Report by the Director-General on the consultation process and the revised draft recommendations on the promotion and use of multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace: General Conference 32nd session, Paris 2003

The draft recommendation propose concrete principles and measures to promote multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace in order to foster an equitable and multicultural information society.

Recommendations are presented under the following broad topics:

• development of multilingual content and systems
• facilitating access to networks and services
• development of public domain content
• reaffirming the equitable balance between the interests of rights-holders and the public interest

These include:

• the public and private sectors and the civil society at local, national, regional and international levels should encourage the creation and processing of, and access to, educational, cultural and scientific content in digital form, so as to ensure that all cultures can express themselves and have access to cyberspace in all languages, including indigenous ones
• Member States and international organisations should encourage and support capacity building for the production of local and indigenous content on the Internet
• Member States and international organisations should promote access to the Internet as a service of public interest through the adoption of appropriate policies in order to enhance the process of empowering citizenship and civil society, and by encouraging proper implementation of, and support to, such policies in developing countries, with due consideration of the needs of rural communities
• Member States should encourage Internet service providers (ISPs) to consider provision of concessionary rates for Internet access in public service institutions, such as schools, academic institutions, museums, archives and public libraries, as a transitional measure towards universal access to cyberspace
• Member States and international organisations should encourage open access solutions including the formulation of technical and methodological standards for information exchange
• inter-agency cooperation within the United Nations system should be reinforced with a view to building up a universally accessible body of knowledge, particularly for the benefit of developing countries and disadvantaged communities, from the massive amount of information produced through development projects and programmes
• Member States should undertake, in close cooperation with all interested parties, the updating of national copyright legislation and its adaptation to cyberspace, taking full account of the fair balance between the interests of authors, copyright and related rights-holders, and of the public embodied in international copyright and related rights conventions