Ensuring Open, Universal, and Affordable Access to the Internet: Global Public Policy Advocacy for Information and Communications for Social Justice and Sustainable Development
Report for the period 1 June 2007 to 31 May 2008
Grant # 1065-0731
Presented by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Communications and Information Policy Programme to the Ford Foundation, July 2008
Contacts:
Willie Currie
Communications and Information Policy Programme Manager
Cell: +1 646 249 0600
Anriette Esterhuysen
Executive Director
PO Box 29755, Melville 2109, South Africa
Tel/Fax: +27 11 726 1692
Table of Contents
Acronyms and Abbreviations......
1.Summary
2.Overview of progress......
2.1Global Advocacy on Open, Universal, and Affordable Access......
2.1.1Participation in post-WSIS public policy processes......
2.1.2United Nations Global Alliance for ICT4D (GAID)......
2.1.3UN Commission on the Status of Women (UN CSW)......
2.1.4Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)......
2.1.5APC led or hosted public events and workshops......
2.2Linking Global Advocacy to Regional and National Advocacy......
2.2.1Africa......
2.2.2Latin America......
2.2.3Asia......
2.2.4National policy spaces......
2.2.5 Connecting the global: manifesto on affordable universal broadband......
2.3.Nurturing and Growing the Existing Network of APC Members and Partners Engaged with ICT Policies
2.3.1APC members......
2.3.2Partnerships......
2.4.Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch)......
Appendix 1: How APC Implements ICT Policy Advocacy......
Appendix 2: New Members since 1 June 2007......
Appendix 3: APC Websites......
Appendix 4: APC.org Website Statistics for 2007......
Appendix 5: ICT Policy Related Publications since 1 June 2007......
Appendix 6: Event Participation since 1 June 2007......
Appendix 7: APC’s Geographic and Strategic Partnerships, May 2008......
Appendix 8: WSIS follow-up mechanisms......
Appendix 9: GISWatch 2008 Table of Contents......
Acronyms and Abbreviations
ALER / Asociación Latinoamericana de Educación Radiofónica (Latin American Association for Radio Education)AMARC / Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias (World Association of Community Broadcasters)
APC / Association for Progressive Communications
AWID / Association of Women’s Rights in Development
BASIS / Business Action in the Information Society
BCO / Building Communication Opportunities
BFES / Bangladesh Friendship Education Society
APC WNSP / APC Women’s Networking Support Programme
CATIA / Catalysing ICT Access in Africa
CIPESA / Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa
CIPP / Communications and Information Policy Programme
CRASA / Communications Regulators’ Association of Southern Africa
CRIS / Communication Rights in the Information Society
CSO / Civil society organisation
CSTD / (United Nations) Commission on Science and Technology for Development
DRC / Democratic Republic of the Congo
ECLAC / (United Nations) Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
ECOSOC / (United Nations) Economic and Social Council
EDRI / European Digital Rights Initiative
EED / Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst
EPIC / Electronic Privacy Information
EASSy / East African Submarine Cable System
EFOSSNet / Ethiopian Free and Open Source Software Network
FOSS / Free and open-source software
GAID / (United Nations) Global Alliance for ICT and Development
GEM / Gender Evaluation Methodology
GISW / Global Information Society Watch
GKP / Global Knowledge Partnership
ICANN / Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICT / Information and communication technology
ICT4D / Information and communication technology for development
IGF / Internet Governance Forum
IGP / Internet Governance Project
IICD / International Institute for Communication and Development
IPRs / Intellectual property rights
ISOC / Internet Society
ITeM / Third World Institute
ITU / International Telecommunications Union
KICTANet / Kenya ICT Action Network
LAC / Latin America and the Caribbean
MDGs / Milennium Development Goals
NEPAD / New Partnership for Africa’s Development
NGO / Non-governmental organisation
NRO / Network Resource Organisation
OECD / Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
ONI / OpenNet Initiative
REDISTIC / Red sobre el Impacto Social de las Tecnologîas de la Información y Comunicación (Network for the Social Impact of ICTs)
SAFE / South Africa Far East
SAT-3 / South Atlantic 3
UNDP / United Nations Development Programme
UNECE / United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
UNESCO / United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
VoIP / Voice over internet protocol
WALC / Workshop for Latin America and the Caribbean
WASC / West Africa Submarine Cable
WIPO / World Intellectual Property Organisation
WSIS / World Summit on the Information Society
1.Summary
This report describes the progress made by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) during the second of two years of support from the Ford Foundation for public policy advocacy work with respect to information and communication technology (ICT).
The Ford Foundation is providing support to the APC toward activity in four specific outcome areas:
i)Global advocacy on open, universal and affordable access to the internet through engaging two policy spaces: the IGF[1] and WSIS implementation action lines C2 and C6.[2]
ii)Linking this global advocacy to regional and national advocacy processes on “open access”[3] to the internet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
iii)Nurturing and growing the existing network of APC members and partners engaged with ICT policies.
iv)Using this network to produce an annual 'information society' watch (published under the title Global Information Society Watch) report that monitors the implementation of goals agreed by governments during WSIS.
A detailed section on each of these areas follows below.
Global public policy that impacts on how the internet develops, how it is regulated, and ultimately on how global civil society and citizens are able to access and use the internet is complex and dispersed. Decision-making is becoming more trans-scalar[4] in character i.e. it is affected by relations within a region, in the interaction of governments, private sector and civil society in global policy spaces and is no longer purely carried out at national level. A greater variety of institutions are involved in regulating the internet at all three levels simultaneously leading to regulatory powers that are distributed across global, regional and national spaces simultaneously in the form of polycentric networks.
Citizens and communities are no longer solely subject to national legislation but affected by trans-scalar and polycentric dimensions of policy. APC grapples with this in its policy practices. This was exemplified by our participation in the Internet Governance Forum and the successful launch of the Global Information Society Watch report in 2007[5]. The text of the report combines a review of the impact of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and of post-WSIS policy spaces like the IGF with an analysis of some of the polycentric institutions engaged in global governance with regard to ICTs and the internet like ICANN and the ITU and also presents a number of country reports that give a national perspective on global ICT policy.
It is not easy to work for policy influence across such diverse policy spaces and to manage to make coherent connections between global, regional and national levels. Much depends on what policy windows are open. In Africa, in the closing phase of WSIS, a policy window opened around open access to broadband infrastructure on the east coast of Africa that enabled multi-stakeholder engagement in policy and regulation related to the building of submarine cables that would bring down the cost of the bandwidth needed to access the internet in Africa.
In Latin America, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) initiated an inter-governmental process to develop an action plan on ICTs for the region which began as eLAC2007 and moved into a new phase as eLAC2010. In the first phase, civil society participation was resisted by the governments, but APC led a sustained campaign to secure civil society participation in the second phase of eLAC2010. In the African case, the policy window involved direct engagement on matters of policy while in Latin America, the battle for multi-stakeholder participation in ICT policy processes, that had been won at the global level in WSIS, had to be fought all over again at the regional level.
APC has integrated its experiences of undertaking national ICT policy advocacy in countries within Latin America, Africa and South Asia into a new form that seeks to undertake policy advocacy at regional and national levels within a framework that is also being pursued at the global levels within the IGF. The issue of affordable universal broadband access to the internet now forms a single policy advocacy issuein campaigns supported by APC:
- Nationallevel: Within at least four countries in East Africa, six countries in West and Central Africa and four countries in the Andes region of Latin America
- Regional level: within the regional economic communities and ICT regulators associations of East Africa, West and Central Africa and the Andes region, and
- Global level: within the Internet Governance Forum and the UN Commission for Science and Technology for Development.
A key moment in 2007 came at the access plenary session at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro, when Mike Jensen, speaking at the invitation of the APC, succinctly advocated that achieving the goal of affordable universal broadband in Africa required:
- More competition and innovation in the Internet and telecom sector, with effective regulation
- Much more backbone fibre, national and international, with effective regulation of non-discriminatory access to the bandwidth by operators and service providers
- More effort to build demand, especially by national governments to build useful local applications
- Improved availability of electric power
- Better indicators for measuring progress.
This is the approach to access that is being followed by the government of Kenya and it will take off across the East African region once the TEAMS submarine cable is landed in Mombassa sometime in 2009. It is also the approach adopted by the Connect Africa Summit in Kigali in October 2007.
It is unusual to see a convergence of thinking about access taking place simultaneously at national, regional and global levels of policy, as well as among different stakeholders – governments, private sector and civil society. The views on access coming out of three multi-stakeholder workshops on access – one led by ISOC, one by the private sector, and one by , converged in their views on what should be done to increase access to the internet across the world.
This has been the main purpose of APC’s policy work – to build consensus on ICT policy matters across national, regional and global spaces simultaneously.
2.Overview of progress
2.1Global Advocacy on Open, Universal, andAffordable Access
In the post WSIS phase APC's efforts to ensure that open, universal and affordable access to the internetis prioritised in strategic global internet public policy spaces were successful.
APC found the Internet Governance Forum, an experimental, but influential policy forum, to be the primary arena of influence for global advocacy on open access. But we have also engaged in other processes that are strategic, and that provide opportunities for APC to promote its policy agenda. These include the OECD ministerial meeting on the 'Future of the Internet Economy', the UN Global Alliance for ICTD (which is doing significant work with the ITU led 'Connect Africa' [6] initiative), the 52nd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women[7] which had as one of it's two main themes 'Financing for gender equality and the empowerment of women' and the WSIS action line follow-up and CSTD (Commission on Science and Technology for Development) process - charged with responsibility for monitoring UN system-wide implementation of the WSIS Geneva Action plans, and which focussed on 'development oriented policies' in it's 11th session.
APC also participated in various CSO organised meetings on intellectual property and copy right enforcement (particularly in relation to trade agreements outside of intergovernmental processes) and in networks that approach public policy from a rights based perspective.
During the second year of this Ford supported initiative, APC refined its global advocacy strategy, expanded its network of collaborative partners, hosted several public events and developed influential publications that have shaped future directions in global policy advocacy work on access. Activities are clustered in four areas and relate closely to APC’s approach to ICT policy advocacy, which is described in more detail in Appendix 1.
Participation in public policy processes (networking and advocacy):
- IGF preparatory consultations (September 07, February 08 and May 08)
- United Nations Global Alliance for ICT4D (Kuala Lumpur, October 07)
- IGF II (Rio De Janeiro, November 07)
- UN Commission on the Status of Women (New York, March 2008)
- WSIS Action line follow-up meetings (May 08)
- UN Commission on Science Technology and Development - 11th session - UN System wide reporting on WSIS to ECOSOC
- OECD Ministerial meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy (October 07, March 08 and May 08)
APC led or hosted public events and workshops:
- Equitable access: one day event prior to the 2nd IGF (Rio, November 2007)
- Workshops on access, content regulation, participation and multi-stakeholder national advocacy in the second IGF (Rio de Janeiro, November 2007)
- Capacity building for regulators: with LiRNE, at the Global Knowledge III conference (Kuala Lumpur, December 2007).
- "Communication Rights for Women - Why the Purse feels empty?: Financing for women's equitable access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) UN Commission on the Status of Women (New York, February 08)
- Participation in public policy processes: with Council of Europe and the UN Economic Commission For Europe during WSIS action line meeting (Geneva, May 2008)
Research and information resources[8]:
- Equitable access: commissioned a series of papers (with peer review and commentary) that document the experience and recommended strategies of practitioners working for equitable access in relation to new business models, policy and regulation, tools and technologies and networks and capacities[9]
- Multi-stakeholder coalitions influencing policy: documenting lessons from APC's experience of multi-stakeholder coalition building and advocacy promoting equitable and affordable access in national level campaigns[10]
- Building Consensus on Access at the IGF: analytical assessment of the work of all stakeholders involved in access in the second IGF and outlining areas of consensus on how to promote open, affordable and universal access amongst multiple stakeholders involved in access in the IGF (and other policy spaces). [11]
- Pro-Poor ICT Access Resource Kit: initial work developing advocacy kits for policy-makers, regulators and CSO practitioners working for 'pro-poor' access solutions (work in progress)
Assessment and monitoring:
- Global Information Society Watch: The 2007 issued monitored WSIS follow up and civil society participation in policy processes. The 2008 issue will focus on access and is reported on in detail elsewhere in this report.
Concurrently, APC has been building it's capacity to build awareness, deepen knowledge, build partnerships and develop advocacy strategies in related policy areas including access to knowledge, building the commons, freedom of expression (particularly in relation to privacy rights and content regulation), internet and communication rights, public participation and transparency and accountability in governance processes.
2.1.1Participation in post-WSIS public policy processes
WSIS implementation involves implementation and monitoring of targets and action lines agreed by governments in the Geneva Plan of Action.[12] Governments set targets for 2015, whereas action lines are understood to be ongoing. The monitoring process is complex and participation difficult and expensive, particularly for CSOs.
Four follow-up processes emerged from the WSIS:
- WSIS action line implementation (including action lines dealing specifically with open, affordable and universal access) - a total of 11 action lines.
- Internet Governance Forum
- Enhanced cooperation on managing critical internet resources
- Financing ICTD/Digital Solidarity Fund
Of these four processes, only the Internet Governance Forum has been consistently active. It was hoped that the action line implementation process would animate stakeholders to collaborate on ongoing activities, but there are neither sufficient resources to support the process, nor is it structured in such a way as to allow for interested stakeholders to easily participate.The 'Enhanced Cooperation' activity has yet to begin in any formal sense and little progress has been made in relation to the ‘Financing ICTD’ line since the inaugural meeting of the Digital Solidarity Fund in 2005. This section of the report focuses therefore on the WSIS Action Line/CSTD process, and the Internet Governance Forum.
WSIS Action Line/CSTD process
The WSIS follow-up processes are facilitated by no less than 10 UN agencies, 5 regional economic commissions, the IGF secretariat and other related bodies. All of these processes feed, by way of reports from facilitating UN agencies and regional commissions, each report with a different format, into a formal review/assessment process overseen by the UN CSTD. The CSTD is responsible for UN system-wide WSIS follow-up and monitoring. The Commission holds its annual session every May in Geneva, immediately following the WSIS week of events. The CSTD compiles the various agency reports into one document and submits this on behalf of the UN Secretary General to the UN ECOSOC[13] annually in July[14].
For the past three years APC participated in thefollow-up processes related to access to infrastructure, openness, access to knowledge, participation, diversity and capacity building. Our goal was to assess which spaces are most strategic in terms of potential partnerships and which most conducive toinfluencing policy outcomes.
Based on agreements made in 2005/6 APC tried to co-facilitate three action lines with the responsible UN agencies during 2006 and 2007:
C2: Access to Infrastructure (with the International Telecommunications Union -ITU)
C4: CapacityBuilding (with the UN Development Programme - UNDP)
C6: Enabling environment (with the UN Development Programme - UNDP)
We also decided to monitor action line C3: Access to Knowledge, which is facilitated by UNESCO.