Development

The “digital divide” between the developed and the developing world (or between “North” and “South”) is an aspect of a much broader social problem than falls within the scope of Internet governance. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are an umbrella programme for addressing such issues at the broadest level,229 _{including the need}

for investment in Internet infrastructure and services in regions suffering from the digital divide. Within the broader field of ICTs for development, there are a few discrete issues that more directly raise questions of Internet-related public policy, and hence fall within the ambit of Internet governance.

The first of these isolated by the WGIG Report and Tunis Agenda is that of interconnection costs. By way of background to this issue, in traditional telephony each country’s telecom- munications provider raises its own connection charges for initiating or receiving a call, and the charges are divided between them when financial settlements between providers are cal- culated. This does not occur on Internet networks, where typically a smaller network—such as that of a developing nation—will pay the whole cost of its connection to a larger back-

224. See http://www.icpen.org/.

225. R v Hourmouzis (unreported Victorian County Court, decided 30 October 2000)

226. SEC v Hourmouzis (unreported, District Court of Colorado, no 00-N-905, decided 1 May 2000)

227. See http://web.archive.org/web/20050204094737/http://www.export.gov/apececommerce/consumer_ protection.html for the former content.

228. See http://www.scamwatch.gov.au/. 229. See http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.

Chapter 2. Internet governance as it was

bone network. The larger network thereby receives access to any Internet content available on the smaller network effectively for free.

This issue formed the subject of Recommendation D.50 from ITU’s Study Group 3, which sought to establish a more equitable settlements regime between Internet network opera- tors, but for commercial reasons this has proved highly controversial and is unlikely to be implemented in its current form.230

A second development issue is that of capacity building. This is an ill-defined term which in the present context refers to the development of institutional and individual capacity for the governance and application of Internet infrastructure.231 _{This is more of an operational}

than a governance issue, which fits more comfortably within the existing intergovernmental structures for international aid and development work.232

The development agency with particular responsibility for telecommunications networks is the ITU-D, the development arm of the ITU. However infrastructure development for ICT is also supported by such bodies as the World Bank,233 _{UNESCO (the United Nations Educa-}

tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization),234_{the United Nations Conference on Trade and}

Development (UNCTAD),235 _{and UNDP (the United Nations Development Programme).}236

On a regional level, the G8’s Digital Opportunities Task Force (DOT Force)237_{and the EU’s}

eEurope programmes238 _{are both notable for having taken a multi-stakeholder approach to}

capacity building, foreshadowing the similar approach of WSIS.239_{In the private sector, the}

Global Information Infrastructure Comission (GIIC) formed in 1995 is a confederation of ex- ecutives notable for its work in this area,240_{as in civil society is the Association for Progressive}

Communications (APC).241

A third issue of equity is that of meaningful participation in global policy development. The prominence of this issue was raised in 2002 by a report of the Panos Institute which demonstrated how poorly developing countries are represented in global ICT governance.242

The conclusions of this Louder Voices report were presented to the third meeting of the

230. European Commission, Internet Network Issues (2000) 231. See Section 4.3.5.2. 232. See Section 6.2.3. 233. See http://www.worldbank.org/. 234. See http://www.unesco.org/. 235. See http://www.unctad.org/. 236. See http://www.undp.org/.

237. DOT Force, Digital Opportunities for All: Meeting the Challenge (2001) 238. See http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/.

239. See Section 5.1.

240. See http://www.giic.org/. 241. See http://www.apc.org/.

242. MacLean, Don, Souter, David, Deane, James, & Lilley, Sarah, Louder Voices: Strengthening Developing Country Participation in International ICT Decision-Making (2002)

Chapter 2. Internet governance as it was United Nations ICT Task Force (UNICTTF),243_{a multi-stakeholder body formed in 2001 at}

the request of UNESCO to play a coordinating role amongst stakeholders working in the area of ICT for development.244

The final equity issue raised by the WGIG Report and the Tunis Agenda is multinationali- sation (more commonly known as internationalisation, or I18N245_{) of the Internet. The two}

principal sub-issues involved here are the support of multilingual content by Internet ser- vices, and the ability to both access and represent that content using multilingual character sets. This issue was pressed by UNESCO in 2003 when its member States adopted a Rec- ommendation concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace.246

Although internationalisation is just as much a development issue as interconnection and capacity building, it can unlike those latter issues be addressed within the technical rather than the economic arena. Most work in this area has been the province of standards organi- sations such as the IETF and the Unicode consortium247_{(which defines a universal character}

set capable of displaying typographical symbols from all human languages). International- isation is also an Activity of the W3C.248 _{Additionally, the W3C has produced a related}

recommendation on making Web content accessible to those with disabilities.249

The current focus of multinationalisation efforts is on the support of multilingual domain names, which allows other character sets such as Arabic and Chinese to be used to access Internet addresses using the DNS. The IETF and ICANN have been principally responsible respectively for the development and implementation of this technology, with support from another civil society organisation, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC),250

in delivering advocacy and education. In recent years slow but steady progress has been made towards resolving some final implementation issues for multilingual domain names, with one of the most recent developments being the testing of eleven multilingual TLDs in October 2007.251

243. See http://www.unicttaskforce.org/.

244. See http://www.unicttaskforce.org/thirdmeeting/openpage.html.

245. So called because there are 18 letters between the “i” and the “n” in “internationalisation.”

246. UNESCO, Recommendation Concerning the Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace (2003)

247. See http://www.unicode.org/.

248. See http://www.w3.org/International/.

249. W3C, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (1999) 250. See http://www.minc.org/.

Chapter 2. Internet governance as it was

For some countries, progress has been too slow; leading China for example to establish its own DNS root in 2005 to serve the Chinese-character equivalents of the com and net gTLDs.252