Internet hands pressure groups a powerful new weapon

Date: 03/02/2000

By Simon Coss

THE now famous battle for Seattle which served as a backdrop for December's failed attempt to launch a new round of global trade liberalisation talks was one of the best organised mass protests of recent years.

Many observers believe the organisers were able to coordinate the actions of so many different groups of people thanks to the vast new possibilities for low-cost mass communication offered by the Internet.

Through a network of websites, the various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in the anti free-trade demonstrations were able to keep in touch with each other and exchange details of meeting points, start times and routes to be followed.

The advent of the Internet also means that NGOs, traditionally the poor relations of the lobbying community, have suddenly found themselves able to compete with the slick big-budget information campaigns organised by their industry-backed counterparts.

"We have been advocating the use of the web in our campaigns for a long time now," explains Martin Baker of environmental group Greenpeace.

Greenpeace has managed to set up a highly successful network of Greenpeace.org websites even though the entire service is managed on a day-to-day basis by just two people - Baker and a colleague.

Despite the limited resources the organisation has available to put into its Internet activities, Greenpeace has used its websites to great effect as part of further campaigns on subjects as diverse as toxic waste, genetically modified food and whaling. This use of the net has gone a long way towards ensuring that journalists, photographers and television cameras are present when the organisation stages its many high-profile protests.

But while the press coverage given to Greenpeace's campaigns and the activities of the Seattle protesters was among the the more visible effects of NGOs using the web to get their message across, one of the greatest successes of the Internet as a lobbying tool started out as a rather low-key affair.

In 1998, talks aimed at drawing up a new series of trading rules for the 29 member countries which make up the Paris-based Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD) collapsed.

After many months of tortured negotiations, governments were eventually forced to give up their efforts to draft a Multilateral Agreement on Invest-ment (MAI) in the face of widespread condemnation and criticism from civil liberties organisations and citizens' rights groups around the world.

One of the key reasons for the failure of the talks was the fact that a leaked copy of the draft MAI text was posted on the Internet, allowing opponents to rally their arguments against the planned deal. The civil liberties lobby subsequently organised a world-wide coordinated protest against the MAI, which ultimately proved too popular for the politicians to ignore.

Experts at the OECD say that being on the receiving end of such an intense and well-coordinated Internet lobbying campaign made the organisation rethink its entire communications strategy.

"It has had an effect on the way we work," said OECD official Robert Ley, who worked closely on the MAI talks. "We have taken the experience of the protests on board and we are now making greater efforts to provide information on the web."