Internet Summit Splits Over Press Freedom

GENEVA (AP) -- Leaders from more than 50 countries launched a summit Wednesday aimed at expanding use of the Internet to poor nations, but a split quickly emerged over the amount of freedom given to news media in sometimes unstable countries.

"The right to freedom of opinion and expression is fundamental to development, democracy, and peace and must remain a touchstone for our work ahead," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in opening the conference.

President Omar Bongo of Gabon said, "Journalists have rights--but they also have certain duties, and they have to act in a way that is ethically acceptable. With that kind of mutual respect we can move forward, recognizing that the Internet must not be used to destabilize situations nor to destabilize the way people think."

Calls for a free press are a smokescreen, said president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

"Beneath the rhetoric of free press and transparency is the inequity of hegemony," said Mugabe, who is listed by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders as one of the world's "predators of press freedom."

Mugabe, who came to Geneva soon after pulling out of the Commonwealth because the bloc extended his nation's 18-month suspension, was combative.

"The rich, imperious, and digital north remains on the one end of the development divide," he said. "The poor, disempowered, underdeveloped south remains on the other end of that divide."

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, also on the Reporters Without Borders list, focused on his goals to provide all Rwandans with access to the Internet.

"We plan to transform Rwanda into a technological hub," Kagame said and appealed for help from "our development partners."

Some developing countries have been trying to use the summit to put control of the U.S.-dominated Internet system into the hands of the United Nations.

Key decisions on the way the Internet works, such as domain names and addresses, now reside in a private agency spun off from the U.S. government--and the United States wants to keep it that way.

China, South Africa, India, and Brazil--the main proponents of wresting control of the Internet from the United States--have offered only vague blueprints for an alternative.

The World Summit on the Information Society is helping by drawing the world's attention to "the importance that new technologies, whether the Internet or other mechanisms, have for helping people around the world," said Ambassador David Gross of the U.S. State Department, head of the American delegation.

President Bush was one of many Western leaders staying away, but Gross said the United States was lending strong support by having its speech delivered Thursday afternoon by White House science and technology adviser John Marburger.

Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was one of the few Western leaders to address the opening session.

"We must build an information society for everyone--a society open to all," Raffarin said. "This is a wonderful opportunity to help less fortunate countries. We must bring down the digital barriers."

At the same time, he said, governments should guard against the spread of pornography and pedophilia on the Internet.

Even as the gathering began, organizers were lowering expectations, noting that a follow-up summit will take place in Tunisia in 2005.

"Geneva is the beginning, the beginning of a process," said Marc Furrer, the Swiss state secretary who helped broker talks among government negotiators ahead of the summit.

But campaigners for press freedom said the follow-up meeting should be canceled or moved to another country on grounds that Tunisia "does not respect free speech and press freedom."

"The Tunisian press is censored, journalists are jailed along with hundreds of other political prisoners, and organization of the Tunis summit has been assigned to a military general alleged to be responsible for the torture of political prisoners," said a joint statement from the World Press Freedom Committee, the Inter American Press Association, the World Association of Newspapers and other groups.

Pending approval from the world leaders is a declaration that challenges them to use technology in promoting development goals such as eliminating poverty, fighting AIDS, and curbing child mortality.

It calls for connecting schools, public libraries, and health centers in poor countries to the Internet by 2015.