Gore to Call for Global Information Age : Telecommunications: At conference, vice president will urge funding to help developing nations bridge economic gap.

At a key gathering the Clinton Administration is comparing to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Vice President Al Gore will urge world leaders meeting in Argentina on Monday to develop a global information superhighway as a way to promote economic development.

At stake is the global agenda for telecommunications development for the next generation. At a time when the burgeoning telecommunications industry is expanding to serve consumers with groundbreaking new technologies such as high-definition television and wireless telecommunications, Gore and other top officials say they will call for a redeployment of international funding to close the technological gulf between industrialized and developing nations.

“There are more telephones in Tokyo than there are in all of Africa,” said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt, who is accompanying Gore. “Africa’s inability to grow economically is directly related to its lack of a telecommunications infrastructure.”

Gore, who will address officials from more than 100 nations at the World Telecommunications Development Conference of the International Telecommunications Union in Buenos Aires, would be the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to attend the quadrennial meeting of the ITU, which is the world’s oldest international body.

Gore’s appearance at the conference is viewed by many observers as lending new prestige and urgency to this movement that languished during the George Bush Administration, which did not favor redeploying international funding for building communications networks in developing countries.

For decades, major international lending groups such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have concentrated on helping nations finance crops, dams, roads and other basic needs. World Bank officials have said they are interested in funding more telecommunications development but must first develop the expertise to evaluate proposals.

The ITU, which sets international telecommunications policy--including use of the radio spectrum--has no direct control over spending by its members, but its recommendations are influential. What’s more, it could encourage members to reduce regulatory barriers in order to attract telecommunications investment.

Gore and Hundt argue that telecommunications development would promote political stability as well as help U.S. companies cash in on the more than $250 billion worth of telecommunications modernization that the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates will be undertaken in the next decade in China, the former Soviet Union and developing nations.

“The development of a global information highway is critical to furthering education and economic development” around the world, said Gregory Simon, Gore’s domestic policy adviser. An interactive global information superhighway is a “top priority,” he said.

In some ways, building an info highway in developing nations may be easier than in countries that already have communications networks. It is cheaper, for example, to install high-capacity fiber-optic cable than to replace ordinary copper wire, Hundt noted.

What’s more, wireless phone service is spreading in developing nations because of pent-up demand. In Poland, for example, more than 2.3 million people are waiting to get telephone service, up from 1 million in 1981, according to the Office of Technology Assessment.

“I think Gore’s appearance will be tremendously well-received by developing nations,” said Michael R. Gardner, a Washington lawyer who heads an industry- and government-funded program to train people from developing nations to provide communications services.

“It’s time to shift gears and stop paving highways to tourist towns in developing countries that have nobody there because there’s no fax machine to take reservations,” he said.

Still, Gardner said, an emphasis on telecommunications development may face some resistance from countries concerned about outside political and cultural interference.

France, for instance, has proposed barring foreign words from virtually all business and government communications. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has banned satellite dishes out of fear that foreign television programs may disturb the Saudi social order. And scores of countries have local-content rules that limit the amount of programming that radio stations and other broadcasting outlets may import from overseas.