America, the UN and the Future of Communications

"In May of this year, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and other UN organizations such as UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD, are scheduled to convene in Geneva to talk about regulation of the growth and development of the Internet......

"The fight over ICANN (the Corporation for Assigned Names and Number) -- a southern California corporation operating with a license from the U.S. Department of Commerce, which began in a conference in Tunis, Tunisia in the Mediterranean, sponsored by the UN and its sister agencies -- was only the opening salvo. It is not surprising that the idea of forming a special international agency to regulate ICANN failed at Tunis as the agenda and impetus for change was too narrow. This may change as nations around the world awaken to the importance of creating a robust communications infrastructure. They will likely be less dependent and less willing to accept what has been considered a one-way flow of information and communications goods and services from the United States.

"National regulators and policy makers worldwide are looking for some way to harness Internet growth and development, and of course, control the flow of communications in the world. Not surprisingly, concerns with the U.S.'s dominance of media flow do not extend to the developing nations alone. Europe and other developed nations have expressed frustrations too.

"So what will be the U.S. position? Indeed, what if anything is the U.S. doing to meet the challenges and concerns of the rest of the world? It isn't clear."

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UNESCO contributes to the fifth Internet Governance Forum

The 5th meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 14 to 17 September 2010. It focused on the following issues:

• managing critical Internet resources, 
• security, openness and privacy, 
• access and diversity, 
• Internet governance for development, 
• taking stock of Internet governance and the way forward, and 
• cloud computing.

In conjunction with the meeting, UNESCO organizes two workshops:

Privacy and Social Networking (16 September)
This workshop examined the interaction between privacy protection, freedom of expression and security.

Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet (14 September)
This event is a follow-up to a well attended discussion on Internet Censorship and Filtering by the participants of IGF 2009 in Sharm el Sheikh. UNESCO took this opportunity to release an in-depth analysis entitled Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet. This report, conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, builds upon previous discussions and provides a panorama of observations and useful exploration of the subject.

UNESCO also organized an open forum to present its activities on multilingualism in cyberspace, open educational resources and open access to scientific information. In addition, UNESCO installed an exhibition stand to present the Organization’s overall activities and programs.

Getting On Board: Promoting E-Government Via Bus

E-government has many wonderful benefits for citizens in promoting transparency of activities, troves of information, and new ways to participate as well as to express opinion. Citizens, however, must first be equipped with the access and skills to take advantage of e-government. And for that, UNESCO's Information for All Programme (IFAP) are urging people to get on the bus.

All this month, citizens in Quito may take chivas, popular Equadorian buses, from busy neighborhoods to public Internet access centers called cybernariums. These cybernariums will hold training workshops of 25 people each that will focus on explaining and promoting e-government services to spread the word about what is available for the community.

Radio and television spots will additionally promote awareness of the initiative; the population of focus will consist of secondary school students, leaders of organizations or neighborhoods, and housewives.

This initiative is part of UNESCO's IFAP "E-government Model for World Heritage Cities" project, which is sponsored by the Spanish government. The cities of focus are Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), Quito (Ecuador), and Cusco (Peru).

Projects like this and others regarding Latin American e-government promoted by the Spanish government and UNESCO certainly have tremendous potential for change on a global level. For more information, see UNESCO's e-government news as well as the World Bank's e-development publication.

U.S. Control of Internet Remains Issue

Reforming Internet Governance: Perspectives from the Working Group on Internet Governance

The second meeting of the Internet Governance Forum ended last week with little to show in closing the issue of U.S. control over how people around the world access e-mail and Web sites. The Forum was created to support the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). As part of the ITU-UNESCO sponsored WSIS, a Working Group on Internet Governance sought to find a compromise among the nations on the topic, and the Forum is continuing that effort.

With no concrete recommendations for action, the only certainty going forward is that any resentment about the American influence will only grow as more users from the developing world come online, changing the face of the global network.

Read the New York Times account of the meeting.

UNESCO workshops on Freedom of Expression and Multilingualism at the Internet Governance Forum

The second meeting on Internet governance was held earlier this month in Rio de Janeiro. It brought together participants from around the world to discuss issues ranging from freedom of expression and security to open standards and linguistic diversity.

Click here for:

• The Chairman's summary for the meeting
• The website of the Internet Governance Forum
  

UNESCO’s workshop on "Freedom of Expression as a Security Issue" explored security and security protection mechanisms as variables that influence freedom of expression on the Internet.

A second UNESCO organized workshop associated with the forum was entitled "Towards International Standards for a Truly Multilingual Global Internet." It aimed at fostering international cooperation in establishing standards for a multilingual global Internet.

Read more about the workshops.