Geneva – The Computer and Communications Industry Association today has joined nine other industry groups in a joint letter to the Ambassadors of Finland and Tunisia, jointly leading a key UN negotiation New York. The signatories collectively represent a worldwide community of businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people and generating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual turnover.
The letter calls on the UN General Assembly to ensure that the process for reviewing the progress in implementing the international community’s policy framework for information technology takes place with all stakeholders at the table. “The information society’s policy framework is a collaboration between all stakeholders. That’s why it has worked, producing the miracle that is the global, interoperable Internet,” said International Digital Economy Alliance Executive Director & CCIA Geneva Representative Nick Ashton-Hart.
The industry letter also suggests that World Summit on the Information Society’s ten year review (WSIS+10) timelines and goals can be fully aligned with the concurrent review of the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) “to ensure that the WSIS goals and accompanying measurable targets are fully connected to the outcomes of the MDG review process.”
The signatories underscored the need for “concrete, measurable targets” in pursuing the objective of a people-centred networked future and a “bottom-up-driven review process” for WSIS+10 that invites broad stakeholder involvement from governments, private sector groups, civil society and multilateral institutions.
“As all stakeholders review implementation of the WSIS agreements, a people-centred, pro-innovation, dynamic networked society must remain the objective. Creating greater synergies between technology policy in WSIS and the delivery of the world’s sustainable development goals is integral to that goal,” Ashton-Hart added. “For almost a quarter of the world’s population, the digital divide is growing, not narrowing. Reversing that trend must be at the heart of future work on the WSIS agenda.”
To read the industry coalition letter signed by the Asia Cloud Computing Association, ASUT, CCIA, EDiMA, EITESAL, EurolSPA, i2Coalition, ITIC, IDEA, and SIIA click here.