"Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) hold a promise for unprecedented economic and social development. More than that ICTs are rapidly creating a new context for development. As the world economy is being integrated through ICT, development policies need to be rethought to help developing countries connect to the new information-based world economy."

"The World Summit on the Information Society offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of the information society so that all people can enjoy these benefits. It will bring together political leaders and leaders from the private sector, civil society and media organizations. It can help us to better understand just how the information revolution is transforming our societies. Most of all, it provides a platform for developing a shared vision of ways to create a truly inclusive information society that serves and empowers all people."

"Like bureaucrats everywhere, the people running the UN believe above all in the growth of their power. This winter, undeterred by their failures in peacekeeping, AIDS prevention and women's rights, they are focusing on a new target of opportunity: the Internet.

"The rest of us may consider the Internet one of the great inventions of modern times, but it affronts the rigid conservatives staffing the UN. They are astonished that no one planned this global enterprise, and they can hardly believe that no one runs it. They yearn to regulate it, and they are working hard, at great expense, to drag it on to their turf.

"... Desai also wants to take power out of the hands of (can you guess?) the Americans... He believes the Americans are running things, and it's the duty of the UN to make them stop. Desai says that while the Internet was put together by private interests, its current problems (he mentioned spam, viruses, cybercrime, and pornography) call for 'governance'...The UN policy people now insist that the Internet, being a public resource (actually, it's mostly owned in private) should be managed within any given country by the national governments and internationally by, well, the UN."

"An ominous sign: China and Saudi Arabia are among those pressing for a UN-directed Internet..... Bureaucrats, above all the politicized and slow-moving bureaucrats who infest the UN, could only harm the Net. Still, it's no wonder they want to get their hands on it. It's everything they are not, the ultimate in decentralization, a spontaneously growing global institution and the antithesis of world government."

"The United States, Europe and English-speaking partners such as Australia favour the existing private-company organisation, ICANN. Whereas developing nations, China, India, Brazil, South Africa and others all want a recognised international body to run the show, ITU....

"....failure to implement this vision should be gratefully received by every man, woman and child on the planet. What arose instead was the vision of the (at that time) liberal and democratic US government. It had developed technology that was independent of the telecoms supplier and allowed computers to communicate directly with one another - it was TCP/IP and it forms the basis of the Internet.

"This equipment allowed anyone to set up their own network. It was also far cheaper that ITU’s approach. The only constraint the US government put on it was that people made their network freely available to everyone. The technology was immediately seized upon by academics and computer scientists across the globe - a fact that has lent the Internet its culture borne of free speech, freely available information and software, and fierce independence from any form of control....

"The US, Europe and countries such as Australia clearly see the advantage of having disproportionate control over the organisation running the Internet and so they are extremely keen to keep things as they are. Their argument against the ITU taking over is that it would give different countries’ governments control over how they run the Internet in their own country and so would enable them to censor their citizens and so damage the democratising power of the Internet....

"And so the Internet sits at a crossroads. The ITU... is desperate to get control of the Internet. This is its one big - and only - chance. It has a huge international meeting on the Internet where dozens of world governments are in support of it. ICANN will be an independent body within three years and is currently in transition and so at its weakest...."