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:
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I don't grok this at all.
Can't non-commercial/civil society stakeholders represent
themselves?
Why would they need to be "represented"?