The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has been meeting all week in Tunis. The topic of the day has been Internet Governance, and a war of words has been waged over who should control the Internet. What the 12,000 attendees and dozens of heads of state are debating are arcane issues such as who gets to allocate Internet addresses or create top level domains such as ".com" or ".org."
The villain to many and hero to a very few is the United States, which purportedly maintains control over these resources through it's creation in 1998 of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California non-profit that took over the functions previously administered on a volunteer basis by Jon Postel, one of the founding fathers of the net. Over the last few months, there have been repeated calls to take over ICANN's functions and hand them over to a new body.
In a midnight compromise, the Tunis summit agreed to create an Internet Governance Forum (IGF). All sides claim victory. Ambassador Gross from the U.S. said at a press conference that "we gave up nothing." UN officials call the new forum a great step forward.
The reality is the new forum will be a debating society, a way to continue the summit debates over a long-term. The IGF will have no formal authority, and will join dozens of other debating societies.
Was anything accomplished in Tunis? Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab brought an amazing new device with him and unveiled it to a rapt audience of journalists. This device is a $100 laptop that can be powered by AA batteries or even a hand crank. Negroponte's aim is no less than to make sure that every child in the world gets a laptop and to that end he's set up a new non-profit and has been touring the globe convincing heads of state that they should buy these devices for their children.
Negroponte said he's going to spend the rest of his life focusing on this project. In a plenary address to the summit, he said that every child should have a pencil and the pencil of the future is a laptop connected to the Internet.
Bridging the digital divide is the theme of the summit and those concerned with Internet Governance seem to have forgotten that theme. The reality of the Internet is that nobody rules the net. It is a bottom-up network, not a top-down hierarchy.
The Tunisian government spent $27 million to put on this Summit. Instead of playing host to the world, they could have bought 270,000 laptops. Over 12,000 people converged on Tunis for this event, and my math says that the total cost in exhibitor fees, plane tickets, hotels, and myriad other expenses is well over $200 million.
What if the heads of state had simply cancelled the summit and let Professor Negroponte use the proceeds to purchase 2 million laptops?
That would have made the digital divide just a little less deep.
Carl Malamud is Chief Technology Officer and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. Support for this project has also been received from Stichting NLnet and ISC.