The United Nations " World Summit on the Information Society" begins in Tunisia today, and an international tug-of-war over Internet governance is expected. From the looks of things, the host country is off to an inauspicious start if they wish to advance the notion that control of this vital tool of economic growth and free expression should be shared by the unfree countries of the world:
The host of the summit, expected to attract 12,000 to 15,000 delegates and up to 50 world leaders, has hardly reassured those concerned that the spectre of censorship is being ignored.Already, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters covering the summit have been harrassed and beaten. Fears of a crackdown have led some civil society groups who plan to hold their own summit on the fringe of the gathering to conceal their plans.
At the weekend, a reporter with the French daily Libération, Christophe Boltanski, who had been investigating the recent beatings of human rights activists in Tunisia, was stabbed and kicked outside his hotel in Tunis. He was not seriously injured.
(an unserious stabbing, I guess? - DW)The Tunisia Monitoring Group has highlighted the cases of seven men now on a hunger strike in the country and estimates that about 500 more have been jailed for expressing opinions.
Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, has been banned from attending the summit. He said: "Banning the head of an organisation that defends free expression from attending a summit about the information society is absurd and unacceptable."
In another report, A Belgian TV crew reporting on issues of free expression was harrassed by Tunisian authorities, to include being threatened with physical harm, and having cameras and equipment confiscated.
Fed by press accounts of the police thuggery, delegations have begun cancelling or withdrawing from seminars and other summit events. From a report by Human Rights Watch:
The international and local reaction continued today, as diplomats fumed, some civil society organizations cancelled their events at the U.N. conference, and Human Rights Watch held two press conferences, one for journalists with WSIS badges, the other for Tunisian and international journalists and advocates who did not attend WSIS. Overnight the international press publicized the crude efforts of the Tunisian government to thwart Tunisian and international civil society organizations' plans to hold an alternate meeting to discuss Internet issues in Tunisia alongside the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The international and local reaction continued today, as diplomats fumed, some civil society organizations cancelled their events at the U.N. conference, and Human Rights Watch held two press conferences, one for journalists with WSIS badges, the other for Tunisian and international journalists and advocates who did not attend WSIS.
The Swiss delegation has condemned the intimidation by Tunisian authorities, and in a twist that Orwell himself couldn't have concocted, now journalists can't connect to the Internet to do their jobs:
...even journalists who have not been assaulted have grounds to complain.Many people have found the internet filtered in their hotels and ports to external servers were blocked, preventing the sending of emails.
The website of the CSIS website has been blocked in Tunisia since Monday – it is only accessible from the WSIS media centre.
The websites of Reporters without Borders and other WSIS-related sites such as www.wsisblogs.org have also been inaccessible.
These are the people who want us to turn over to them control of the Internet. Thank God the position of the United States continues to be a polite but firm "NFW."
I'm betting they'll get all this ugliness behind them soon, so everybody can get down to the serious gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over U.S. unilateralism and greed for the next three days. But if they'd prefer to allow the whole conference to disintegrate into demonstrations, police actions and general chaos, that would be cool too.
UPDATE 11/16: Great piece by Claudia Rosett in the WSJ on the U.N. "turf-grab" in Tunis. The problem, she says, is the "dictatorial divide", not the digital one.
For anyone who cares about the vast freedoms and opportunities afforded by the Internet--for pajama-clad bloggers, for journalists, for businessmen and especially for people in the poorest countries--it is time for a call to arms. Sen. Norm Coleman, whose investigations into U.N. corruption have provided him with more insight than most into the cracks and chasms of that aging institution, has already warned in The Wall Street Journal against the possibility of Tunis becoming a "digital Munich." Whether America retains control over the root directory or some other setup ultimately evolves, the clear bottom line right now is that allowing the U.N. to involve itself in these questions is the wrong answer. A U.N. unable even to audit its own accounts or police its own peacekeepers has no business making even a twitch toward control of the Internet.
UPDATE 11/16: Sanity prevails? (via Instapundit)
Posted by dan at November 16, 2005 12:08 AM