GENEVA - Negotiators from 192 countries have narrowed differences on setting the global ground rules for expanding use of the Internet, but remain undecided on whether rich nations should help their poor counterparts pay for the increase.
Two days of closed-door talks, which continued into the early hours Sunday, have resolved most of the key issues to be tackled at a U.N. summit on information technology which starts Wednesday, said Marc Furrer, the Swiss official who brokered the discussions.
"Unfortunately, we didn't settle everything, but one has to be realistic. We're probably at 98 percent," said Furrer, director of Switzerland's Federal Office of Communications. Negotiators will meet again Tuesday, on the eve of the three-day World Summit on the Information Society, he told reporters.
The negotiators, meeting for the fifth round of talks already this year, have been trying to draft documents for the nearly 60 heads of state or government expected in Geneva.
French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Cuban President Fidel Castro are among some of the leaders who plan to attend. Many of the leaders will be coming from developing countries.
The key stumbling block remains whether and how richer nations should subsidize growth of the Internet in poorer countries.
African countries support the creation of a special "digital solidarity fund" to pay for extending the Internet into remote villages, but European nations, the United States and Japan have been wary, saying existing development aid money could be used instead.
"Some countries want to set this up now, others say they don't want to have anything to do with it," said Furrer, without identifying them. "It's clear we need resources, but we should first check whether there are already resources, because some exist but are not used."
On Tuesday, negotiators will focus on wording saying a further study is needed before any fund is created, said Furrer. "If the idea is good the fund will happen, if it's not good it won't happen."
Furrer said the talks had resolved two other key differences: whether news media freedoms should be protected and whether and how governments should regulate the Internet.
During earlier rounds, media and human rights organizations said they were worried that a draft of the final declaration to be issued at the close of the summit made little reference to freedom of expression.
Countries - including China - which have clamped down on both regular and Internet media have been anxious to restrict references to press freedom in the declaration, campaigners and officials close to the talks said.
However, Furrer said, negotiators have agreed to include wording maintaining the commitment to press freedom enshrined in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
"It's always a compromise," said Furrer. "However, as a former journalist, I can stand behind the wording. Countries that uphold the idea of a free media can live with it."
Countries have been divided over whether to exercise more national control over the Internet. Some developing nations have said they would like a U.N. body to regulate the Internet, but industrialized countries reject international agencies playing a significant control.
After the latest talks, "the political will was quite clear - we don't want a big change on Internet governance," Furrer said.
Key decisions about controlling the Internet's core systems remain with the U.S. government and a private, U.S.-based organization of technical and business experts known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number, or ICANN.
Some countries, particularly newcomers to the Internet which are afraid they could be ignored, seek a greater role for non-U.S. governments, perhaps through a treaty-based international organization.
Rather than tackle the issue in Geneva, negotiators have agreed to ask U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to set up a group to study new ways to run the Internet, with its proposals to be presented at another information summit in Tunisia in 2005.
ICANN president Paul Twomey praised the outcome, saying such a working group was more likely than the government-dominated summit to reflect the positions of business and civic leaders.
But Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, said a greater role for government is inevitable. The discussions over the next two years, he said, would be over whether that role remains within ICANN or goes to "some other acronym."
The declaration also calls on governments to work more closely together to improve Internet security and find ways to deal with spam, or junk e-mail.
ON THE NET
World Summit on the Information Society, http://www.itu.int/wsis
