Ray of hope for worried Net users

At last some relief is on the cards for Internet users whose mailboxes are crammed with spam and are worried about privacy settings and burgeoning cyber crime.

Political, business and civil society leaders have taken note of their plight and are holding a global summit under the aegis of the United Nations next week to devise ways and means to address the issue, which has assumed alarming proportions.

The World Summit on the Information Soceity, to be held at Kram PalExpo in Tunis from November 16-18, will look into Internet governance and key issues like fixing the jurisdiction of cyber crimes, spam, privacy settings and virus, special advisor to the United Nations secretary General Kofi Annan on WSIS Nitin Desai told reporters in New Delhi on Wednesday.

The summit, a follow-up of the Geneva Conference in 2003, where 175 countries had agreed to improve connectivity and access to information and communication technologies, will also look into domain management system and the role of national governments in it.

Presently, an America-based body, coordinated by the US Department of Commerce, looks after assigning domain names for websites and with more and more users sprouting in developing countries like India and China, the summit will look into the problems which can arise in the future, he said.

All countries agreed that governments should be involved and there should be some sort of national engagement. They also accept that the system should not hamper freedom of expression, Desai said.

The problem is that the exact role of the governments has to be worked out as their involvement is vital in view of the security aspect when it comes to issues like cyber crimes, and virus attacks, he said.

Problems like excessive spam and cyber crimes committed from outside a country cannot be tackled by individual nations and there needs to be a broad framework to address these issues, he said.

In Geneva, 175 countries had adopted a Declaration of Principles outlining a common vision of the information society and a plan of action that sets targets to improve connectivity and access to ICT.