TUNIS, Tunisia – After three days of intense negotiations, the World Summit on the Information Society wrapped up November 16th in Tunis, Tunisia with a pledge to bridge the digital divide and a compromise agreement to keep discussing the politically-charged issue of Internet control.
Delegates from 174 states supported proposals creating a new Internet Governance Forum and a Digital Solidarity Fund, and maintained support for a series of small projects to bring information communication technologies to the developing world.
While officially hailed as a success, this follow-up Summit to the 2003 gathering in Geneva is nonetheless considered a timid step towards extending the IT revolution into the developing world.
Indeed Yushio Utsumi, the Secretary-General of the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), called it “just the beginning”.
The Summit committed itself to the goal of connecting all villages in the world to the Internet by 2015. But the debate over control of the Internet, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has been shuffled off to an international forum to be convened next year by the UN.
The U.S. has maintained its opposition to shuffling control of ICANN – which is an independent, not-for-profit organization – anywhere, and Canada has, so far, not supported any shift in control over ICANN, or in changing the way the Internet currently operates.
Meanwhile, there remains the fundamental and ever-growing digital divide, as highlighted by a paper prepared for the Summit by Orbicom, the International Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communications based at the Université du Québec in Montreal (UQAM).
The 252-page document, “From the Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities: Measuring Infostates for Development”, is a sobering portrait of what the Internet world looks like.
In a nutshell, and it’s of no surprise to anyone, the developing world is on the outside looking in.
“The magnitude of the digital divide remains huge… Gaps between countries continue to be enormous… Thus literally, ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ countries are worlds apart, separated by many decades of development,” says the report, edited by Claude-Yves Charron, Secretary-General of Orbicom and Vice-Rector of UQAM, and Abdul Waheed Khan, Assistant Director-General for communications and information at UNESCO.
The report looked at 192 countries representing 98% of the world’s population, charting changes between 1995 and 2003.
To provide bench-marking and to track progress, it devised an Information Communication Technology (ICT) Opportunity Index, measuring the slice of a country’s overall ICT network and labour (called infodensity), as well as its ICT consumption (or info-use). Together, they indicate a country’s “ICT-ization”, or Infostate status.
While increased cell phone use helped some countries improve their ICT index, there were still astonishing differences. Italy and Luxembourg, for instance, had more mobile subscriptions than population, while Ethiopia and Democratic Republic of the Congo had just 3% cell phone use.
The use of broadband, considered an important benchmark economic indicator, did not exist at all in half the world’s countries.
With the help of more than a dozen teams on every continent, the report goes into great detail on the strengths and weaknesses of individual countries, shining a light on which countries made progress, in what areas, and how they did it.
It explores “the all-important why questions” and “what macro environments, government policies, regulations and business strategies are moving the numbers”.
The report also notes a gender digital divide and strongly urges policies specifically designed to help women improve their ICT skills. As well, it explores the potential role of free and open source software in development.
The report found a strong relationship between ICTs and economic growth, and calculated that on average, a 1% increase in Infodensity results in a 0.9% increase in per capita GDP.
While the authors acknowledge the impact can be unequal in countries at different stages, it underlines the need for countries to achieve a critical threshold of ICTs in order that serious growth occur.
“The digital divide represents the newest addition to the enormous chasms…in the standard of living among economies,” the study says, “and it matters enormously, to the extent that ICTs represent an historic opportunity for our evolution.”
(The report is available at www.orbicom.uqam.ca. The Summit documents are available at www.itu.int/wsis.)
Glenn Wanamaker is cartt.ca’s Quebec Editor
