed.
When governments go beyond regulation "down the slope toward censorship and harassment, all of us — and potentially our rights — are imperiled," Annan told a parallel global gathering of broadcast executives Tuesday.
Leaders addressing the conference were mainly from the developing world. President Bush and many Western leaders were staying away.
But Gross said the United States was lending strong support by having its speech delivered by White House science and technology adviser John Marburger.
Gross said that documents that were hammered out in months of negotiations for the summit "reflect many of the issues we think are critically important," including free expression, Internet governance and the importance of intellectual property.
Even as the gathering began, organizers were lowering expectations, noting that a follow up summit will take place in Tunisia in 2005.
"Geneva is the beginning, the beginning of a process," said Marc Furrer, the Swiss state secretary who helped broker talks among government negotiators ahead of the summit.
But campaigners for press freedom said the follow-up meeting should be canceled or moved to another country on grounds that Tunisia "does not respect free speech and press freedom."
"The Tunisian press is censored, journalists are jailed along with hundreds of other political prisoners, and organization of the Tunis summit has been assigned to a military general alleged to be responsible for the torture of political prisoners," said a joint statement from the World Press Freedom Committee, the Inter American Press Association, the World Association of Newspapers and other groups.
Pending approval from the world leaders is a declaration that challenges them to use technology in promoting development goals such as eliminating poverty, fighting AIDS and curbing child mortality.
It calls for connecting schools, public libraries, health centers in poor countries to the Internet by 2015.
Many participants are looking to Tunisia as the forum to flesh out the documents with more concrete details.
Key decisions on the way the Internet works, such as domain names and addresses, now reside in a private agency spun off from the U.S. government — and the United States wants to keep it that way.
China, South Africa, India and Brazil — the main proponents of wresting control of the Internet from the United States — have offered only vague blueprints for an alternative. Advocates have called for creating a separate treaty-based U.N. agency for Internet governance modeled after the International Telecommunication Union, which organized this week's summit.
Yoshio Utsumi, the ITU's secretary general, said Tuesday that his agency would be capable of assuming the responsibility, "but it's up to members to decide. At this moment, there is no consensus."