177. It is in recognition of Tunisia’s efforts in the field of information and communication technology that it had been chosen by the United Nations General Assembly to host the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society from 16 to 18 November 2005. 178. This beginning of the 21st century is seeing the increasing need for information, of access to knowledge, to the new opportunities open to communication. It is, at once, the outcome of each person’s aspiration to broaden his competences, his capacities of intervention and a major requirement of economic and social development. This dual dimension of the need for information defined the focus of the deliberations of the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society, which took place on the 16, 17 and 18 November 2005 in Tunis and which culminated in two documents titled: the « Tunis Commitment » and the « Tunis Diary ». The challenge posed by the « Tunis Commitment » and the « Tunis Diary » being greater than their objective is to identify the mechanisms and means making possible the reduction of the digital divide and committing the international community to the quest for appropriate solutions in this regard. 179. The Tunis Summit is, in effect, the first intergovernmental meeting to have emphasized the evidence that the Internet is from henceforth a crucial infrastructure for the entire world. « We recognize that all the Governments need to play a role and hold equal responsibility in the international governance of the Internet as well as in the maintenance of the stability, security and continuity of this network », stipulates paragraph 64 of the « Tunis Diary for Information Society ». 180. The « Tunis Commitment », a document based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ultimately took a clear position on the freedom of expression by recognizing that it was « essential for the freedom of information and promotes development ». The Tunis Summit on Information Society ended with the commitment to reduce the digital gap between the North and the South. With regard to the merits, the UN undertook to connect all the villages to the Internet before the year 2015. Only one billion inhabitants of the planet currently have access to the Internet. 181. Undoubtedly, the « Tunis Commitment » and the « Tunis Diary » constitute real progress in the promotion of civil and political rights at the level of the African countries. In a world which is becoming more and more globalized, where communication has become a strategic raw material and where the economy of the nonmaterial is exploding, communication networks play a fundamental role. Considering the extraordinary potential that can be generated by the NTIC, in improving the economic, social and cultural well-being of the populations in an economy of digitalized knowledge, it is imperative that the entire world have access to these technologies on the pain of seeing the creation of « cyberghettos » whose existence would be not only ethically reprehensible but also an obstacle to the development of all peoples. All these considerations give the road map defined at the Tunis Summit its consistency to reduce the digital divide. 182. The Internet network, which can be a formidable tool of freedom and an inexhaustible vector of modernity and universality, can, with its media power, become a tool for the propagation of fascist and fundamentalist thinking and for 41