What are "National Information Policies"

It must be frankly admitted that "national information policy development and implementation " is not a particularly exciting subject to investigate. And yet as the World enters the Cyberspace era, and every nation state is trying to rise to the demands of the Information Superhighway and the demands of their own national and regional information infrastructures, and the linking of national to global infrastructures, the subject is increasingly critical. In the absence of careful attention to the subject, a stare of "policy chaos" can exist which leads to confusion, waste, abuse and misuse, not just of information resources, but resources of all kinds, both man-made and natural resources. In the aforementioned Handbook, UNESCO seizes the challenge of addressing the subject with apology. The core ideas are contained in Chapter 2 of the publication, which is excerpted here.