Next month the United Nation's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will consider whether -- and if so, how -- it will assume the lead policy role for the future growth and development of the Internet. This includes assigning domain names and addresses and related technical matters discussed at two earlier UN conferences. While no decision affecting the way the U.S. -- mainly through its agreement with the southern California corporation called ICANN -- does business, that all is slowly but surely about to change.
As nations around the world awaken to the importance of creating a robust communications infrastructure, they will be less dependent and less willing to accept what has been considered a one-way flow of information and communications goods and services from the United States. This undoubtedly places a greater burden on U.S. policy makers to pursue the basic idea of a free, unregulated, unrestricted flow of news, entertainment and information. Clearly trade in information goods and services and the future of journalism itself face new challenges.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been a leading proponent of free trade in part because many countries are opposed to the importation of American films. At the same time, of course, there is great concern over piracy of those same films. Clearly while the government says and wants to do one thing, the worldwide consuming public wants another. Television, which produces all forms of audiovisual materials, has run into the same nagging import restrictions, tariffs and administrative barriers to the free trade of information goods and services.
Just two years ago UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, adopted a treaty promoting or recognizing cultural identity. The MPAA among others in the industry opposed the U.S.'s support of the resolution. The U.S. stood alone, along with Israel, in opposing the cultural treaty on the grounds that it would be used for trade purposes to block the importation of American information and entertainment products, which constitute a major percentage of U.S. exports.
This concern about the "free flow" of information across borders is certainly not new. Most recently, in the late '70s and early '80s, the term "The New World Information Order" was part of the debate by the MacBride Commission -- named after Nobel Prize winner Sean MacBride, chairman of the panel -- whose concern, then as now, is that the current flow of information and communications heavily favored the U.S. The developing countries were expressing their frustration with what they were calling a form of electronic colonialism with the U.S., indeed the Western world, dominating media flow. In protest, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, among other countries, withdrew from UNESCO in the '80s and rejoined just a few years ago.
Despite the concerns expressed by the McBride Commission report and the call for a New World Information Order, the report's concern with concentration and commercialization, and what it felt was unequal access to information and communications, has not changed significantly. The commission's call for a "strengthening of national media to avoid dependence on external sources" has had some success, and as noted earlier, many countries are now focusing on developing a robust communications media unique to their national economy and culture.
The concern with the U.S.'s dominance of media flow does not extend
to the developing nations alone. Indeed, in the mid-'70s France published a treatise called "The Computerization of Society" written by the then-secretary of the Treasury, Simon Nora and co-authored by his assistant Alain Minc, which called for a way of taxing information flows as well as information assets. As early as 1976, the French government realized that there was a basic change in the structure of its economy and it was going to be increasingly difficult to tax or control information products and services. It was also concerned with the collection of information for subsequent data processing that was being done in the U.S. by multinational corporations located in France. To keep the data from being transmitted and processed elsewhere -- and in turn to create a robust data processing industry in France -- the French devised the concept of "data protection" and argued that nations such as France had a duty to control "the transborder flow of data" in order to preserve and enhance the communications and information technology infrastructure so essential to the economy of the future. For the first time, it was clear that data flow and media flow were one and the same and that the loss of information could hurt domestic economic development.
France and much of Europe subsequently developed privacy laws to control the flow of all data -- they called it "name-linked data" -- under the guise of protecting privacy. Such laws applied to both persons and corporations and severely threatened the free flow of trade and commerce.
Multinational banking and financial corporations and indeed all multinationals doing business in France and elsewhere in Europe were concerned about the new data protection laws and vigorously expressed those reservations. Consequently, government authorities backed away from strict enforcement as it applied to corporations. Yet the die was cast. It was clear for many reasons that if possible, information processing should be done locally and that these nations would assume greater responsibility for developing the industries important to their future in the coming, yet-to-be-defined knowledge economy.
In 2005 at the International Telecommunications Union's (ITU) World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, the European Union (EU) joined most developing nations in expressing their concern over the widespread development of the Internet and its control by the U.S. With support from UNESCO and other UN agencies -- including the Office of the Secretary General -- the ITU appears to have launched a new initiative for solving many of the problems UNESCO identified through the WSIS.
All this may seem arcane and distant to the average American. Perhaps too little has been said or written about these issues. Perhaps most Americans don't care or simply trust the UN system. Yet unless the U.S. has a plan to negotiate and establish global polices which satisfy the worldwide hunger for the bold new future promised by the growing Internet, our own future may be in peril.
