The 2008 thematic focus for Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) is “access to infrastructure”. The Geneva Plan of Action that emerged from the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) declared information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure an “essential foundation for the Information Society” and identified it as one of six main action lines. 38 country reports are published here analysing the status of access in countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, Switzerland and Kazakhstan. Besides thematic reports dealing with key issuesaffecting access, such as net neutrality, open standards, spectrum management, trends in technology and access to content, GISWatch includes regionaloverviews for North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the countries of the former Soviet Union, South-East Asia, and the Pacific.
