UNESCO and INFOethics: Seeking global ethical values in the Information Society

•UNESCO puts information ethics on the agenda of international policy debates.•INFOethics conferences as space for open and critical debates on the Information Society.•Tensions between commercial and social values in the digital sphere.•Contradiction of perspectives caused by the paradoxical nature of the informational environment.•Opposition of different social imaginaries of the Information Society causes diplomatic crisis.

Between 1997 and 2000, UNESCO organized a conference series on the ethical and legal dimensions of the Information Society, called INFOethics. The article retraces the history of these meetings and UNESCO’s search for global ethical values in the new informational environment. It analyses the different and conflictual discourses within the organisation with regard to universal access to information in a digital environment, and draws on Robin Mansell’s reflections on social imaginaries of the Information Society to explain the divergent positions as results of the paradoxical nature of the Information Society itself. The article thereby contributes to understanding the origins of policy debates on the ethical dimension of the Information Society and the interests of involved policy actors.