Diverging information societies of the Asia Pacific

The Asia Pacific is home to the best connected as well as the most isolated economies in the world. The wide range of diversity offered by the region makes it an interesting testbed of alternative strategies for nurturing information societies. As the largest Internet user group in the world, the region needs to adopt a more active stance in the governance of cyberspace over which it has little say at present. The Asia Pacific also needs to mobilise member economies to address a number of urgent problems that will benefit all Asians in the long term; these include some of the sharpest digital divides in the world, absence of appropriate ICTs for rural communities to get online, lack of a truly internationalised DNS which enables all users to navigate the Web in their own scripts and languages, and freedom for true information societies to flourish.