U.S. TO SEEK CLOSURE ON WSIS DISCUSSION DOCUMENTS THIS MONTH
The U.S. intends to press delegates at next week’s Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) meeting to agree on the 2 documents scheduled for discussion at Dec. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as soon as possible, delegation head David Gross said Wed. Going into the 3rd PrepCom meeting, the declaration of principles has been broadly negotiated but needs tightening, said Gross, U.S. coordinator-international communications & information policy at the State Dept.
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Talks on the draft action plan haven’t even begun, however, Gross said at a meeting of the State Dept.’s International Telecom Advisory Committee. With the various countries now scrambling to schedule and brief the heads of state attending the summit, Gross said, work on the documents should be completed sooner rather than later. However, he told us, while he expects a lot of progress at PrepCom 3, closure is uncertain.
The U.S. will focus on 2 other items as well, Gross said. It wants delegates to reach agreement on the procedures to be followed at the summit. WSIS is particularly challenging, he said, because it lasts only 3 days, during which heads of state, as well as civil society and nongovernmental bodies, must have time to express their views on the documents. The 4th key procedural item to be addressed, he said, is what should happen -- from organizational and process standpoints -- between Dec. and the 2nd phase of the summit in 2005 in Tunisia.
The decision on who will head the U.S. delegation is “premature,” Gross said, in part because the documents are in a state of flux and the U.S. level of enthusiasm for the summit overall could depend on its view of the declaration and action plan going into WSIS. Because Gross is an optimist, he said, he hopes U.S. negotiators will be excited about the documents. A decision about the head of delegation is likely “fairly shortly” after PrepCom 3, he said. However, he said, the delegation head wouldn’t necessarily be the “star speaker” at the summit. A decision on whether the President, Vice President or other top official will appear usually is made closer to the actual event, he said.
Key issues for the U.S. continue to be media freedom, intellectual property (IP), network and cybersecurity, open source software and Internet governance, Gross said. Outsourcing and offshoring of information technology (IT) services is another contentious area, he said. The global nature of the IT industry is making issues to be faced at WSIS “sensitive and critical” to several countries, he said. For example, Gross said, India worries about spam because it’s a principal software developer as well as a major outsourcer for the U.S. IT industry.
Outsourcing issues also are embedded in other issues such as privacy and security, Gross said. At its highest level, outsourcing represents a “carrot” the U.S. can dangle when a country asks “what’s in it for me?” to spark action in areas such as infrastructure development and promoting the rule of law, he said.
Media freedom also is a high priority for the U.S. but Gross warned attendees that negotiating U.S. core principles in a multilateral forum would be challenging. “This is crunch time for all of us,” Gross said. PrepCom 3 is Sept. 15-26 in Geneva.