Sam

I’ve written a lot of scholarly papers about just that topic.

Here is an excerpt:

“A political tension between the transnational, private sector-led organizations/governance mechanisms characteristic of the Internet and the sovereignty-based governance of national and intergovernmental institutions has been a recurring feature of the evolution of Internet governance. Multi-stakeholder entities are IOs that serve as a bridge between these two worlds. Multi-stakeholderism inserts representatives of civil society and the private sector into intergovernmental proceedings, more or less as peers. The UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is the main multistakeholder organization. It was expressly created by the World Summit on the Information Society to serve such a bridging function. The IGF itself sits in a sometimes uncomfortable place between the two worlds. It is part of the UN system but must raise its own money as it is not guaranteed funds from the general budget like a UN bureau would be. The IGF runs an open annual meeting that typically attracts about 2,000 people, where the problems of Internet governance are discussed in a nonbinding dialogue. The program of the IGF is established by a Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group which contains representatives from governments, business, and civil society. Since the first meeting of the IGF in 2006, regional and national IGFs have proliferated which reproduce this pattern locally.

Some writers use a broader definition of multi-stakeholder; they would categorize ICANN and the RIRs, for example, as multi-stakeholder institutions or as exemplars of “the multi-stakeholder model.” But it is important to remember that the label “multi-stakeholder” was only applied to ICANN and the RIRs retroactively, in the wake of the battles over Internet governance during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). And the concept does not apply to the IETF at all, because it is based entirely on individual participation not on classes of “stakeholders.” In fact, the term “multi-stakeholder” was applied to the organically developed Internet institutions after the WSIS debates only as a kind of political ploy: to leverage the rhetoric of broader inclusion and representation that civil society activists had brought into the UN system during WSIS and make the Internet institutions more palatable to states and the UN system. The fact remains, however, that the original Internet institutions were private sector-led forms of self-governance that in some ways were intended to exclude or avoid governments. The White Paper that established the basis for the ICANN regime, for example, described it as a ‘privatization’ of the DNS. Only after governments asserted themselves in the WSIS process was the term ‘multi-stakeholder’ applied to ICANN, the RIRs, and IETF. The tendency now is to consider governments as “stakeholders” on a par with private sector and civil society organizations. Governmental participation as peers, however, almost never works because of their inherently bureaucratic and hierarchical structure, and their ability to overrule or even repress other stakeholder groups. While in some sense states are also network operators and users and thus share many concerns with other stakeholders, there is a certain naivety about the treatment of states as “stakeholders” when the pre-existing political and governance system is built around the notion of states as sovereign decision-makers who are above specific stakeholder groups.

From: NCSG-Discuss [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sam Lanfranco
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2016 9:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: IANA

This is a question for one of us with a longer history with ICANN than I have.

I have noticed that the language used to discuss the history leading up to the transition of IANA oversight the wording does not
refer to ICANN as a not-for-profit multistakeholder organization but instead uses variations on the term "private and international".
Most recently this appears in Wolfgang's piece in circleid.com where he writes:

"...the privatization and internationalization of the management of Internet core resources."

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20160921_breaking_nonsense_ted_cruz_iana_transition_and_irony_of_life/

I assume there is some history to using the words "private" and "international" rather than "not-for-profit" and "multistakeholder".
Can someone shed some light on this?

Sam L.