[WSIS CS-Plenary] FW: [wsis-finance] Re: Digital Solidarity Fund in risk of disappearing: action required

[Daniel Pimienta]

Dear Francis,

Apparently the subject of the 1% is extremely sensitive and polemical.

My intention was not to trigger a debate about the validity of the 1% 
principle but  rather inform of a situation of concern about the DSF 
where I supposed that the claim for an audit could be a consensual 
matter within civil society, independently of the diverging opinions 
on the 1% principle.

As for the 1%, with no intention to feed again this specific debate, 
I shall just note that:
1) The idea of the DSF was not for a "forced" tax but rather a 
consumer "voluntary" contribution when buying ICT equipments.
2) The telecommunication reform, in almost all Latin America 
countries, have set up a mechanism where a fixed percentage of the 
telecommunication consumer bill (says 2% in some countries) is used 
to feed some type of "universal access fund" which is supposed to 
be  used to finance social projects of telecommunication (in many 
case it goes beyond telecom and it serves for instance telecenters).

This mechanism has been functionning for many years with no legal 
problem and represents a huge amount of money derived from carriers 
to fund social projects. The situation is extremely different 
depending of the countries (some have stored the money without giving 
use, others have used for non planned purposes, and others do develop 
social projects) but this is not the subject here.

Daniel

PS: I totally agree with Mike Gurstein on the deep dififculty to fund 
(beyond the next few years) such networking projects. Our Latin 
America MISTICA project (http://funredes.org/mistica) is a perfect 
example of it (people, years after, still complain on the end of what 
was an extremely efficient mechanism and had to stop due to lack of 
support: the posthume web site keep receiving the same huge amount of 
visits 5 years after death!).