COMMUNICATIONS SUMMIT MAY BE DOMINATED BY MULTINATIONALS

By Antonio Pasquali and - - Reprint | | Print |

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CARACAS, Dec 1 2003 (IPS) - The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an organisation which defines itself as being \’\’specialised in technologies\’\’, has received a mandate from the UN to organise a World Summit on the Information Society without co-organisers that have greater competence in social matters, writes Antonio Pasquali, former Assistant Director General of UNESCO for Communications. In addition to the socio-political inexperience of the host there is another shortcoming to this event: the role in the Summit ceded to the multinationals of this sector, writes Pasquali in this article. If the Summit produces any universally beneficial decision it will be due to, for the first time perhaps, the intelligence and tenacity of the NGOs. As a show of democracy, the ITU has invited governments, companies, and civil society to participate, though the latter were ostracised to such a degree during the three preparatory sessions that some are weighing withdrawing loudly from the Summit.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an organisation which defines itself as being ”specialised in technologies”, has received a mandate from the United Nations to organise a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in which it is to ”play a central role” — in other words, without co-organisers that have greater competence in social matters.

The ITU has taken the precaution of dividing the summit into two segments (Geneva, December 2003, Tunis, November 2005), with three preparatory meetings to be held before then to neutralise conflicts.

In addition to the socio-political inexperience of the host there is another shortcoming to this event: the role in the Summit ceded to the multinationals of this sector, which will end the year with over 2.5 trillion dollars in revenue from the sale of equipment and telephone services alone — an extra weight that might capsize the ship.

The idea of a world meeting convened at the opening of the 21st century to ponder the good and the bad of the so-called ”Information Society” is to be applauded.

The ”Information Society” is the unstable socio-political derivative of info-communication technologies undergoing exponential change and growth of their already limitless capacity to generate, store, and transmit messages. It took 114 years for the field of telephony to reach 500 million lines. In the last 13 years the number jumped from 562 to 2,539 million; the number of internet users soared from 4 to 665 million; the percentage of weaponry that is computer-guided shot from 2 to 70 percent. Memory capacity has expanded exponentially from the megabytes of the 1980s, leading irresistibly to the day when massively intelligent computers will equal the neurological connections of the human brain.

In this new realm, the old socio-economics indicators are no longer applicable: recent Latin American studies show that as many as 11.4 percent of the homes of the poor and 7.8 percent of those of the extremely poor have cable TV. In our ”infosphere”, do the real necessities or pseudo-necessities dominate; is knowledge the same as information; is an internet connection the greatest form of help for the half of humanity that lacks water, nutrition, and health?

Today’s world is an archipelago of societies with wildly diverging access to information: one speed for the rich, another for the poor. The slide in the prices of technologies has somewhat democratised connectivity but worsened the old imbalances. The well-off 20 percent of humanity has monopolised 80 percent of the technological wealth of the info-communication sphere. Luxembourg has 170 telephone lines per 100 people; Nigeria, 0.21.

The Summit of 2003/2005 is convened by new actors in an area marked by aggressiveness and the suspicions aroused by the attacks of 11 September.

On the one hand, the major intergovernmental organisations and the majority of their member states now seem –in a cordial understanding with the major economic powers– to have been won over to the liberalising-privatising cause. The old and coherent concept of ”the politics of communications” has become a bad word to be replaced by the incoherent formula of an ”Information Society” (only communication with dialogue creates society).

In short, the UN and the ITU of yesterday, from whose cloisters emerged the Declaration on a New Economic Order (NOEI, 1974) or the Maitland Report: the Missing Link (1985), no longer exist, and doubts regarding their declining ”intergovernmental” character remain valid.

Since Boutros-Ghali was pointedly removed from his position as UN secretary general, official documents of the UN Secretariat began circulating the idea of a bicameral General Assembly that would provide space for multinationals.

Today the UN family being weakened one piece at a time. One of the more startling developments is the transference of the responsibilities of its auxiliary organisations to a sort of ”parallel UN” composed of the IMF, World Bank, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Trade Organisation, the G-8. Intellectual property and asbestos are now matters for the WTO, and water, for the World Bank. Then there is the semi-privatisation of the UN family, the most successful model of which today is the ITU, whose 189 member states are backed by a Consultative Council of 660 private companies that act as both judge and plaintiff.

On the other hand, progressive governments, non-aligned countries, and front-line investigations that formed the bulk of the old opposition to the communications imperialism of the East and West have given way to the NGOs (non-governmental organisations), an acronym that was for decades used only by insiders but now is synonymous with the ideological vitality that civil society has shown in its active search for a less economicised, ecocidal, and politicised future .

If the WSIS produces any universally beneficial decision it will be due to, for the first time perhaps, the intelligence and tenacity of the NGOs. As a show of democracy, the ITU has invited governments, companies, and civil society to participate, though the latter were ostracised to such a degree during the three preparatory sessions that some are weighing withdrawing loudly from the Summit.

Opposed to the conversion of the WSIS into a blast of oxygen for the giants of the info-communications world in the wake of the most catastrophic episodes of speculation in economic history, NGOs are now fighting to achieve legal and practical goals such as: not endorsing the principles of an Information Society that are not based on the more fundamental Right to Communication; more democracy and public dominion through free software and open standards, more internationalism in management of the Internet, and an end to network spying.

One of the most efficient and dangerous NGOs on this front is CRIS (Communication Right in the Information Society, www.crisinfo.org) a network of organisations devoted to communications rights. CRIS will organise in Geneva a parallel summit to the WSIS called the World Forum on Communication Rights (www.communicationrights.org), an attempt at preventing the human and social dimensions of communications from being reduced to business and technical matters.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)