Business at the WSIS
The Coordinating Committee of Business Interlocutors (CCBI), led by the International Chamber of Commerce, organized two events at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) including a session discussing the role of information and communications technologies in economic growth. The CCBI’s final business statement highlighted the conditions necessary to generate business investment in such technologies. The conditions highlighted by the CCBI that governments need to create in order to generate investment include:

    –   Intellectual property rights protection;
    –   Stable and predictable legal systems;
    –   Trade liberalization;
    –   Technology neutrality; and
    –   A regulatory framework which promotes competition and fosters
         entrepreneurship.

Also of note, CCBI rejected the notion of “internet governance” considering the term to be an oxymoron. As the final business statement explains, “The fact that there is no real central locus is one of the internet’s most important features.” The CCBI statement provided a positive outline of the potential role of business in developing the internet. It will be interesting to see exactly how business organizations pursue their stated vision.