[discuss] Questions regarding business sector participation

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

 From this description it sounds like there is more in alignment with 
the nature of the Technical Community.  Perhaps not as individual 
companies but as members of some of the aggregate associations that 
service providers of various sorts formed for technical coordination's 
sake.  This may be especially reasonable when we don't have a 
contractual basis for differentiation, as is the case in ICANN that 
often brings out the business side of these enterprises more than their 
technical shepherding role.

When thinking about stakeholder groups, there is the possibility of an 
indefinitely large set of sub-divisions.  For discussion and scalability 
sake, they seem to get aggregated.  Certainly in terms of working out 
process details on Internet governance, we seem to currently have a 
model with 4 non-governmental categories to work with.*  The trick seems 
to be finding an appropriate home for each stakeholder claiming a stake.

Like the informatics folks who can possibly fit into any of 3 
(technical, CS, academic) of the 4 current categories, the technical 
service providers seems to have several possible aggregation points.

I do not think that these alignments need to be permanent, but it seems 
reasonable that they need to stabilize on the 4-model of 
non-governmental stakeholders at least long enough to make 2014 tractable.

It may make sense to have longer term discussions on the best possible 
SG aggregation categories, but at this point I think we need to focus on 
the ones that are in current use.

avri

* I actually think we currently are still in the UN's binary system - 
everything governmental and everything non-governmental.  The 
governmental category has the same sort of sub-division problems, but 
perhaps less visibly: e.g. diplomatic government reps, telecom policy 
government reps, parliamentarians, regulators, IGOs ... Even in the 
implementations of the tripartite Tunis Agenda model, we generally see 
rough parity across the binary split and not across a tripartite split.


On 23-Dec-13 16:46, Shatan, Gregory S. wrote:
> I think there are fundamental differences between infrastructure providers (e.g., registries (ccTLDs and gTLDs), registrars, DNS providers and ISPs) and the general business community.  The vast majority of businesses are "users" -- they plug into the internet and take it as they find it.  They will use it to allow the rest of the world to find their website, and to conduct business and payments, and to send and receive emails, but the Internet itself is more or less a "black box."  Infrastructure providers have a fundamentally different relationship to the internet as builders and maintainers of the Internet and sellers of internet services of various types (domain names, connectivity, etc.), in addition to their "business user" relationship.  The question is how and where does those infrastructure issues, interests and concerns find representation?  These concerns are irrelevant to the rest of business (except to the extent that business, like civil society, individuals !
  and eve
ry other user depends on the "black box" to work).  Furthermore their approach and desired outcomes to IG issues, interests and concerns may be significantly different from (or even diametrically opposed to) those of business users.  For these reasons, shoehorning them into "business" is an uncomfortable fit.
>
> Of course, anytime you try to divide a complex ecosystem into 4 parts, you will have a range of views within each of those parts.  But I think this "fit" issue is a fundamentally different one, because infrastructure providers have a direct and unique relationship to the Internet that is fundamentally different from those of business users (or any other users).  While the business stakeholders can represent infrastructure providers' generic concerns as "business users" of the Internet "black box," whether and how they should represent their concerns as infrastructure providers inside the "black box" is entirely a different matter.
>
> Greg Shatan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-bounces at 1net.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at 1net.org] On Behalf Of Avri Doria
> Sent: Monday, December 23, 2013 9:06 AM
> To: discuss at 1net.org
> Subject: Re: [discuss] Questions regarding business sector participation
>
>
>
> On 20-Dec-13 11:16, Neuman, Jeff wrote:
>> Sometimes technical is also including.  But many of the infrastructure providers, including registries (ccTLDs and gTLDs), registrars, DNS providers and ISPs are left out of the mix.
>
>
> For the most part, in the larger scheme of things, aren't they, for the most part, businesses.  I would think that at the scope of 1net, business would include all of these as sub-groupings and would need to deal internally with that diversity.
>
> This is the same way that CS is now grappling with the problem of trying to be inclusive of all perspectives and grouping of organized civil society.  Etc.
>
> avri
>
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