Let IT be a force for good

On 10 December, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) opens its World Summit on the Information Society, in Geneva. There China, India, Brazil and South Africa may stay quiet. But by 16 November 2005, when the summit reconvenes in Tunis, these big four may not be so accommodating. They want the internet regulated by the ITU – not Icann.

Icann assigns the world’s domain names, IP address numbers and protocol parameter and port numbers. It also runs the internet’s root server system. It’s a non-profit organisation, all right, but it’s also a private firm set up at the end of the last century. Its critics argue that Icann is an undemocratic representative of status quo internet players, and no match for the new-century challenges of spam, security, child pornography and “hate speech”.

Naturally, Icann’s own home page offers the usual PC platitudes about achieving broad representation of global internet communities and developing policy through bottom-up, consensus-based means.

I find it hard to take sides. US boosters hail current internet arrangements as a global commons, but it’s about as open as my native Wimbledon Common is to people from the East End. Yet I’m unconvinced that the ITU would really be an improvement.

Californian hippies in suits intone the inane mantra that information wants to be free. Governmental elites the world over endlessly debate forms of regulation. Meanwhile, Senegal leads a Third World drive to get rich countries to pay into a digital solidarity fund to overcome our old friend, the digital divide. It’s all so predictable.

Throughout, what is missed is the real difference that IT could make to the Third World. That is rarely discussed by non-governmental organisations, even though, backed by the Western governments they affect to detest, NGOs pretty much run large chunks of the Third World nowadays.

Zac Goldsmith’s Ecologist magazine says little about IT. And Britain’s Intermediate Technology Development Group seems to prefer donkey-drawn ploughs to new technology. Indeed, it believes that technology has failed to meet the needs of the poor – as if silicon itself amounted to imperial rule in the Third World. But it is not alone, millions of young Westerners agree with its sentiments.

In an age where British-invented clockwork radios and Intel 386 PCs are seen as real progress in the Third World, and major dams designed with the aid of internet protocols are held a shocking threat to indigenous cultures, it’s time that IT professionals rose above the current level of debate. Primitiveness, it seems, is not something confined to the Southern hemisphere. So when you next come across a good example of IT bringing real benefits to the Third World, shout it from the rooftops, please.