World Summit on the Information Society

Stephen Timms’ speech to WSIS (delivered by Nicholas Thorne) can be found here. One paragraph is of particular interest:

“Governments have a vital role to play in ensuring that private operators work to the wider public good. This means developing an enlightened, but focused regulatory approach to strike the right balance. Each country will of course need to decide which policies are best suited to its circumstances. But the UK Government and many multilateral agencies can offer technical assistance to create the necessary expert capacity to identify those national objectives and pursue them.”

Several crude, and perhaps unnecessary, points might be made regarding the latent neo-liberal assumptions within this statement. Yet my question is altogether closer to home, and that is whether the approach outlined here also holds for the ‘nations’ (and in time the ‘regions’) of the United Kingdom?

In a side note, it seems that such a collaborative atmosphere was not necessarily the norm at WSIS, a group of journalists, under the auspices of the British Council, have been blogging the event, and have provided an engaging, but somewhat fraught, picture of proceedings. My key concern remains the same as when the summit began: how do you sell the bracketing of ‘civil society’, as a collective grouping, to those outside of the formal deliberation processes of WSIS?