[governance] Multistakeholder model

[Deirdre Williams]

The U.S. House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee's
Subcommittee on Communications and Technology's hearing *Ensuring the
Security, Stability, Resilience, and Freedom of the Global Internet
<http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ensuring-security-stability-resilience-and-freedom-global-internet>*
in
Washington DC has just finished. The information about the hearing also
contains a link to a background memo
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF16/20140402/102044/HHRG-113-IF16-20140402-SD002-U1.pdf
The
memo gives the background leading up to the National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA) announcement of 14th March "to transition
the IANA functions to the global multi-stakeholder community". Pages 3/ 4
of the memo give a four paragraph explanation of "The Multistakeholder
Community". This is the first paragraph of that section:

ICANN, as well as the groups that oversee the creation of voluntary
Internet standards

under the auspices of the Internet Society, receive input from governments,
Internet users,

corporations investing in the Internet, academics, and engineers that
develop the technology that

makes the Internet possible. In addition to the corporations and
governments that participate in

the process, a series of ad hoc groups form the engineering corps of the
Internet. The Internet

Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the
Internet Engineering

Steering Group, and the Internet Research Task Force, now collectively
organized under the

international non-profit Internet Society (ISOC), are run by volunteers and
all work to create

voluntary standards for Internet users to make interconnection of all
networks easier. The

flexibility of this governance structure, referred to as the
"multistakeholder model," is what has

enabled the explosive growth of the Internet as a driver of jobs, commerce,
social discourse, and

innovation.

Apart from ICANN four "ad hoc groups" are mentioned directly, five if you
count ISOC which "collectively organize[s]" them. There is no denying that
each of these five is a "stakeholder", and, being more than one they
qualify as "multi". However there is no diversity - in fact they are
described as " the engineering corps of the Internet".

So is this the "multistakeholder model" that we are discussing?

Deirdre

-- 
"The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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