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152 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
in the summit, 8 the lack of freedom of information within the first WSIS
meeting was reinforced by the intimidating ‘architecture of the event’
(Selian and Cukier 2004), which physically separated state and corporate
actors from civil society representatives. In addition, the prohibitive
costs of accessing the paid wireless internet services at the event, the intense
surveillance of civil society groups entering official buildings, and
the arrest of protesters for threatening security, 9 cast a dark shadow on
a summit meant to highlight the benefits of a global information society
(Hamelink 2004; Sreberny 2005).
The limited influence of CSOs on policy outcome in the Geneva stage
of the Summit was restricted to the areas of communication rights and
Internet Governance. Specifically, the WSIS Declaration of Principles
(2003) reaffirms the right to the freedom of expression, a right that
virtually all CSOs, private-sector actors and a vast majority of nationstates,
most importantly Northern nations like the US, supported. In the
area of Internet Governance, CSOs called for greater democratization
of ICANN, with the US and some of its Northern allies and the private
sector arguing strongly in support of the status quo as a non-profit
organization based in the US.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the Civil Society Declaration shows that
there were other areas of disagreement between civil society and its more
powerful ‘partners’ in negotiation. These found little resolution or more
importantly, discussion in this first stage of the Summit. The two most significant
include the area of norms over intellectual property rights (IPRs)
and financing the ‘bridge’ to the digital divide. In the area of Intellectual
Property, Northern states have been largely successful at reinforcing
existing IPRs and keeping meaningful negotiation off the WSIS agenda,
despite the fact that Southern nations like Argentina, Brazil, China,
South Africa and others have argued persistently for the need to rethink
the redistributive and developmental impact of laws that favour Northern
nations and private firms (Shashikant 2005). On the second issue, the
Senegalese delegation proposed a ‘Digital Solidarity Fund’ (DSF) to
redistribute resources from the North to the South in order to finance
the expansion of ICTs in the face of strong opposition from the US, the
EU and Japan. The US proposed a counter ‘Digital Freedom Initiative’
(DFI) that essentially promoted a pre-existing US Agency for International
development (USAID) programme ‘enabling environments’ for
the ‘creation of US corporate interests in Africa’ (Accuosto and Johnson
2005: 13–14). Coordinated opposition by Northern state actors and the
private sector against establishing such a financing mechanism rendered
the Digital Solidarity Fund weak and dependent on nominal voluntary
contributions as opposed to a tax on users or firms.