FLORENCE, Italy, Nov 14 (IPS) - Last-minute negotiations are seeking to narrow the wide divisions that have emerged on governance of the Internet and the 'digital divide' between nations.

The talks began in Sunday and will continue until Tuesday. The three-day World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) begins in Tunis, Tunisia, Wednesday.

No agreement was reached during preparatory conferences earlier in Geneva and in Hammamet in Tunisia, and experts fear that the final summit too could fail to work out an agreement.

Reform of Internet governance is the most divisive issue on the agenda. The web is currently managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organisation based in California in the United States.

ICANN has an international advisory board, but the United States has veto power, giving it effective control over the global domain name system.

Several countries are calling for a more democratic inter-governmental organisation to rule the Internet. Ten proposals for reform are under discussion.

Disputes have arisen also over ways of financing the 'digital divide' - the gap between access to information and communication technologies (ICT) between rich and poor countries.

It is not clear who will pay for a narrowing of this divide, or what role private sector and civil society could play. An African proposal for a Digital Solidarity Fund for developing countries through voluntary donations has got nowhere.

Other unresolved issues include the use of free and open software for development. Here Brazil is strongly opposed to the United States.

But the summit agenda could well be taken over by protests over abuse of human rights and denial of freedom of expression in host country Tunisia.

Following protests by civil society groups in October, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote back to say: "The High Commissioner (for Human Rights) has proposed to the Tunisian authorities that they take several measures to remove obstacles to the full enjoyment to the right to freedom of expression and association."

The group Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontieres, RSF) ranks Tunisia 147th out of 167 countries, and describes surveillance of the Internet in Tunisia as "very serious". RSF says its secretary Robert Menard was denied entry into Tunisia earlier this week.

The Tunisia Monitoring Group of the network International Freedom of Expression Exchange said in a report in September that Tunisia is "not suitable for a UN summit."

But civil society groups do not intend to boycott the summit. "It will be an important occasion to expose to the international public opinion the difficulties the local population faces," Jason Nardi from the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) campaign told IPS.

Some 20 civil society events are due to be held at the Kram Palaexpo within the official summit site. More than 80 human rights and freedom of expression organisations have signed up to participate in a parallel Citizens' Summit on the Information Society (CSIS).

This parallel summit will "address the main issues from the perspective of citizen groups and the public" and "send a strong message of support and solidarity from international civil society to the local civil society."

But the parallel summit could have run into difficulty already. "The place booked for the meeting has been cancelled at the last minute for reasons the CSIS organisers consider to be consequences of political pressures from the Tunisian government," the organisers said in a statement published on their website.

The Tunisian embassy in Rome declined comment despite at least eight attempts by IPS on Friday and again Monday to request a response.

Canada, the European Union and the United States have asked the Tunisian government to ensure "unhindered participation of all NGOs and their members" as the "only way to make sure that this will be a summit in Tunisia, not on Tunisia." (END/2005)

Source: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31006

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