APC to IGF: Cyberspace should promote maximum sharing, creativity and innovation

APC executive director Anriette Esterhuysen has told the Internet Governance Forum, meeting in Athens currently, that it has a duty play a much bigger role in spreading the sharing of ideas and encouraging innovation.

Speaking on the theme of openness, Esterhuysen said: "Piracy creates jobs. But [Free Software and] Open Source and Open Standards create opportunity, create entrepreneurs. And I think that’s the challenge for the IGF as well; how to look at it is a public interest forum, the Internet is a public space, and how can we facilitate maximum sharing, maximum creativity, peer production, new models, innovation."

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), currently meeting at the Greek capital, is a global venue under the auspices of the United Nations. It was set up, as the Wikipedia points out, to accommodate a multi-stake-holder policy dialogue in the field of internet governance.

It purports to bring together all stake-holders in the internet governance debate — whether they represent states, the private sector or civil society — on an equal basis and through an open and inclusive process.

Speaking during the session, Esterhuysen said she had a "lot of respect" for what she termed Microsoft’s efforts to provide educational content in developing countries.

"But as long as they copyright and limit the right of teachers and learners in those countries to reuse and change and share that information, then there’s very limited value to that. So I think, yes, sharing and openness is absolutely essential if we’re going to use the Internet for development," she commented.

Esterhuysen who became the Association for Progressive Communications Executive Director in May 2000, and has expertise is information and communications for development, also stressed the need for ‘developing’ country governments to "prioritize the interests of their citizens".

Johannesburg-based Esterhuysen said, "As a South African living in South Africa I resent the fact that my government that has a huge crime-fighting burden has to spend time and money, my taxpayer money, in prosecuting people who pirate Microsoft software licenses."

Esterhuysen stressed the need for the internet to be protected. Said she: "There are spaces, and they are not always safe. But I think the real power of the internet to create a world where there is more awareness and more realization of rights cannot be dealing from access."

She argued that while challenging governments that sidetrack human rights, "it’s much more effective to engage them at a social and economic development level as well as a human rights level."

She stressed the "power of the internet" to promote transparency, and how more people worldwide were "using it". But she cautioned: "I think what we need to be careful about with events like this is not to always assume we all agree."

She was critical of companies that offer "software and technologies to aid (government’s) repression". But, she contended, the "real question", is how a forum like the IGF — comprising technical people, policymakers, entrepreneurs, civil society activists — could begin to create an international policy and principal framework that stops that from happening?

Esterhuysen also "challenged" the public sector to rethink what the commons is about, and what the public domain is in "the world of the internet".

She compared cyberspace to public libraries of the past, saying the internet presents an opportunity where, for example, all scientific research that’s publicly funded can be made freely available.

She lent her support to concepts like rethinking copyright, looking for alternatives like the CreativeCommons approach, and more.

Earlier, Esterhuysen has served on the African Technical Advisory Committee of the Economic Commission for Africa’s African Information Society Initiative.

Commenting recently in the APC annual report, Esterhuysen said that contrary to plans to focus on regional and national level policy developments and advocacy, the APC’s involvement with the World Summit on the Information Summit process had actually turned out earlier.

"Three people from APC staff and members were asked to join working groups convened by the UN Secretary General to focus on the two controversial issues that were not resolved during Phase 1 — financing ICT in developing countries, and internet governance," she noted.

While all agree on a theoretical ‘openness’ in cyberspace, there are wide differences over how this is translated into practice.

As Indian lawyer Lawrence Liang from Bangalore comments, "with global capitalism, control over copyrighted works became centered in the hands of media corporations instead of authors and artists."

Issues of cyber-content being sharable have often come up. From the grassroots, the peer-to-peer production process is proliferating at a phenomenal pace, as documented by sites like http://p2pfoundation.net

Yet efforts to block possibilities of sharing, new peer-to-peer models and the proliferation of knowledge are blocked in a battle which often sees laws and corporate interests ganging up as a powerful foe against the potential offered by technology and innovation at the grassroots.

Campaigners in diverse places of the globe are pushing to implement the Free Software-influenced ideas of peer-production and freely sharing knowledge to a range of other fields, from open access journals to literally dozens of other spheres.