Reg saves World Summit with multi-million-pound commitment

The Register has put its money where its mouth and saved the World Summit from being branded a waste of everyone's time.

Yes, the United Nations has added our "commitment to provide the peoples of the world with excellent IT news coverage" to its official list of projects achieved under the WSIS process, called the Golden Book.

Far from being an open database, without any checks or balances - which would of course have made the whole thing a nonsense - we are delighted to announce that ITU fact-checkers have pored over our application and decided that The Register's pledge to "put forward significant resources to producing and promoting news on all IT subjects for the perusal and enjoyment on any Internet user in the UK or anywhere in the world" is worthy of entry into the database.

It is a great honour, especially since the head of ITU Yoshio Utsumi himself pointed to the Golden Book as the summation of everything that has been achieved at the Tunis World Summit. The Reg's pledge (no. 3483617) - listed as having been put forward by the UK government, even though we forgot to ask them - now joins the 200 or so other entirely reliable entries in the database and, we are pleased to say, is one of the largest monetary commitments there.

Reviewers of the Golden Book will no doubt be pleased to know under other information that "the site's great", and will be excited to realise that our partners in this enterprise will be "journalists, alcoholics and cuddly animals".

So that settles once and for all the question over what has actually been achieved by this entire summit process. With our commitment coming in between one million and ten million euros, it may just have tipped the balance between the money realised from what the summit purported to promote, and the amount actually spent on hosting it.

You can see the full commitment on the ITU's website here. Why not add your own and help the process along? ®

Related link

Register commitment no. 3483617