[governance] Muti-stakeholder Group structure (some ideas)

[Karl Auerbach]

To Bertrand and Robin:

Bertrand: Thanks for the very well articulated note on individuals and 
"stakeholders".

My concern remains, however, that even though individuals may in our 
context be recognized as "stakeholders" the use of that term easily 
permits people to be forgotten in other contexts or be subordinated to 
those corporate or aggregate bodies that claim to be "stakeholders" on 
an economic basis.

The reason why I find the term "stakeholder" to be corrosive is that it 
opens the door to Orwell's fearful sentence: "All animals are equal, but 
some animals are more equal than others."

I very much agree with you that thinking and developing answers and 
policies works best if all points of view are represented by people 
(ultimately it is always a person who does the articulating or 
representing) and that a synoptic view is more important at that stage 
than universal representation.  At a later stage, when a choice is made 
whether to adopt the answer or policy, then a broad based counting of 
opinions is more important.

Nevertheless, those who are excluded will often resist or resent an 
answer simply because they weren't part of its making.

To Robin: With regard to your note that mentioned the resistance of 
China: I detected a hint of a crossover between issues.  I've been 
pressing the position that of using people, not legal fictions or 
artificial aggregations, ought to be the basic unit of interest and 
benefit for internet governance.  What you and Mereyem have mentioned 
tends to go towards the issue of human rights.  These are, of course 
related but the coloration is a bit different.

I am not sure that China or other countries that resist externally 
imposed definitions of "human rights" would not be so uncomfortable with 
the proposition that when a "stakeholder" votes, that that vote be 
weighed on the basis of the number of people who can be garnered to 
support that vote.

To be more concrete, let's image a hypothetical body of internet 
governance.  Imagine that it has various "stakeholders" but that when it 
comes time to measure consensus or take votes that each stakeholder's 
vote is measured by the number of people who sign that stakeholder's 
vote.  Thus the IP industry vote would be measured by the number of 
people they can get to back their point of view.  The same would hold 
for other aggregates - the size of their vote is proportional to the 
number of people who back their vote.

Would that kind of formulation less likely to trigger China's defensive 
mechanisms?  I could imagine that, due to China's immense population, 
that they actually might find such a formulation attractive.

	--karl--

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