Opinion: The Digital Solidarity Fund and The Economist

By Association for Progressive Communications (The Economist)
New York, March 2005

On March 10, 2005, The Economist featured reports and an editorial on the digital divide in which it derided the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF), which had been welcomed by governments at the WSIS Prepcom 2 in Geneva in February and was due to be launched on 14 March 2005. In its editorial on “the real digital divide”, The Economist made the following claims about the Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF):

• That on March 14th the United Nations will launch a Digital Solidarity Fund.
• That waving a magic wand to cause a computer to appear in every household on earth is just the sort of thing for which the UN’s new fund is intended.
• Technology firms operating in poor countries will be encouraged to donate 1% of their profits to the fund.

None of these claims is true.