Making the Internet cheaper and more accessible to all will be the challenges of the Phase II of the Tunis World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), according to the International Telecommunications Union on Tuesday during the observation of the World Telecommunication Day.
Few months ahead of the Tunis WSIS, selecting the theme ‘Creating an Equitable Information Society: Time for Action’ to celebrate this year’s World Telecommunication Day on 17 May, is an additional effort to help focus the world’s attention on the importance of moving to action.
The second phase of the Summit, to be held next November in Tunis, is supposed to measure the progress made in fulfilling the specific objectives of the first phase Geneva and to call on all stakeholders to transform the political will expressed at the first phase into long-term commitments.
The Tunis event will constitute a true test of an engaged, empowered and equitable information society, the ITU said.
It added: "it will also enable the world’s decision makers to measure the extent to which today's powerful knowledge-based communications tools are able to connect different peoples across geographic, knowledge and information divides, especially in the most impoverished countries".
World Telecommunications Day 2005 occurs in a year dedicated by the international community to discussions aimed at creating a global society where information is seen not as a mere commercial product but as a real means for enhancing the livelihoods of the majority of the world’s population. It is a year in which the international community’s desire to use information and communication to build better societies will be tested.
The issues of action that will be dealt with at the Tunis Summit are numerous and complex. They will be of both political (inclusive) aspect as well as purely technical one.
At the global level, representatives of governments, businesses, civil society organisations and other stakeholders in the information and communication technologies sector will meet at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November to debate such problems inhibiting the internet use and access as:
* The Internet is at present an anarchic mix of services and information, and it can be difficult for new users to find their way to what is required.
Even the search and retrieval tools available are often slow and inefficient, especially in the GMT noon time because of competition for computer resources from North American users and limited bandwidth.
* The second problem, which is particularly acute for business users, is security. By its very nature, the Internet has been designed to be an open system for free exchange of materials. There is therefore the concern that third (often undesired) parties can get access to people’s and businesses’ private and sensitive data.
Thus the need for both business and citizens to have confidence that the information or data they receive or transmit has indeed come from, or gone to, the person or organisation intended.
* There is also the problem of illegal and "undesirable" material. A number of news reports and studies demonstrated that there is a considerable amount of undesirable material available on the Internet, and that some of this material is falling into the wrong hands.
* A related problem is the suspicion that surrounds a big number of online consumer suppliers. Researches showed that many of them claim they are simply a "common carrier", and take no more responsibility for the potentially defamatory or pornographic content of the material placed upon their services than the Post Office takes responsibility for materials it delivers, or telecom companies take responsibility for what transpires over a telephone line.
* More and more used by business (than by scholars and academics), payment via Internet and other online financial transactions constitute today a huge concern for both regulators and consumers.
Today, peoples' fear of quoting their credit cards’ numbers on the Internet is real and big. That will remain so until the issue of digital cash is resolved.
The efforts and achievements undertaken so far in developing safe, robust and trusted methods of transferring money over the Internet is therefore crucial if the Internet is to be used for buying and selling information or other services or products.
On the other hand, the following are some of the technical issues the global Information Society is faced to:
* Today, Internet use is even more limited globally, while the number of ‘Internet domains’ (essentially the ‘addresses’ on the internet) available is inequitably distributed and forecast to run out completely within a few years;
* The only widespread way of accessing the Internet remains the PC;
* The number of applications running over the internet is limited to communications (email, chat) and publishing (Web);
* Email is under a very real threat of being ‘drowned into uselessness’ by spam.
Mourad Teyeb - Tunis
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