The Impact of WSIS

I do think that the WSIS will have - or already has -an impact. The US position of being the sole rulers over domain space and IP adresses came under heavy attack, and even though ICANN was not handed over to the UN (as was to be expected), ICANN will have to restructure in a more democratic way and provide better access to developing countries. In my opinion, the rising awareness of the importance of the issue of internet governance is one of the important outcomes. Leaders of development countries are much better informed now about the mechanisms and this is the basis to make them get involved in the first place. I also find it important that the Civil Rights scene worldwide is becoming stronger and tries to take influence - e.g. in the WTO
.As for concrete steps, there hasn't been a satisfying outcome at WSIS05. A new global forum on Internet Governance has been installed, which is good because the discussion won't die down. There are lots ofprojects associated with the WSIS, but it's not clear to me whetherthey are new projects or existing projects that now take the new label. The digital solidarity fund does exist, but it's on voluntarybasis and this way doesn't make a big difference. Personally I thinkthat in many cases more money in the hands of developing countries'governments wouldn't be the best measure; more effective would be debt reduction measures, fair trade measures, fair interconnecting costs etc.
One concrete step in Tunis was the presentation of the "100 DollarLaptop". I think it is a good idea but it won't solve the problems. Again, the 100-dollar-laptop can only be a success on the ground of a joint effort to inprove the situation in the developing countries. Resume: The WSIS was an important and right step on the long pathtowards the information society. However, its concrete outcome is by far not sufficient and the UN, journalists and governments have to stay tuned to the issues and not let them die down.

Google censors itself for China

Leading internet company Google has said it will censor its search services in China in order to gain greater access to China's fast-growing market.
Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site.
The company is setting up a new site - Google.cn - which it will censor itself to satisfy the authorities in Beijing.
Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.
Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.
Google's move in China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching
Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.
Google's move in China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for.
Google hopes its new address will make the search engine easier to use and quicker.
Its e-mail, chat room and blogging services will not be available because of concerns the government could demand users' personal information.
Google said it planned to notify users when access had been restricted on certain search terms.
The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.
"While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistJulian Pain, internet spokesman for campaign group Reporters Without Borders, said Google's decision to "collaborate" with the Chinese government was "a real shame".
The number of internet search users in China is predicted to increase from about 100 million currently to 187 million in two years' time.
A survey last August revealed Google was losing market share to Beijing-based rival Baidu.com.
Last year, Yahoo was accused of supplying data to China that was used as evidence to jail a Chinese journalist for 10 years.

{BBC Online}

GOOGLE DROPS SOUTH AFRICAN SEARCH ENGINE JONGA

Web users searching for South Africa's newest search engine Jonga onGoogle are more likely to find an Indian army 4x4, a South Africantour company or the genealogy of a German whose name is "Jonga". Thatis if they find it at all. The search engine was dropped from the Google index "in its entirety"last week, according to owner of Jonga, Alistair Carruthers.Carruthers says he has "no idea whatsoever" why Jonga is no longerindexed by the world's biggest search engine."The interesting thing is that a lot of South African related searcheson Google were displaying results from Jonga's Web Directory and thusa lot of traffic was being forwarded from Google to Jonga's webdirectory and search," he says.Although the GoogleBot has sniffed around the website in the last week- visiting only one page each time - the results have not beenrecorded on Google's search index, says Carruthers."I did contact Google via the usual channels however I only receivedautomated responses which I did respond to and at this stage havereceived no feedback from them," he says.However, Carruthers says Jonga has yet to record a decline in traffic."Since Jonga was launched only a month ago its traffic has beengrowing on a daily basis and thus the effect of being removed fromGoogle's index hasn't adversely affected our traffic, however we domiss the referral traffic," he says.Jonga still features strongly on other search engines. Yahoo, MSN andAltaVista return the website in their top three results when searchingwith the term "Jonga". But even site-specific Google searches come upempty-handed.Jonga, which launched in December 2005, uses open source Apache Luceneas its text search backend. It features over26-million websites in its index and "at least 85 000 website domainsin the ZA or ZA related name-space", according to Carruthers.Google did not respond to Tectonic's request for comment.