By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Mar 1 2005 (IPS)

The only visible progress made at the recent preparatory meeting for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was the adoption of a financing mechanism created a year ago by city governments of Europe and Africa.

Consensus on other key factors for closing the digital divide between the rich and poor countries, including Internet governance, additional financing mechanisms, and freedom of expression on the worldwide web, will have to wait until the final session of the final session of the WSIS Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) in September.

The PrepCom is responsible for negotiating the political declarations and programmes to be adopted during the second phase of the WSIS, set to take place in Tunis Nov. 16-18.

The first phase of the Summit was held Dec. 10-12, 2003 in Geneva.

The financing mechanism approved during the latest PrepCom session, which ended in Geneva on Feb. 25, was proposed two years ago by Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, who christened it the Digital Solidarity Fund.

The initiative was promptly endorsed by the city authorities in Geneva. Subsequently, with the support of municipal governments in Lyon, France, Turin, Italy and Dakar, Senegal, it became established as a city government-based project in 2004.

The Fund, which will depend on voluntary contributions, has been enthusiastically backed by the African nations, and its adoption by the PrepCom followed negotiations between the African bloc and the European Union.

However, according to Tracey Naughton, the chair of the Media Caucus – one of the civil society sectors participating in the WSIS negotiations – the concept of the Digital Solidarity Fund "still needs to be defined a little more carefully."

She told IPS that as the African delegation pointed out, any new fund has to be carefully administered.

"It’s really important to minimise the cost of any organisation that has to be created to distribute the funds, and a general principle is that no more than 10 percent should be spent on staffing, managing and funding," she stressed.

Although the Digital Solidarity Fund was formally adopted as a means of supporting the countries facing the greatest underdevelopment in terms of communications and information technology, civil society will continue to call for additional formulas to provide more resources.

Anitha Gurumurthy, another civil society representative, said that the WSIS should explore new financing mechanisms to foster information and communications technology as a means of promoting development.

These mechanisms should not divert resources already earmarked for the poor countries through official development assistance, she stressed. Instead, they could take the form of new initiatives, such as a voluntary or compulsory tax, or contributions from owners of Internet domain names, she suggested.

Civil society believes that information technology and communications are global public property, and as such should be financed through taxes.

One of the ideas proposed is the application of a global tax on computer sales. Nevertheless, there is greater support for an initiative through which the tax burden would not fall on the final consumer, the computer buyer, but rather at the other end of the chain, on the manufacturer of computer processors, noted activist Roberto Bissio from the Third World Institute in Uruguay.

"The special group created within the WSIS to develop proposals for financing mechanisms limited itself to studying existing formulas, and therefore failed to fulfil its mandate," Bissio told IPS.

As a result, the matter of new financing mechanisms has been postponed until the next PrepCom session in September.

The same holds true for the issue of Internet governance, a particular priority for the developing countries, which want to participate in the management of the worldwide web. As of now, it remains in private hands, under the protection of the U.S. government.

With regard to freedom of expression, the Media Caucus is pressing for the WSIS to declare Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the "philosophical primus for the Internet."

According to Article 19, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The adoption of Article 19 was decided upon at the "very last moment" of the first phase of the WSIS in Geneva, Naughton said, because of opposition from countries like El Salvador, Egypt and China.

During PrepCom Two, an International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) report was widely distributed, reporting freedom of expression violations in Tunisia.

These abuses were studied by the Media Caucus, with Tunisians making up the majority of the participants in the discussion, Naughton said.

"I was so proud that this Caucus was able to have a principled discussion and put out a document that is absolutely in line with Article 19, even although some of the countries are not in conformity with the statement that we made," she added.

In any event, the Media Caucus chair stated that she is not opposed to the holding of the second phase of the WSIS in Tunis. "I accept that those decisions are made and are not going to be changed," she said.

"I think that the only way that things change is if people inside countries actually earn the change and promote it themselves," she added.

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