McTim,

You miss the point. The issue brewing in the background is not who is a 
stakeholder but how processes of representation are structured. Many 
not-for-profit and civil society groups within ICANN have a low level of 
dialogue at home. Greater domestic engagement would bring more weight to 
their positions in ICANN policy dialogue (whether in agreement or 
disagreement with government or others at home) . Consensus in policy 
making is as much a question of the breadth of agreement as it is the 
weight of evidence. Outside ICANN this is seen as a weakness in ICANN's 
multistakeholder process, a weakness that ICANN itself is not in a 
position to address. That is why it is important to have dialogue (IGFs) 
at the national and regional level, so that when DNS and other Internet 
governance issues reach the policy stage, there has been a layered 
dialogue from local, to national, to global. Then, the few voices that 
are actually present and heard, and the positions they present, have 
come out of a process of representation and carry the weight of that 
process. For better or worse, it would appear that the commercial 
stakeholders within ICANN are much better at this process.

Also, this does not involve either "validating" representation by some 
accreditation process, or assuming that lower layers of dialogue will 
produce consensus, but it does involve effort for greater depth of 
stakeholder engagement in the development of policy positions before 
they are input into the high-level policy development process.  The WEF 
Netmundial initiative will face the same issue as ICANN's, and any 
other, multistakeholder model on this front. To paraphrase one of A. K. 
Sen's points about democracy in "The Idea of Justice", the quality of 
policy making is a function of the dialogue along the road to the Inn, 
and not just the quality of the dialogue around the table at the Inn.

  Sam L.

/On 16/11/2014 10:09 AM, McTim wrote://
/
> /I don't grok this at all.//
> //
> /
> /Can't non-commercial/civil society stakeholders represent themselves?//
> //
> /
> /Why would they need to be "represented"?/