Information Policy

Beyond the dust and heat: APC looks at Tunis and Geneva in perspective

Some months after the heat and dust settled on the Tunisian skyline, APC has come up with its evaluation of what the four-year World Summit on the Information Society could hold out for people on the planet. And our reflections throw up a mixed bag.

There are some positive signs emerging from WSIS, it suggests. But unless active steps are taken to ensure that vested interests don't take over, and local opportunities are created, all hope and optimism could be rather misplaced. Read the eleven page report.

APC reflection report on WSIS: http://rights.apc.org/documents/apc_wsis_reflection_0206.pdf

Chinese Gov't Announces Plans For New Country-Code Domains

The Chinese government has announced plans to create three new country-code domains in a move that looks like the creation of an alternate root. In addition to dot-cn, the government will create Chinese character versions of dot-china, dot-net and dot-com. An article notes that with the change, Chinese Internet users "don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of ICANN

http://english.people.com.cn/200602/28/eng20060228_246712.html

Cisco Networking Academy Program Afghanistan

The Cisco Networking Academy Program is a comprehensive e-learning program that has been launched in approximately 10,000 educational institutions in over 150 countries worldwide. Through a partnership among UNDP, Cisco Systems, the Ministry of Communications and the International Telecommunication Union, the Academy Program was introduced and initiated in Kabul in 2002. Due to the program’s success, USAID Afghanistan joined the partnership in 2004 to expand the program to secondary provinces, to introduce new curricula, and to strengthen the existing Networking Academies in the areas of sustainability, workforce development and gender.

http://www.stockholmchallenge.se/projectdata.asp?id=1&projectid=1001

KZ: e-Government to Be Introduced

Kazakhstan will put into effect its "e-government" system in mid-April, head of Kazakhstan's Information and Telecommunications Agency Askar Zhumagaliyev said. Some 32 of the 34 state bodies and institutions already have their own websites, forming the infrastructure for implementing the e-government portal. The people of Kazakhstan can take advantage of the portal's interactive information services, such as obtaining tax declaration forms and licenses over the Internet, and online shopping.

http://www.rbcnews.com/free/20060226185615.shtml

Search Engines and the Law

The European Audiovisual Observatory has just published its latest IRIS plus entitled: Search Engines: Seek and Ye Shall Find? The Position of Search Engines in Law

The use of search engines as a means of finding and accessing information on the internet has become so much a part of everyday communication, that the verb "to Google" now exists in reference works such as the Oxford English Dictionary. In this new publication, author Nico van Eijk presents us with an extremely accessible introduction to the functioning of search engines. He then goes on to tackle the more complex issues of the regulation of search engines in the eyes of European and international law.

The manipulation of search results given by a search engine is explored in the first part of this report. Van Eijk explains that the order in which you receive the search results can be changed by the fact that the highest positions in any given search result can be offered to paying customers. Priority-indexing of web pages is also offered to those willing to pay. A website owner can therefore literally `buy his way up the list.'

Search results can also be manipulated by website owners themselves. The report demonstrates that this can be done by adding attractive search words to your site which are unrelated to its content but which will nevertheless guarantee a high placing in any search list. This practice, known as spamdexing, is judged to be so vital in improving web presence that companies known as SEOs' - search engine optimisers - are doing a roaring trade in improving their clients' internet site traffic using such methods. Hackers are also able to manipulate search results through a process known as "Google-bombing" which involved linking certain search terms to completely unrelated items for a joke or in order to make a social statement.

This report then goes behind the scenes of the financing of search engines' business structures and explains how they obtain their principle revenue through advertising. Most search engines sell advertising space on their own websites and clients are charged according to the number of times their advertisement is "clicked". However, it is also possible for search engines to place advertisements for clients on third parties' websites and to receive payment for this service.

Finally, we are given a thorough analysis of the position of search engines in the eyes of current legislation. The report states that "the search engine does not have a place in law" as neither the "Television Without Frontiers" Directive, the European Framework Directive, the E-Commerce Directive nor even EU competition law currently provide an adequate legal framework for the regulation of search engines and their functions. Nico van Eijk recommends that "Partly in view of the major social dimension of search engines, it is desirable that legal and multi-disciplinary research be launched on national and international scales" as well as giving certain pointers for a beginning of legislation in this field.

An accessible and detailed analysis of search engines: their functioning, their business methods and their current position within the eyes of the law.

http://www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/irisplus0206.html