The world is now integrating economically into a single world-wide market. This essential aspect of the present globalization process is strongly encouraged by the availability of ICT and its ability to eliminate distance.

The opposite of sustainability is extinction. Any consideration of the information society must take this into account. Environmental issues often have to do with costs and competitiveness.

World market conditions strongly influence environmental matters and many other aspects of life for members of the information society. By far the strongest existing frameworks for the global market are the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the rules of the world financial markets, and other organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Many of the possibilities it opens for an improved life for all are connected with the positive features of globalization. Most of the challenges it poses demand global solutions, and these require a new international framework that deals fully with the economic, social, cultural and environmental needs and concerns of the members of the global information society.
Physical access is necessary but not sufficient for full participation. To avoid the risk of public mistrust in new services, a firm civil rights approach is necessary to guarantee both consumer confidence and fundamental matters such as privacy. This is central to the European conception of the rights of the individual.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a central - perhaps predominant - role to play in eventually reaching sustainability and improvements in the quality of life. The Forum takes the position that whether we can reach a sustainable state will be decided in the course of shaping the future information society.

On the one hand, these technologies are major drivers of economic globalization. Because of this they are now indirectly causing additional social and environmental burdens world-wide.
This is typical of so-called rebound effects of technological progress. A particular technology may enable a particular good or service to be produced with the consumption of fewer material resources; but if it stimulates demand, including demand for other technologies, it may increase total resource use. Large numbers of people traveling to meetings that discuss the information society could be taken as an ironic example.

On the other hand, these technologies offer, in principle, huge opportunities for overcoming social exclusion, for supporting cultural diversity, for stimulating the economy and for reducing environmental burdens by increasing material productivity. While this so-called dematerialization is a typical, promising feature of most technological progress, ICT has by far the highest potential in this regard. On top of that, ICT is the technological basis for an open worldwide information and knowledge society, and it is in this context that our mental images for the future will be shaped.

Whether information and communication technologies will lead to more sustainability, or not, essentially depends on the further development of the global economic and societal frameworks within which they are deployed, and on corresponding attitudes and values. Why do we need new frameworks - is something lacking in global governance? Building such frameworks is the single most important challenge to politics and societies entering the 21st century. Such frameworks require more than ideas: development along sustainable and equitable lines needs transfers of resources. We need global instruments that commit the industrialized states to support and co-finance social and ecological developments and improve standards, in countries in transition and in developing countries. In the long run, the result is likely to be something like a global civil society and a global citizenship.