Despite the best efforts of thousands of development activists arriving for this week’s WSIS meeting, disagreement over a handful of issues is threatening to sink the global summit on the information society.

As of Monday evening, organisers from the Swiss government were saying they had brokered agreements on the need to recognise human rights and to study how the Internet is managed. But, they were still fighting over a proposed fund to finance development of the infrastructure needed for information and communication technologies in the world’s poorer countries.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade told ‘Terra Viva’ that the fund issue had the potential to create a "second Cancun", a reference to the North-South deadlock at September’s World Trade Organisation negotiations that finally scuttled the talks. Before this leg of the conference has even got properly underway, controversy is also already threatening to bog down the second phase of WSIS — scheduled to take place in Tunisia in November 2020.

As delegates at the cavernous Palexpo near the Geneva airport collect their information kits and stake out "hot spots" to connect their laptops, activists in Tunisia are fighting with their lives to attract attention to that nation’s dismal record on human rights, including the right to information.

Inside this issue of ‘Terra Viva’ — the first of four at the summit — you will find an interview with a Tunisian cyber activist, Zouhair Yahyaoui, who was recently released after 18 months in prison. On a more optimistic note, telecentres are in vogue in many nations of theSouth. Schools, libraries, community centres and even health clinics have been "wired" for computers to initiate citizens to the benefits of the information society.

Our story on page 10 describes several of these centres in Latin America. But beware, warns contributor Diego Gradis in "Les TIC sans l’éthique". While visiting a Quechua village in the Peruvian highlands he found a line of children waiting at the door of the local Internet "cafe"and, inside, computer The squabbling over whether industrialised countries should help pay for technology infrastructure in the South continues to deflect attention from the potential of ICTs in development screens displaying only pornographic websites.

No one, says Gradis — not parents, educators, or the media — can prevent the "devastating" effects of this hypnotising technology. But the challenge of adult content enticing the children of the ITC age — one of the myriad "digital dilemmas" facing us — is a test that civil society says it is prepared to tackle.

At the same time they blame the offical WSIS documents for neglecting their voices and the "general interest".

In the final draft of their declaration the group says, "At the heart of our vision of information and communications societies is the human being. The dignity and rights of all peoples and each person must be promoted, respected, protected and affirmed. Redressing the inexcusable gulf between levels of development and between opulence and extreme poverty must therefore be our prime concern".

Source: IPS