Chapter 1:
A civil rights orientation:
people first

Since its formation in 1995 the Information Society Forum (ISF) has stressed the importance of the aspirations and needs of citizens and consumers in the development of the information society.

Information and communication technology (ICT) was in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s widely perceived as a primarily technical and economic affair, concerning almost entirely businesses and producers. If this had remained the case, the information society would not have become a reality for the mass of the population, not even in the developed countries. The one-sided technical and supply-side orientation of the past has led some to a fear of seizing the opportunities the technology offers for strengthening freedom and democracy.

The most significant concerns of potential and starting internet users are still a lack of trust in the safety and privacy of network communication and the barriers to access to ICT, which is widely felt to be difficult and expensive.

Improving the quality of life

Using ICT in a socially responsible way has the potential to improve our quality of life significantly. Where it helps to create more jobs and more educational opportunities than it destroys, it can help to improve our welfare (see Chapter 6).

ICT can enable working hours to be reduced and leisure and cultural practices to be extended. Communication between people can become easier and better, provided that online communication adds to face-to-face communication, producing a fruitful interplay between them. Democracy can be improved by better communication and by more equal exchange of information and ideas between citizens and their representatives. Peoples' safety can be improved by, for example, alarm and health systems. People with disabilities can get new opportunities to participate - if ICT is (re)designed to facilitate their access to jobs and to social communication. Higher productivity and efficiency can be used to save energy and reduce society's load on the environment, enabling a better life more in harmony with nature (see Chapter 3).

Non-exclusion

These opportunities to improve the quality of life will be realised only if no significant part of the population is excluded from ICT. But according to the UN Human Development Reports, in our high-tech societies around one-tenth of the populations are functionally illiterate. The number of "digital illiterates" must be considerably higher.

Large majorities of people with low incomes and restricted education, and of those living in less-developed countries and regions, are in fact excluded from the nascent information society. The only exception to a trend of increasing gaps is the closing of the "gender gap" for ICT. There is a huge and widening gap between the Northern European and the Southern and Eastern European countries.

A European Way for the information society must set out to alter this situation. An information society with such large and structural inequalities is socially unsustainable. It risks destroying the social cohesion of society and of our still-young European Community.

In the information society access to the following should be regarded as civil rights for all residents whatever their citizenship:

• basic connections for public and private communication - universal and public access;
• a plurality of affordable public information and communication content readily and affordably accessible - to enable participation in democracy and society in general;
• communication and information for health and security services - accessible basic health information and alarm facilities;
• tools both for compulsory education and for lifelong learning.

On these matters, see the ISF's Bristol Declaration.

The extension of universal & public service

Putting these modern civil rights into practice requires the provision and extension both of universal service requirements and of public service information.

In the short term, public service is emphasised in the promotion of the information society: providing schools, libraries, hospitals and civic centres with computers, networks and training. In the medium term universal service requirements have to be updated and extended.

The ISF prefers a broad, forward-looking definition of universal service. Now is the time to start the debate about the extension of universal service to include internet access and electronic mail, and to go beyond the limited, traditional definition based on speech telephony as the minimum service.

Some argue that universal service requirements lead to all consumers paying, indirectly, for new services they do not use. We believe this case has not been proven. At least some of the new network infrastructure involved is required by the convergence of internet, traditional telephony and cable.

The US has some important universal service requirements we lack in Europe: "life and link-up services"; reductions of phone and connection charges for qualified low-income consumers; and service support for eligible schools, libraries and rural health care. Life and link-up services extend basic universal service, including provisions for people with disabilities.

Local access

The liberalisation of telecommunication appears to be very successful in the EU. Prices for international calls, and sometimes for long-distance calls as well, have dropped considerably. The total number of telecom operators has increased and European operators are able to compete on the world market.

However, in many member states local tariffs and the price of subscriptions have risen. Some studies show that telecom expenses have increased for the average consumer. It is business and high-income users who benefit to the greatest extent from lower international tariffs. A primary reason for the proportion of people who are internet users in the US being double that in Europe is that US residents enjoy flat-rate unmetered local access. Cheaper internet access would encourage Europe to catch up with the US.

Access to digital television

The advent of digital broadcasting platforms - terrestrial, cable and satellite - raises several issues.

The first is choice. It is vital to ensure that viewers can find their way around electronic programme guides easily and make objective choices. We must guard against anti-competitive behaviour in how content is listed and accessed.

The second issue is access in the narrow sense: the need for affordable access to digital TV services. Many are concerned over the future of free-to-air broadcasting and of public service broadcasting in general.

We recommend that all concerned should be wary of confusing digital TV with pay-per-view TV in policy debates. Clearly there is a migration of content to pay-TV and premium channels, independent of the delivery technology.

EU Member states have the opportunity to "list" major events - mainly sporting and cultural - which must remain accessible to all. These national lists should not diverge too far: the European soccer championships, for example, should be listed Community-wide to help ensure a single market.

Thirdly, there is a need to ensure that all three digital platforms - terrestrial, cable and satellite - achieve full geographical coverage and maximise viewer choice. It is essential to achieve regional coverage and to offer programming that reflects cultural diversity, in ways suitable to each broadcasting technology. We see a need to clarify policy on the delivery of public service broadcasting through all digital platforms, to ensure that all viewers and listeners continue to have access to these important services.

Finally, the possibilities for interactivity in digital TV raise questions over the reliability of information and users' confidence.

The EU will, the ISF predicts, need actively to promote these concerns in the World Trade Organisation, ensuring that it and the member states retain the ability to act on them.

Trust and confidence of users

Research indicates that the prime concerns of present internet users are: privacy; the lack of safety of payments or other transactions; and infringements of information and communication freedom both by legal actors (governments and corporations) and illegal ones (criminals, racists, pornographers etc.)

These concerns can be addressed by legal protection, by industry self-regulation and by technological solutions. We believe these add to each other, and that none will work on its own.

Without effective self-regulatory practices, the legal protection of privacy, information and communication freedom, the safety of minors, commercial transactions, intellectual and material property rights and many other issues will not be effective. Effective self-regulation requires the involvement of organisations of producers, service providers, consumers, trade unionists, and citizens; and it requires simple and well-publicised accountability mechanisms.

Unless self-regulation takes place within a clear legal framework, however, it will either be ineffective or will benefit only the strongest parties. Technological solutions like encryption, rating and filtering systems, rights management systems and techniques of anonymity are powerful. They can be used for both good and ill, so they must be embedded in transparent regulatory practices, both legal and self-regulatory.

Privacy

Privacy and anonymity are human and citizens' rights. They are vital to citizens' and consumers' trust in the working of the information society.

People must have control over the use of their personal data. They must feel free to communicate without being subject to permanent surveillance. They must not be forced to communicate: the capability of being reachable at any place and time must be exercised at the individual's choice. The integrity of the body must be protected when new techniques of biometrics and DNA registration are used.

Anonymity in sending messages, browsing websites and purchasing goods or services should be possible on the internet as it is in the offline world of sending letters, looking at shop windows and buying with cash. The large-scale electronic surveillance practised by American state security agencies - in which at least one European state is deeply involved - should be subject to the same strict regulations for official criminal investigations as are applied offline.

The EU's Privacy Directive is a good example of the European Way, demonstrating that human and citizens' rights have primary importance in the Union. But some regard it as an uneasy compromise between basic rights and freedoms and economic necessities. On the other hand businesses complain, about it being unworkable and too expensive to administer. After a year, more than half the member states lack national privacy laws; some others have passed over-complicated laws.

The US is objecting to restrictions on the transfer of personal data to that country, which has no such comprehensive general privacy law. The ISF holds that the EU should stick to the principles of the Directive. It is a good elaboration of the 1980 privacy principles of the OECD and the Council of Europe. The EU needs to explain it better, particularly its implications for privacy intrusions on the internet.

Security

All technical and organisational means have to be mobilised to safeguard electronic communications and transactions. In adopting regulations for encryption, digital signatures and other privacy-and security-enhancing technologies, the EU has been straightforward in applying the insight that misuse has to be confronted by new safety and investigation measures, rather than by plain prohibition or restriction of encryption.

Police and security forces, however, say that they are running behind fast-evolving technical and criminal capabilities. They may need to consider innovative methods of investigation, perhaps switching their emphasis from cracking codes to traffic analysis under proper authorisation (for example scanning log files to identify criminal networks). ICT may increase their ability to launch investigations at the points where criminal actions emerge from the digital underworld and return to the analogue surface and thus reduce crime in the information society.

Information & communication freedom

In the spring of 1999 the European Council adopted a proposal to prepare a Declaration on fundamental constitutional rights of citizens of the EU for the year 2000. This is an excellent opportunity to formulate basic rights of information and communication freedom in relationship to the information society. The ISF will propose a Charter of Citizens and Consumer Rights in the Information Society, as a contribution to the wider debate on the 2000 declaration.

Both self-regulatory and technical solutions are two-edged swords, which can be used to defend information freedom - or to curb it. The government of Singapore, for instance, uses filtering systems to police and censor the internet. Few would argue with parents' right to protect children from illegal and harmful content at home and at school. But what of those prohibitive parents who regard information about worldviews which challenge their own - evolution or atheism, for example - as harmful? ICT thus raises very complex and interesting questions about the application of fundamental freedoms, which require much further debate. The ISF recommends that the EC urgently examines options for managing access to content within the appropriate legal and constitutional frameworks. These should include guidelines for the implementation of ethical standards and user complaints procedures.

Balanced intellectual property rights

The mainstream European Way in intellectual property clearly focuses on the rights and responsibilities of the individual authors and artists who produce both cultural works and the reportage on which democracy depends. Where Anglo-Saxon laws deal with "copyright" as a commodity, the European mainstream deals with (for example) droit d'auteur and Urheberrecht, which are akin to human rights. The ISF believes that this focus on human creators is central to the European Way for the information society and for culture in general, and must guide future regulation in this field.

The ease of digital copying, manipulation and transmission of works is enormous, and has been perceived as a threat to authors' rights and to businesses which deal in intellectual property. In responding to this challenge, we need to balance three interests:

• citizens' rights to unhindered access to a full range of cultural works and reporting, including free use where this does not prejudice the legitimate interests of rightsholders;
• authors' rights which provide the user with a personal guarantee of the integrity of the works, and give creators and producers the widest possible protection for the results of their entrepreneurial efforts;
• the interests of the disseminators and distributors of protected works in optimising their entrepreneurial activity, which implies strong measures against counterfeiting and piracy.

These three interests are in constant tension. If schools, for example, make free copies of works using ICT, neither educational authors nor the publishers make a living; if educational publishers are too powerful, both authors and education suffer; and if authors do not adapt the licensing of their works to the world of ICT, publishers and education are deprived of these.

Rights Management Systems will be the tolling agencies on the future Information Highway. The ISF proposes that regulation of these strives to maintain a fair balance between citizens', authors' and business needs. It must conform to European privacy law.

Democratic involvement

An enormous stock of politically relevant information is available to citizens who have access to the new media. Those who have the skills can freely select from this body of knowledge themselves, instead of being dependent solely on traditional preprogrammed mass media supply. Of course, journalists and other kinds of information brokers have benefited most from these opportunities.

Some claim that the interactivity of the internet will transform democracy. While there is an impressive range of electronic debate on the internet, we should be cautious about the extent to which these might be considered representative given deficiencies in the current level and quality of participation. For example, one major consideration in evaluating the quality of such participation is the integrity of the information upon which decision-making is based.

The ISF supports experiments and applications which extend the potential of electronic media to further citizens' democratic involvement in our political systems and the information society in general. However, it recognises that unless and until there is more widespread access and the demography of that access is better understood, these cannot be considered to be properly representative. In facing up to the challenge the electronic media pose to traditional political communication, the ISF would like to encourage initiatives designed to ensure the integrity, authenticity and accuracy of data on the internet, as well as to monitor opinion-testing techniques, and to expand access.

Consumer rights

As noted, trust and confidence are vital to the uptake of information society services. These depend upon consumers knowing the framework conditions of these offers and having confidence in the security and reliability of transactions. In order to break down uncertainty and enable people to make fully informed choices with confidence, any programme to promote acceptance must also comprise the creation of an ordering framework with known points of reference from the world of traditional shopping and ordering at a distance.

So consumer protection in the information society does not automatically mean new statutory measures. It means safeguarding and transferring existing consumer protection standards to the new technologies as a matter of high priority. The retention of regulations that have proved themselves should not be seen as a brake on growth, but rather as an expression of a corporate culture which takes the uncertainty of electronic consumption seriously and strives to ease it. Elements of a framework for this will be proposed by the ISF in a forthcoming Charter of Rights for Citizens and Consumers in the Information Society, as a contribution to the wider debate on these matters.