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142 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
mainly focused around the political and administrative nature – and future
– of ICANN. Some scholars seem to agree that ICANN represents
a first democratic experiment in global electronic governance, an institutional
realm outside the framework of national legitimacy bound with
the nation-state that demands a global democratic ‘plan of governance’.
Its foundational origins as a not-for-profit private (and therefore not
state) organization with more open participatory structures is considered
a cause célèbre for some scholars (Kleinwächter 2004a; Klein and Mueller
2005). Nevertheless attempts to broaden the base of decision-making,
such as the ICANN-at-large, has not resulted in any significant progress,
as we shall see in the following chapter. The ICANN experiment attracts
the favourable attention of industry, some governments and scholars –
probably for different reasons – but it also attracts criticisms by many,
largely because of its elitist organization, its close affiliation with the USA
government and industry in particular and its lack of accountability. 11 Deriving
from the WSIS process, proposed changes to the governance of
the internet echo those offered by the dominant WSIS discourse based
on the allegory of ‘competition’: here the competition is proposed on
the political and institutional level whereby internet users can choose
their ‘preferred’ alternate governing system (see, for example, Klein and
Mueller 2005). Obviously the questions over legitimacy, control and jurisdiction
over the names and domains and the nervous system of the
electronic age become technical in definition, as technology takes its toll
of these debates, with the effect that large parts of civil society become
alienated from the debate. Furthermore, although the technicology of
the largely political question ‘who owns’ the Internet discourages those
actors with less technical expertise and functions as a filter of participants
and agendas, Internet Governance, in effect, although significant, has
become the focal point for the energies and resources of civil society to
a large extent, with the result that policy issues that do not fit directly
under the ‘umbrella’ of internet governance enjoy less attention.
In the following chapter we examine the role of civil society in more
detail as well as the shortcomings of treating technology as a neutral
factor in the determining of future global socioeconomic developments
for ICTs, communication and cultural rights. We approach this issue by
adopting a view from the social margins, the minoritized majorities, as
we specifically examine a vision of the IS from a feminist perspective,
exposing the violence of gender-neutral assumptions in current policy
formulations. In this discussion the recurrent questions of redistribution
and recognition take centre stage to guide us towards a normative framework
that will help explain the plurality of visions for an electronic global