Izumi Aizu
Asia Network Research

Digital Cities are spreading all over the world, or at least where people can afford Internet access. As Internet can transcends physical constraints, space and time, in extremely inexpensive and super-fast ways, people are starting to wonder and appreciate new social dimensions which are free from traditional notions such as nation states and local value and thinking. Wait. Are we really going that direction?
I would like to present some fundamental questions:
How to establish truly global decision-making process in Internet and other Information and Communications Technology (ICT) policy and standardization fields? How do regional perspectives work in global context? Do Asians share some common value that works in digital world? How could we ensure the equitable participation of these policy issues from both developed and developing parts of the world? To what extent do national perspectives work? How to think and act globally? How to think globally and act locally, at the same time? How to link community networking activity in one locale with another, beyond national boundary? Where are the common grounds?
I will walk through these issues with such experiences as ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), G8 Digital Opportunity (DOT) Task Force, and Networking activities in Asia, with focus on both Japan and Korea.

Izumi Aizu has been promoting Internetworking in Japan, by giving strategic advise to Japanese telecommunications companies and other private companies in information and media industries. He joined GLOCOM (Center for Global Communications at the International University of Japan) as a planning manager in 1991 and IHNS (Hyper Network Society) as a research director in 1993. In 1997, Mr. Aizu established a Malaysian based research institute, Asia Network research, to study the social implications of Internet. (http://www.anr.org/)

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