The first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva in December 2003 made a commitment to ‘build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society, where everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge’. For making this a reality, a transparent and non-discriminatory ICT policy is necessary.

During the last 20 years, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have provided a wealth of new technological opportunities, with the rapid deployment of both the Internet and cellular telephony leading the way. These technologies have invaded every country that is willing to accept them. The most important differentiating factor now is policy. Policy makes the fundamental difference regarding how countries are able to take advantage of the technological opportunities available to them and exploit them for good. Countries that have progressive policies are seeing these technologies spread quickly. Conversely, countries that have not been able to formulate an integrated ICT policy yet have been plagued by slow growth of technology and the consequent lessening of support for economic and social development.

ICTs are now also an important enabling tools to support the process of development. The full potential of ICT can be realised, and it can be used to maximise the social, economic and environmental benefits of the society only if the ICT policies are effective. The policies should contain a particular approach as to how ICT for development will be achieved and ensure the collaboration of stakeholders in government, the private sector, civil society and international organisations. ICT policies and regulations are also needed to foster an environment, conducive to build an ICT infrastructure as well as leveraging ICTs for knowledge creation and dissemination.

Actors in ICT policy

Government
The government plays the most important role in the formulation of ICT policy, and thus, it only decides how countries are able to take advantage of the technical opportunities available to them and exploit them for good. In the Republic of Korea, for example, the government took the lead in promoting development of the Internet. In Egypt, the dynamic Ministry of Communications and Information Technology played a strong role in catalysing telecommunications development in the country.

Most of the high income countries have one integrated ICT master plan, where telecommunications and IT policies form part of one development plan. The old sectoral framework for policy-making based on broadcasting, telecommunications and information technology has now been shifted to a new layered framework where all the tools of ICT work cohesively, focusing on social and economic development. A central body may be needed to coordinate and oversee all policy issues driving competitiveness centrally to ensure policy coherence across different policy domains and to make sure that efforts in some fields are not held up by bottlenecks in other areas.

For this reason, several countries have established high-level task forces entrusted with monitoring and overseeing the implementation of integrated policies for ICTs, such as the ICT taskforce in Australia and the National Information Technology Council in Malaysia. These task forces are often build on principles of public-private partnership and collaboration between government and the private sector, to ensure that policy making can respond quickly to firms’ needs and concerns.

Private sectors
Although policies are formally put in place by governments, different stakeholders and in particular, the private sector make inputs into the policy process and affect its outcomes. In the context of globalised markets, large and rich corporations are often more powerful than developing countries’ governments, allowing them to shape the policy-making process. When Mexico was considering adopting free software in its education system, Microsoft offered fund and free licences to the government, which eventually dropped GNU/Linux and embraced Windows completely.