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CIVIL SOCIETY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 155
counterpart, with the private sector and Northern states effective in displacing
the crucial issue of access to content and technology transfer almost
completely from the official deliberations. In Geneva, open-source
software was recognized as important if not preferential from the perspective
of development by most Southern nations. Partially in response
to this trend, IP Watch has reported how Microsoft became an official
sponsor of the WSIS Tunis Summit, gaining its own ‘speaking slot’ to
reinforce the importance of the ‘strict protection of intellectual property’,
expanded its participation in WSIS by bringing 70 representatives
to Tunis versus some 6 to Geneva and played a disproportionate role in
drafting the official WSIS documents (Ermert 2005). If civil society engaged
primarily in the areas of human rights and Internet Governance,
the Tunis Summit showed how the private sector had mastered the discourse
of sustainable and multicultural info-development. In Tunis, the
‘trade fair’ look of the event was played down by corporate representatives
who pointed out that their booths were not manned by salespeople but
rather ‘community affairs’ or ‘public sector managers’. Representatives
from Sun Microsytems, Microsoft, Nokia, among others, argued that
they were ‘selling success stories’ and the growing presence of the private
sector in the development arena was explained as a ‘win–win’ proposition.
As the Managing Director for Africa of Hewlett-Packard Co. exclaimed,
‘Investors are not doing business only for charity . . . Business must be sustainable.
And funds could be cycled to local communities’ (Toros 2005).
This logic strongly opposes any mention of tax-based solutions or the
Global Public Goods model of regulation as proposed by CSOs from the
South, as evident in the official documents produced in Tunis (see: http://
www.itu.int/wsis/ ).
While progressive Southern-based NGOs supported the communications
rights agenda of holding authoritarian states in the South accountable,
the separation of recognition-based claims targeted at states in the
developing world deflects the larger scale of ongoing human rights violations
by Northern states like the US and the UK, especially in the
context of the egregious violations of human rights resulting in the ‘War
on Terror’. 11 The civil society priorities that did manage to surface in
the content of the WSIS official documents raised only the narrowest
of claims for gender advocacy as well as human rights, steering clear of
redistributive issues that faced enormous opposition by corporate and
Northern state actors (Dany 2004). The civil society outcry against the
violation of communication rights by Southern states therefore served
to displace, however unintentionally, a focus on redistributive claims. As
we have seen, the Civil Society Declaration critiques the technological
determinism of the dominant policy framework and promotes instead