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:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">Why would they need to be "represented"?I don't grok this at all.Can't non-commercial/civil society stakeholders represent themselves?