[governance] Supporting something other than democracy because change is too hard.

[David Conrad]

Paul,

On Oct 25, 2012, at 6:10 PM, Paul Lehto <lehto.paul at gmail.com> wrote:
> People who legitimately care greatly about issues and are otherwise quite democratic-minded are sorely, sorely tempted to support processes that are something more "efficient" than democracy.

Actually, my impression is that given (as you have acknowledged) we don't actually have democracy in the context of defining global policies for something as vast, amorphous and ill-defined as the Internet, a preferable alternative to uni-stakeholderism of inter-governmental decree is multi-stakeholderism in which views beyond (but including) those of governments can be represented.

As far as I can tell, the reason for a multi-stakeholder approach is the realization/acceptance that governments, be they democratically elected or not, do not (and perhaps cannot) represent the interests of all who make use of, provide, rely upon, seek to control, etc., the Internet.  Ideally, it is a way in which people's, community's, and organization's  interests can all be represented in an open forum in which a consensus (perhaps rough) can be reached.  Contrary to your previous assertion that 'experts and informed voters do not become fully informed until "the last second"', my experience has been that participants in multi-stakeholder efforts do so because they have been deeply involved in the issues for a very long time and have a deep understanding as well as interest in ensuring their perspectives on the issues are understood (I'll note that I suspect this is probably in contrast to the vast majority of actual democratic voting where people's understanding of the issues and/or their representative's intent regarding those issues is ... limited).  

Regards,
-drc


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