Interaction between Policy and Technology: An Assessment in the Aftermath of the World Summit on the Information Society

This multidisciplinary conference provides a unique opportunity to underline the linkage between policy and technology. There are many evidences that technology may not be politically neutral, and conversely that specific policy frameworks are not technology neutral. P2P technology revolutionized access to digital content for information and recreation, facing policy makers with two options : repression within a rigid legal framework or trying to find new ways so that content creators may receive a fair financial contribution. A global patronage scheme (http://globalpatronage.org) is being proposed. In the case of scientific information, the WSIS (http://www.wsis.org) recommended the use of P2P, but the paradox is that the reflection of this advance in national laws and in daily scholarly practice has been slow. Concerning Free Software, if access and modification to computer code is considered as an essential expression of human freedom and accepted as a matter of public policy, the consequences in terms of software development are staggering, and in our opinion, quite beneficial. Concerning Internet Governance, it is clear that the current plagues of the Internet : intrusion, phishing, DOS, spams, worms, viruses, etc... are not going to be cured any time soon, because of political considerations over who is going to take the leading managerial role in implementing policies. It is our analysis that the semantic web, much heralded as the second generation of the web, has failed to take off because of an unsuitable policy framework. We present a proposal: the Semantic Web gTLDs (http://semantic.cc). Crucial policy decisions have been taken, are taken, and will be taken, in the shadow, concerning emerging technologies such as Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and Object Naming Service (ONS) that provides a linkage between RFIDs and Internet resources. It is unclear if these issues are going to be discussed in Rio at the next meeting of The Internet Governance Forum (h- tp://www.intgovforum.org) which felt short so far to fulfill its WSIS mandate. As a conclusion, too many scientists and technologists underestimate the importance of policy frameworks and are not participating enough in their determinations.