Internet governance and sustainable development

In examining the evolution of Internet gover- nance, Jovan Kurbalija and Don MacLean focus on the process around the World Summit on the Information Society and point to the leadership of civil society and the technical community in the Internet governance debate. [...] The statement in Doran’s paper that “from the perspective of developing coun- tries the language game is sometimes ‘fixed’ from the outset and ‘incapacity’ is built into the rules of the game as a fait accompli” captured the mood of one of the more dominant debates of the e-conference. [...] In the case of the Internet governance community, the future has generally been seen in a very positive light, from the perspective of the apparently limitless pos- sibilities created by the Internet for improving the generation, communication and sharing of information, knowledge and cultural expression. [...] The vision that has motivated much of the activity of the Internet governance community is captured in the following passage from the Tunis Commitment of the World Summit on the Information Society: We reaffirm our desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, premised on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, in [...] Page 20 20 Internet Governance and Sustainable Development: Towards a Common Agenda In the case of the sustainable development community, since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the publication in the same year of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, the future has generally been seen in a some- what different light—from the perspective of the harm that has been done to th