An Inclusive Information Society - Rhetoric or Realisation?
Involving years of preparation, the World Summit on the Information
Society was an enormously resource-intensive event, and many wonder if
all this money and effort would not have been better spent on concrete
actions to address - rather than talk about - the digital divide.
Involving years of preparation, the World Summit on the Information Society was an enormously resource-intensive event, and many wonder if all this money and effort would not have been better spent on concrete actions to address - rather than talk about - the digital divide.
The Summit was convened by the United Nations in order to reach international agreement on pressing issues raised by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the 21st Century: issues such as who owns the Internet and how it should be governed, how to finance affordable access by the world’s poor, combating cyber-crime and spam, promoting cultural and linguistic diversity, and the search for an acceptable balance between international security, privacy, and freedom of speech.
This brief looks at what was said, and what results were actually achieved, in this first phase of WSIS.
-
An-inclusive-information-society.pdf
(application/pdf
312Kb)
2004