<incom> Framing a Global Information Society Discourse

[Soenke Zehle]

EPW Commentary
March 11, 2006

<http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=03&filename=9822&filetype=html>
(free registration required)

Framing a Global Information Society Discourse

The outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society held in 
Tunis in November 2005 were widely seen as "fuzzy". But the WSIS was 
never mandated with a clearly defined global "problem". The summit was 
held at a time when US-led interests were active in undermining several 
democratic forums of global governance, even as global capital appeared 
increasingly intolerant towards public policy regimes. Thus there was a 
consistent attempt to keep several substantive issues out of the summit 
discussions. Moreover, the private sector, as a supposed leader of the 
information society, was pushed in very questionable ways into various 
governance arrangements.

Parminder Jeet Singh, Anita Gurumurthy

In attempting to evaluate the World Summit on the Information Society 
(WSIS), two of its characteristics need especially to be kept in mind. 
One is the fact that WSIS, unlike earlier world summits, was not 
mandated with a more or less clear-cut global “problem”. It emerged out 
of the excitement generated by some paradigmatic breakthroughs in 
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the turn of the 
millennium. These breakthroughs were manifestly far-reaching, and to 
many they seemed to herald a “new model of social organisation” or a new 
kind of society. History testifies to such links between disruptive 
technologies and basic societal changes. Such a broad context to the 
WSIS meant that its mandate was never very clear nor well-formed. People 
came to WSIS with completely different ideas. The fuzziness of WSIS 
outcomes must be seen in this light.

The second important characteristic of WSIS is the global governance 
context in which it was located. The unilateralism of the US has become 
increasingly more menacing, and neo-liberal ideology is strengthening 
its clasp over the global policy and governance spaces. The ICT 
phenomenon has largely been private sector driven and such has been the 
domination of the private sector in this arena that it is often 
considered the primary expert on strategy and policy even when the use 
of ICTs has concerned social and developmental purposes. ICT 
multinationals have been becoming politically more powerful than ever 
before, further sidelining the state and other legitimate political 
entities from the discourse on shaping an emerging “information society”.

In light of the above analysis, it is meaningful to discuss the outcomes 
of WSIS in terms of (i) what was achieved in substance and (ii) what are 
the implications of WSIS for global governance.

What WSIS Was About

The ICT and the “information society” (IS) phenomenon were born in the 
North. And their concepts and theories largely represent the dominant 
socio-economic paradigm of today’s world. At one level, new ICTs were 
conceived as bringing forth a new Global Information Infrastructure (a 
term used by the US) and at another, they were considered as 
underpinning a new economic system called the “knowledge economy”. The 
term “information society” was popularised by the EU, but its vision 
remained largely economic, and within existing paradigms.

The North-driven IS discourse has not really been willing to address the 
structural and institutional shifts implied in the far-reaching impact 
of the new ICTs on our social and political processes, even while 
vaguely acknowledging them, in the conception of a new type of society. 
This is quite understandable as the attitude of the “incumbent”. 
However, these new paradigms are more meaningful for the South, vast 
sections of the population of which are ill-served by the dominant 
socio-economic paradigm. Unfortunately, the leaders of the countries of 
the South have mostly not shown the vision to grasp the new 
opportunities and have not begun to engage with the information society 
discourse on the terms determined by the interests of the South. Under 
these circumstances, the relevance of ICTs to development is also an 
arena whose theory has largely come from the North, predominantly in the 
form of a co-option into the dominant discourse on ICTs and the IS. Many 
initiatives – like the DOT force initiative of G-8 countries, the 
Digital Opportunity Initiative, and UN’s ICT Task Force – and their 
reports, build a largely neo-liberal framework of ICT for development 
(ICTD), which remains the default IS discourse in its developmental context.

Against this background, WSIS may be seen as having made considerable 
progress in terms of a broader and certainly more legitimate conception 
of a global information society. The WSIS outcome documents have a much 
greater socio-political vision and make greater reference to some 
paradigmatic and structural aspects of the impact of the new ICTs than 
the above referred documents on ICTD that seek to articulate a 
“pragmatic” and efficiency-based discourse, that is essentially neo-liberal.

WSIS has legitimised and given broad directions to the information 
society discourse – the real fruits of which, it must be admitted, lie 
only in the future. It was too much to expect a UN Summit, especially in 
the present conditions of global governance, to make paradigmatic 
visionary shifts to global policy, which any meaningful engagement with 
IS issues really calls for. The outcome documents do contain many “pegs” 
which can be used to shape an IS discourse in the required directions. 
The institutional basis provided by WSIS and its follow-up (however weak 
and poorly defined) provide the context and the space for a collective 
engagement with IS changes to guide them in directions of greater equity 
and social justice.

The arena of real struggles seeking to define the significance of the 
emerging IS in terms of greater equity and social justice, or in a more 
general way, in terms of a people-centric and development-oriented IS,1 
  mostly lies outside the confines of WSIS. Already many contestations 
have been happening around us – in the open source and free software 
movement, in open content paradigms like Creative Commons and Wikipedia, 
in a growing alternative or citizen’s media, in “illegal” VoIP and in 
free public wireless connectivity models. An example closer home, in 
India, would be in the potential of the internet in “operationalising” 
the right to information legislation and enforcing transparency in many 
governmental processes. Of course, we have also been witness to the 
negative aspects of new ICTs as well, from the use of online spaces for 
sexual abuse to the role of ICTs in strengthening the stranglehold of 
global capital. While digital technologies promise greater 
democratisation of information and communication, the use of these new 
technologies to increase the state’s interference in and control over 
the private lives of citizens is an issue that has greatly concerned 
civil society.

An ongoing information society discourse which sees these struggles in a 
broader and shared context can certainly help them along in a positive 
manner – both through their legitimisation – even if with contestations 
– and through sharing information and strategies across different spaces 
– both topical and geographic. The “either-or” attitude to these 
struggles and policy engagements at global and other levels must 
therefore be avoided, and complementarities between the two processes 
recognised and strengthened. WSIS may need to be judged more from the 
processes that it has set into motion than what it has achieved 
substantively.

Global Policy on ‘Digital Divide’

In addition to establishing the role of WSIS in formalising and 
legitimising a global policy discourse on the information society, it is 
necessary to also assess it on more specific outcomes. In journalistic 
shorthand, WSIS has come to be associated with two basic issues: 
bridging the digital divide, and internet governance (IG).

The digital divide issue in its broadest scope includes a whole swathe 
of issues implicated in the gap between those who seem to be benefiting 
from the emerging information society and those left behind. Many of 
these issues – from the different approaches to software production, to 
telecom access models for free or affordable connectivity, open access 
to information, capacity-building, international telecommunication 
costs, R & D for affordable hardware, technology transfer on 
preferential terms, and the role of the state and public policy in the 
information society, to community-based ICT initiatives – were discussed 
at WSIS, and they find mention in one form or the other in the outcome 
documents.

In its narrow conception, the issue of “bridging the digital divide” was 
seen in terms of financing the ICT infrastructure and other basic 
concomitant requirements for an inclusive information society in the 
South. Some least developed countries, especially from Africa, expected 
countries of the North to commit specific financial assistance for 
laying ICT infrastructure in their countries. This did not happen. 
Governments of the North are mostly wary of making funding commitments 
at UN summits, and, even if they agree on the basic proposition for 
specific funding, they prefer unilateral commitments or work through 
exclusive clubs like the G-8. However, WSIS failed even to establish the 
context and the rationale for considering ICTD financing at a level 
different from regular development financing. This was a huge failure of 
the WSIS.

As an information and communication infrastructure that represents an 
entirely new basis for organising a whole range of social and economic 
processes, new ICTs have to be seen as an essential public 
infrastructure. ICT financing therefore must follow a different logic 
than most economic goods and services. The fact however is that the same 
infrastructure that is seen by some as a potentially “equalising field” 
for faster development with greater equity and social justice among 
countries and among sections of the society, is also seen by others as 
the economic infrastructure around which a new set of comparative 
advantages have to be concretised for protecting their economic, social 
and political dominance. The question of whether “basic connectivity” 
and basic ICT capacities constitute a normal economic service, that 
should be subject to market forces, or whether they qualify strongly to 
be considered public goods best produced by public funds and provisioned 
in a non-rivalrous and non-excludable manner has not been discussed, 
much less sorted out, at WSIS.

This should, however, not come as a surprise since this basic issue is 
still strongly contested in ICT policy spaces in countries of both South 
and North. Two examples of such contestation are provided here, one each 
from the South and North. In India, the broadband project of the state 
of Andhra Pradesh to connect all villages on a regulated per-connection 
price of $ 2.3 per month recently ran into problems with telecom 
regulators. (The issue has since been sorted out.) Similar problems 
occurred earlier with some other developmental projects in India 
innovating affordable or free connectivity solutions. In the US, many 
state governments have threatened to bring in legislation to prevent 
municipalities from providing public connectivity systems. (More than 
300 municipalities in the US have such public connectivity provision.)

As with connectivity, other “information society” issues like software 
models, bottom-up media alternatives and easier access to content are 
going through similar basic and far-reaching contestations and 
transformations. It is unfortunate that the dominant interests – 
governments and multinationals of the North – apart from not discussing 
the “public goods” paradigm for basic IS infrastructural requirements, 
were able to keep the important issue of IPR and freer access to 
knowledge out of the WSIS.

All these issues need to be articulated and advocated at both global and 
local levels, and the momentum generated by the WSIS on these or related 
issues needs to be carried forward by interested actors. This brings 
forth the twin needs for optimising the WSIS follow-up process, 
especially from a Southern point of view, the role of civil society, and 
the need for strengthening South-South collaborations, for further 
developing pro-people and pro-development IS paradigms and relating 
these to real policy options.

For the last 10 years, the US and the EU have been conducting formal 
annual dialogues on IS issues; it is geopolitically important that the 
countries of the South, and civil society, also engage continuously to 
discuss and, if possible, develop common positions on IS issues.

IS and Global Governance

WSIS took place at a time when US-led interests have been very active in 
undermining UN organisations and other relatively democratic forums of 
global governance. The growing intolerance of global capital for public 
policy regimes has been both a strong motivator as well as an ally in 
this process. These dominant forces conspired in many ways at WSIS to 
undermine the political legitimacy of global governance structures. At 
one level, there was a consistent attempt to keep as many substantial 
issues out from the discussions as possible – using varied excuses, from 
claims that some of these issues were “legitimately” in the purview of 
other multilateral forums (IPR with WIPO and telecommunication 
agreements with WTO) to assertions that the summit lacked the political 
authority to “direct” the UN system and its entities towards one 
direction or the other and that these entities should be left to “act as 
they deem fit”. At another level, the role of private sector – as a 
supposed leader of information society – was pushed in very questionable 
ways into various governance arrangements.

It was because of the attitude of US-led governments of the North that a 
summit that had one of the widest mandates came out with very weak 
outcomes. And, except in the area of IG, it has left very weak follow-up 
mechanisms. Under much pressure from developing countries, US-led 
countries of the North budged only so much as to look into the 
possibility of changing the mandate of the ECOSOC Commission on Science 
and Technology for Development to include follow-up on “information 
society” issues. It is significant to note that in the MDG + 5 Summit as 
well, “information society” is dealt with under the section on science 
and technology. It is ironical that all the conceptual progress made in 
the last decade from seeing ICTs as merely another set of technologies 
to understanding their society-wide impact as a complex and far-reaching 
socio-economic phenomenon has been nullified through such exercises. It 
is not that countries of the North do not understand the significance of 
IS changes; they certainly do. For example, the EU has a very ambitious 
IS programme, and an IS commission, or a similar body, is one of the 
institutional arrangements that is recommended to the countries aspiring 
to join the EU. However, the countries of the North are not enthusiastic 
about relatively democratic and representative global governance 
structures like the UN having a strong role in “governing” the emerging 
information society. They prefer more exclusive arrangements – 
privileged membership groups like the G-8 or other systems that 
represent dominant geo-political interests like some private sector-led 
arrangements. The existing regime of IG is one such system. WSIS could 
not change the present regime though some significant processes of 
possible changes have been set in motion. This became possible because 
on this one issue – where some unilateral exercise of power by the US, 
for example, its control over the DNS root zone file,2  was unacceptable 
even to the normally amenable European nations – the EU broke ranks with 
the US in the last stages of the negotiation.

Though the present IG regime remains unchanged as of now, the tough 
negotiations that ensued after the EU breakaway have ensured that some 
processes have been put in motion by the summit to examine various 
aspects related to internationalisation of political oversight over the 
present technical and logical management functions of IG. Another 
significant gain is the setting up of a multi-stakeholder Internet 
Governance Forum (IGF) that will debate and present recommendations on 
various public policy issues related to IG. Governments, civil society 
and the private sector will participate on an equal footing in this 
forum, or so it appears from the reading of the summit outcome 
documents, and the precedent in a similar body, Working Group on 
Internet Governance, which had contributed to the WSIS process. IGF will 
be a significant new age institution – an organisation that is a true 
multi-stakeholder partnership dealing with some very significant and 
substantive global governance issues.

WSIS and Multi-stakeholderism

The concept of multi-stakeholderism in the WSIS remained controversial. 
While WSIS saw a greater official role for civil society and the private 
sector than any other global governance forum ever before, two 
significant aspects of this issue are worth taking note of. One, that 
often the presence of civil society seemed to provide a cover for a 
greater private sector role in the WSIS, and in the IS discourse 
generally. Two, the accent on multi-stakeholderism was at times used to 
further undermine legitimate global governance bodies like those of the 
UN, and thus played to the designs of the US-led governments of the 
North. In fact, civil society from the South was also often more 
interested in “showcasing” ICT for development initiatives at the summit 
rather than in contesting important issues taken up by the summit. A new 
class of “ICT for development” NGOs seem to be so taken up with “looking 
for real solutions in cooperation with all actors” that this 
multi-stakeholderism often comes at the expense of engaging with 
purposeful advocacy for more structural changes. The need for such 
engagements, as discussed above, may be more rather than less relevant 
in case of an emerging IS.

However, the gains for civil society in terms of multi-stakeholder 
platforms for global governance are real and significant, even if WSIS 
was perhaps the most apolitical summit ever – generally, as also in 
terms of civil society’s role. One of the problems, as stated earlier, 
was that civil society that converged at WSIS came from too diverse a 
background. For some, human rights was the basic issue at stake, and for 
others WSIS was more about media and communication. Still others were 
looking at vast socio-economic opportunities for developing countries. 
For many, governments were the prime enemy; for others, like those 
concerned with development potential of ICTs, they were a necessary 
partner. Altogether, the range of backgrounds, interests and opinions 
were too wide for the civil society to present a strong political front 
at WSIS. Probably, it was due to the fragmented and depoliticised nature 
of the WSIS that progress could be made on the issue of 
multi-stakeholderism in global governance. What is significant is that 
since this procedural gain in global governance has been made, the WSIS 
precedent will always be useful to push for a greater role for civil 
society in the more politically contested global governance spaces like 
WTO, WIPO and disarmament negotiations, and issues like cultural 
diversity, environment and media. It is also necessary for all actors – 
and civil society needs to take a lead in this – to develop connections 
between these arenas of global policy and those that are more directly 
dealt with as IS issues. IS issues are by their very definition 
society-wide issues, and thus cut across other arenas. In fact the IS 
discourse provides the opportunity for advocating and leading meaningful 
positive changes in many areas of global policy and governance.

Email: parminder at itforchange.net
anita at itforchange.net

Notes

1 These terms are used by the Declaration of Principles of the Geneva 
phase of WSIS as an articulation of the vision of the “information society”.

2 The master file of Domain Name System (DNS) which directs the logical 
flow of data on the internet.