Mr Chairman, Mr Representative of the Director-General of UNESCO, His Excellency, M. Pastorelli,

Allow me first of all to thank you for inviting me here to UNESCO’s Second International Conference on Info-Ethics – where the ethical, legal and societal challenges of cyberspace have been discussed by specialists, appropriately enough, from all around the world.

Before I move on to deliberate on some of these questions I really must mention the beautiful welcome we have all been given in this beautiful country – and I would like to thank our hosts not only for their great hospitality but equally for the productive friendliness and peace and quiet that this intimate society creates (daytime anyhow – I have not seen the night life). Conferences on vital issues, I feel, should be held whenever possible in small communities, where the world is somehow so much more concentrated and manageable. And it is certainly a thought-provoking idea to link major steps in the direction of progress with the places where they are taken, as we heard in the vote of thanks to our hosts the day before yesterday. In this way we could describe the pitch or direction of all notions of info-ethics after the second conference here as bearing "the Monte Carlo stamp." International agreements are often associated with the places they are signed, and we name schools of thought after the places that ferment them – so why not associate visionary dimensions, insights and angles with their physical origins too? Certainly, we all hope that Monte Carlo will be a springboard for progress on urgent issues relating to the ethics of information technology.

It has truly been inspiring to be here and listen to all the experiences and viewpoints that have been raised from so many different parts of the world, look at the information society and examine it from your individual angles. The information society is arguably the most remarkable advance made in dissemination of information since Gutenberg introduced printing. The great possibility opened up by printing was mass production of the written word. From that time on, language and literature ceased to be instinctive human responses to the passing age and could be preserved for ever – possibly nowhere more remarkably than in my country, where the early printed translation of the Bible into Icelandic established the ancient Viking tongue in a form which has withstood the onslaughts of the centuries even today. People marvel now that Iceland has preserved its ancient language, but not everyone realises that this is not just something quaint and charming, but actually the result of keeping up with the leading technological developments of the day, which is what printing really was. Progress is therefore compatible with preserving the past, and even contributes to it.

Printing also meant a step forward for democracy, by enabling the word to be spread about anything at all; it demanded literacy, and encouraged literacy as well. In today’s information society we talk about computer literacy, and a whole new wave of democratic advances follows in the wake of this modern skill. Everyone who has access to the Internet – not only the necessary computer literacy, of course, but also the money – has access to everything in the ever-expanding universe that we call cyberspace: the words and images that go to make up every nation and culture, past, present and future. The difference from printing is that this information is instantly available globally. And the fact that everyone has not only passive access to the Internet for reading but also active access for communicating and writing poses a definitely greater risk of misuse and "disinformation". The Internet demands responsibility as much as it offers freedom, just like the freedom of speech, in fact.

In the past few days you have been addressing themes of paramount importance, and please allow me to express my admiration and appreciation of your wisdom in these fields, since such wisdom is the basis for action. It takes courage to contemplate the state of affairs and describe it at international conferences, and possibly even more courage to have to wait for the truth of nature of the problem to dawn on others, who then finally will be prepared to do something about it. As a citizen of a small nation, which has concerns about its precious language, I was particularly moved to hear the priority given here to multilingualisme. In this context I cannot resist repeating the classic words of Iceland’s Nobel Prize winning author Halldór Laxness:

"When we stop caring for our independence and are swept into some superpower’s ocean of nationhood, when the last old woman who can recite an Icelandic verse is dead, then the world has become poorer. And the superpower who might have swallowed us would not be left any the richer for it."

Countless thoughts arise as to what can be done at this global meeting of UNESCO and how this great international institution can help the global village yet again. UNESCO enjoys worldwide respect and is an influential force towards doing positive things, never negative ones. Everywhere in the world people long to hear from somebody who has positive influence – and I am deliberately personifying UNESCO as "somebody" rather than "something". UNESCO is there to bring people information: teaching, learning, the very science of the world. Scarcely any other international institution has as positive a mission as UNESCO, with its aim to distribute knowledge in all fields, regardless of nationhood, since knowledge is the most welcome friend to all people wherever they are living on the globe. When this conference issues its statement, it will do so in the faith that it will reach a wide audience and that people will find the various principles that UNESCO sets itself to be thought-provoking – principles which of course have only developed in the first place to point out blatant injustice or matters to improve in so many areas.

It is perfectly clear that UNESCO is always guided by the principle of human rights. But what is the best way for UNESCO to serve as a role model in all the countries, which belong to it? One point of entry could possibly be through discourse etches or consensus ethics. Discourse ethics reach conclusions on correct ethical action through open intellectual discussion in which everyone discusses an issue from the same starting-point. What everyone involved in that discussion can agree upon is deemed to be a point to build from. Imagine that UNESCO could launch such a process, thereby opening dialogue on the various principles produced by this conference on the topic of info-ethics. UNESCO is widely seen as a magical combination of very good people who live in a different part of the world and are working for "le meilleur des mondes." The list of its visions is impressive. A single example might be the Participation Principle, that "Every citizen (in the world) should have the right to meaningful participation in the Information Society." The information society is here put on an equal footing with society as it is more commonly defined, and the right to information is recognised not just as a social goal, but also as something in which everyone can participate, irrespective of gender, ethnic background or financial standing. The information society, according to this principle, has become an integral part of society as we know it today, with all the rights and obligations that this entails.

UNESCO is, in a sense, at a crossroads now. Not only because of this conference – there will be more, and a very important one, on The Sciences next summer – but more because the tide has turned in our favour now that the world, or the western world at least, is entering a new millennium. At such milestones we look back on what we have achieved, and forward as well: to make a new start. And we can never start without vision, the promise that we will explore new ways of thinking and prepare the future for the good people who will be running the world then, just as we are trying to make things more comfortable for people in the world and in cyberspace today. We really do have a new vision of innovations and access to them, based on the premise that information technology is by its very nature a human right, ought to be regarded as an obvious human right, and ranks alongside the concept of human liberty itself.

UNESCO is an organisation for people in 186 countries, in effect a public domain in its own right. This caring body which wants to preserve cultural heritage and languages does not, however, everywhere have a prominent profile, although people who do know about it know nothing but good about it. Perhaps UNESCO is to some extent on the defensive for the fact that learning and culture cost money. And this is precisely the contradiction underlying all UNESCO’s work, as in so many other international programmes: it conflicts with financial interests, and as a rule those who seek profit win priority too.

But who guides these priorities when there is no global governance and everything depends on international agreements? As with human rights questions, all we can rely on at international level is giving guidance, stating principles, appealing to reason and reasonable values – and taking action to promote them.

I would like to take up one of the issues that have been discussed here and consider how it might be channelled in a more positive direction as part of UNESCO’s vision for the new age. The cause I have chosen is likely to have widespread appeal and is certainly linked to global interests.

Copyright and licensing is mainly used by the private sector in cyberspace, which treats as private property the information channels that are actually the business of everyone on Earth, and uses them to make money. And money is not just the end product but also the starting-point, which means that the large proportion of mankind living in poverty has no means of coming into contact with information technology. These are indeed the very people whose lives could change infinitely for the better if they had certain basic skills and information. The same applies, in fact, to women in their quest to establish equal opportunities. The general access to cyberspace information needs to be rethought from the very start and information transferred more into the public domain, so that all people, and not only those who can afford it or have professional or social access to it, can acquire for themselves the greatest of all human survival tools, namely knowledge which can now be spread as never before through the marvel of information technology. Among other things this involves presenting society, and not just male-dominated society, to women, making the world heritage available to the world; and so much else that concerns and could benefit the whole global community.

We badly need global governance that is not driven by interest, but addresses other values than economic ones, which after all are defended by the World Trade Organisation and OECD. The problem with globalization is that its common denominator is the economic and the financial, while the culture and values that make our lives rich in a different sense tend to be ignored. A redefinition of our priorities has long become overdue. We have no global democracy. Separate nations have representation for the people, but nations do not combine to represent their combined people. National democracy offers no guarantee for the global good.

How can we prepare our world for the future? We can point out the lack of coherence resulting from the lack of governance. We can also inject human dignity into cyberspace. As it is now, nobody is supposed to take responsibility. My vision for UNESCO is to urge member states to deal with transnational and metanational cyberspace issues. Incidentally, the global nature of cyberspace could make this a testing-ground for the first true global programme driven by ethics and values. From there it would be much easier to launch other global programmes to redress such pressing issues as human rights violations, poverty, gender inequality and ethnic discrimination.

Individual states have monopoly commissions, anti-trust laws and other safeguards against the powerful seizing absolute power, but cyberspace is ruled by the law of the jungle. The problem of access, ownership and copyright is particularly tricky. We have to prepare our children for information, but the software for acquiring this information is a) costly and b) not open. Freeware, on the other hand, is free and open.

LINUX (intellectuals’ contribution to public good) has proved that it is possible to approach information technology creatively with a new set of values, earn respect for it, and what is more, survive. If all UNESCO countries adopted freeware, UNESCO could create a very good public domain fully competitive with any rival. Software could develop within the "copy-left" (as we have started to call it these days) by the public domain.

The fact is that if we do not have a public domain we risk having a private monopoly. While commercial competition creates winners, in the unlegislated global cyberspace they can win against the public at large as well as their rivals. It is not the concept of copyright as such which is at fault, but rather the application of copyright and licensing for the sole purpose, it would appear, of gaining control and money and maintaining that rule by intimidation. Information is by nature in the public domain, but the thought that a giant corporation allegedly designs its software specifically to exclude existing designers, in order to establish sole control over the way that this information is distributed, is horrendous. There has been so much talk about standards for the Internet – first technical standards, which is what all the monopoly and unfair business practice allegations ultimately hinge on – and later moral standards for the transmission of material, similar to film censor board ratings. But what a body like UNESCO could perhaps do is to campaign for a different type of standard, based on a minimum standard of universal access to information, which would create a genuine free flow and prevent the right to know things from becoming a monopoly product that is only sold to those of us who pay enough for it.

The reality of the matter is that the public sector is always rather late off the mark, so the common good is delivered late as well. "It is the tragedy of the common good that nobody is responsible for the good." The main mechanism for material and technical progress is through the free market, because it encourages new things. But if enough of us work together we can do as well as companies in the private sector by granting scientists the facilities to create freeware and give the public (in the full sense of the word) new access to the great heritage of all people on Earth, and all the knowledge that could serve to improve the world. In economic terms the public domain is very efficient, since it does not squander resources trying to kill of imagined enemies. Just think how many disadvantaged people could have been learning on the Internet today, if the biggest corporation in the world had spent on them the money it has put into trying to achieve absolute domination.

Pipe dreams? Perhaps this vision appears utopian, but we should not forget where the Internet originated – as a free-form system of links to exchange information between universities. The market mania about it is only a couple of years old. And the utopian idea of a free information system? Well, is there any essential difference between that and state education or public libraries? Quite simply wee need to consider the possibility for setting up an information welfare state, or incorporating information into the welfare state philosophy.

Thomas Jefferson created The Public Library, which has brought invaluable benefits and pleasure to nations all over the world, in work, study and leisure. Our aim should be to create the most open public library ever, embracing the whole world through cyberspace. This is my vision for UNESCO for the coming millennium.

Mr. Chairman,

In the old Norse mythology which is preserved in Icelandic poems and stories we have a magical figure, the god Óðinn (Wodan), who had only one eye, having given the other away as the price for acquiring wisdom. He was the father of the Universe, and not only wise but clever too, even cunning. On his shoulders sat two ravens – Thought and Memory – which were birds of battle but also symbolic of the quest for wisdom. From his throne on the top of the world Óðinn had what we would call today a "global view." He sent his ravens around the world every day and when they came back to him they whispered to him tidings from all around: in this way he had constant knowledge, conveyed by vision and by the word, of everything that was happening at any time. Óðinn and his ravens were moving in cyberspace a millennium before our era. His wise advice was much treasured ... and it was free for everyone who wanted to learn.

INFOethics’98, Monaco, 3 Oct. 1998