The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> NADIA TJAHJA: Good morning, everyone. And thank you very much for coming to this launch event on the legitimacy of multistakeholderism in Internet Governance spaces. My name is Tjahja. I'm a PhD fellow at University of Kris and Free University of Brussels. I invite you to explore three publications that look at legitimacy of multistakeholderism. We'll have a presentation online from Dr. Hortense Jongen in Amsterdam. Then it will be followed by Dr. Corinne Cath who sent in a presentation and speaking about loud men talking loudly, exclusionary culture of Internet Governance. This will follow the launch of my publication of youth participation in Internet Governance and followed by these publications there the Internet Governance roadmap improving multistakeholders tomorrow to provide a perspective for the future.
After this, we will invite you to come to the microphones and share your reflections and ideas. We would like to question three questions, how can multistakeholder initiative promote meaningful participation from diverse stakeholders and groups. What is the relationship between inclusive participation and the legitimacy of multistakeholder initiatives? And the last question, what lessons for other multistakeholder bodies can we draw from the different ways in which the three multistakeholder bodies at the focus of this session?
So in this case, ICANN, IETF, and IGF, and aim to promote participation. So help us in these reflections and discussions, we invite two discussants. I can like to thank you very much to Elise from the Dutch government and Elise Lindeberg from the Norwegian authority for joining us today. I want to invite my co‑moderator, Dr. Hortense Jongen who is joining online to give her presentation. Thank you for your participation.
>> HORTENSE JONGEN: Good morning, everyone. Sorry, let me just try to set this up. Can you all hear me?
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Yes, we can hear you.
>> HORTENSE JONGEN: Great. Thank you so much. The presentation that I will be giving today it is part of ‑‑ it was part of a larger research project that I worked on together with professor (?) on the legitimacy in ICANN specifically the drivers and implications of legitimacy.
I can only give a snapshot of some of the findings today and some of the key publications but on each of the slides I listed the key publications that give a lot more detailed information about each of these findings.
But the publications all stem from one research project, which asked a question, how far and on what grounds does ‑‑ oops, apologies ‑‑ does multistakeholderism of governing gain legitimacy. We levered the legitimacy beliefs to multistakeholder apparatus at ICANN and try to generate what limits those legitimacy beliefs. We studied this by means of a couple of hundreds of interviews from members of the board, members of staff, the community, as well as also with several outsiders to ICANN.
And we conducted this project between 2018 and 2019. So I think also in the next presentation, legitimacy it is interpreted in many different studies in vastly different ways. In this study we understand it as the belief and the perception that a governing body has the right to rule and also exercises that right appropriately.
So concretely we are interested in the opinion of ICANN has the right to formulate and administer certain rules for the global Internet.
So we understand legitimacy as underlying confidence in and approval of a governance arrangement. Which is a lot more than just passing support for a particular measure, and instead it instills deeper faith in government apparatus as such.
Why do we focus on legitimacy? Well, both the literature as well as many people that we interviewed, it indicates that legitimacy can help a governor, in this case, ICANN, acquire mandates, obtain resources, attract participation, take decisions and vice versa, if a governor does not have legitimacy, it may be more difficult to acquire mandates or obtain resources, for example.
So one of the first publications in project we saw to identify the levels and patterns of legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN. On this slide I'm summarizing the key four findings. Pay attention to this and I will be spending a little bit less time on different explanations for this. When it comes to the listen levels of legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN, we find that taking all audiences together, average levels of legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN are neither so high to warrant complacency for so low to prompt alarm.
You also find these legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN generally correlate to closeness to the ICANN regime. It's legitimacy amongst the board, the staff, the community. It gets more wobbly the further we get removed from the ICANN.
Several exceptions legitimacy beliefs in board community staff by Stakeholder Group or region or social category. And they also find there's no glaring Achilles heel of vulnerability in any quarter but also no striking concentration of greater ICANN champions outside the staff and board which have stronger length necessary beliefs.
A key question is how can we explain these legitimacy beliefs and how can we understand why some people have more confidence in ICANN than others. So in a series of publications, we're trying to find out what the sources, drivers, or the causes of legitimacy beliefs, what conditions can be fostered or attacked to bolster legitimacy beliefs. We focus on three types of explanations, organizational drivers, so institutional drivers that have to do with ICANN as an organisation, the way it works, its purpose, it's performance. Individual drivers that lie with the people who actually ascribe legitimacy or have confidence in ICANN and societal drivers that have to do with broader societal structures.
I'll quickly go over some of the key findings here on the slides you can also see some of the publications that discuss this more extensively. But we do find that actually a large number of institutional sources are positively associated with legitimacy beliefs toward ICANN. Think, for example, accountability, fair decision taking, timely decision taking, and several aspects related to the mission that ICANN stands for.
We also find several individual level drivers are positively associated with legitimacy in ICANN. It matters what ‑‑ perceive to say who ascribes or does not ascribe to the legitimacy of the ICANN board or staff who have a higher level of confidence of ICANN than members of the ICANN community. People who feel they have benefited personally from ICANN and its policies also tend to ‑‑ are more likely to find legitimacy to ICANN.
Finally, we look at several societal level drivers or explanations for legitimacy in ICANN. What I'm focusing on here specifically is perception of structural inequalities, based on age, ethnicity, race, gender, geopolitics, language. To sum up the discussion, we found that a lot of participants perceived structural inequalities in ICANN do find it problematic but most of them do not enter in their mind about their confidence in ICANN but the perception of problematic inequalities based on the geopolitics, so between the Global North and the Global South.
So to summarize, legitimacy understood as approval of ICANN as a governance mechanism for the global Internet is important. We find that ICANN has fairly secured legitimacy amongst insiders and starts to wane off the further we get removed. And we find multiple and variable drivers of these levels of ICANN legitimacy beliefs. There's not a simple formula available to solve all the legitimacy challenges.
We also believe knowing that levels of legitimacy beliefs prevail in what quarters and what kinds of forces shape those legitimacy beliefs can nevertheless contribute to more informed and nuanced policy making. Thank you very much.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much, Hortense for your presentation.
I'll share my screen and we'll show the presentation of Dr. Corinne Cath who was not able to be here today unfortunately. You should be able to see it now.
(Video Playing)
(No audio.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: I think we can't hear her. So the sound is not connected. Am I screensharing? Yes. So dune why the sound is not working for the presentation?
>> (Off Microphone)
>> NADIA TJAHJA: While I wait to figure out what is happening with this, I propose I'll just go straight into my own presentation. So her presentation is a prerecorded session. So she's not actually with us online. Thank you so much for paying attention, because otherwise if she was still talking, that would have been a little bit awkward for all of us.
In the meantime, I'll share my own screen again and start my own presentation. We did it in order of the year of publication. We started with Dr. Jongen first and Corinne Cath who published earlier this year. And I am pleased that I am going to launch my publication today.
So fortunately, I don't need sound for mine. That's not my presentation slides either. I think I'm confused now. So while I figure this out, could I kindly ask ‑‑ I'm sorry to have to put you on the spot like this, but Mr. Carter, could you please share your vision for multistakeholderism while we sort out our technical issues?
>> JORDAN CARTER: I can, yes. Thanks, Nadia. And good morning, everyone, who is in the room and good afternoon or good evening to the rest of you who might be online. I thought I would be riffing more in the content that came through other presentations. I'll be quite brief at this point.
AuDA, we operate the dot AU for Australia. And the reason we put together a roadmap on Internet Governance was simply to try and provoke some discussion and dialogue among the Internet community about the ways that Internet Governance might need to be improved to make it more functional for the deeply complicated digital governance we all face in the 2020s and beyond.
Because of the nature of this launch event, I wanted to focus in on a couple of aspects of legitimacy. And to do that, we ran into some of the things we said in the roadmap. It's not a promo thing. You can find the roadmap on our website auDA.org.AU. Bates on the practitioner view, I'm not an academic. This isn't an academic pitch. This is a practitioner and participant perspective that we're offering. That more broadly‑based participation is going to enhance the outcomes and outputs that come from Internet Governance processes for the same reason that we say that they work at all.
If you get the right mix of stakeholders and perspectives around the table, the idea is that the solutions that get developed by that process are more likely to work and more likely to be accepted by participants and other people who can rely on the right expertise having been present.
That goes to one of the discussion questions. How do you use exclusion and enhance these initiatives? And one of the ‑‑ it's a bit of a truism in some of the institutions that have been talked about already, that most of the protagonists are from particular regions of the world. And there are deficits of participation. If you want to take a deficit model from Global South participants from people who are not from Europe or North America in particular.
And one of the things that I think is material to that is providing effective funding approaches so that people without economic resources so be able to participate have opportunities to do so in a meaningful way. And another, which I think will come up in one of the other presentations is about the culture of these affairs.
It's been ten plus years since I attended my first ICANN meeting, as an example. And some people were very friendly and welcoming and some other people were off-putting and arrogant. I'm sure it's the same experience today. I come with a set of attributes and cultural capital that means I would have had an easier journey into some of that than other people do.
And the second thing I want to talk about in terms of legitimacy is the procedural legitimacy that can come from the great decision-making frameworks if you like the constitution of Internet Governance. One of the things we articulated in our paper was the notion that there should be a review of the foundations of Internet Governance, how it is practiced in the 2020s and beyond.
We leaned a bit on the roadmap that was developed in the NETmundial process in 2014 as an example of that kind of framework. There are other normative and procedural frameworks out there about how IG should work. And our view, again, is if you assemble the breadth of stakeholders and the diversity of stakeholders that are required, the legitimacy of those underpinning frameworks will be enhanced.
And the third one, I'll briefly mention, is the institutional innovation question. And there are some policy questions these days that have emerged in the technology in the new year that are on the agenda at Internet Governance events like this. You will notice by now the focus on AI at this year's IGF. It isn't immediately obvious that the right assemblage of stakeholders deal with Internet Governance questions is going to be the right assemblage of stakeholders to deal with other policy questions.
So it might be the case that new processes and institutions are needed to deal with new policy questions that become quite remote from the Internet, which is an essential service for many of these technology stacks but they might engage very much different stakeholder groups.
And if we keep trying to shoe horn all of the issues that relate to the Internet and issues that don't relate to the Internet but make use of the Internet into a single framework, then the Internet Governance system isn't the Internet Governance system, it's just the governance system. It's just running the world. So we do need to think about the boundaries of the material that we're dealing with and the necessary stakeholders that we need to engage within nose boundaries to build the legitimacy of the work that's done within them.
I hope that progressed a few thoughts. I saw some nods and head shakes which is perfect from my point of view. I'll pass it back to you, Nadia.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you for your comments. I hope I have it figured out right now. And we will be able to see Dr. Corinne Cath joining us on the screen.
(Video Playing)
(No audio)
>> NADIA TJAHJA: ‑‑
>> CORINNE CATH: ‑‑ this manual suggests and given I'm not there in person, I will be giving some guidance on the slides as we go. So next slide, please.
So in this brief talk I will try and do three specific things, provide a bit of an introduction to the PhD research that I've done, specifically looking at Internet Governance cultures and their rougher edges, summarize some of my key findings as I have published them in a recent report called loud men, talking loudly on the exclusionary culture of Internet Governance which was a report I published for the launch of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. The report is on their website and also go check out their work if you haven't heard about them yet. They're really wonderful. Then I'll hand over to the next speaker or Q&A or whatever Nadia things is best.
Next slide, please. By way of introduction. My name is Corinne Cath. I'm an anthropologist of Internet Governance. I was at the University of definitely and finished my PhD in Oxford in 2021. I currently work at the University of definitely where I'm doing research on the politics of cloud computing but this topic remains near and dear to me. Next slide, please.
So what I'll be doing today is present some of the research that derives from my PhD where there's an important Internet Governance body called the Internet Engineering Task Force and it's one of the oldest Internet Governance bodies that makes key protocols and standards that enable networks to connect.
And I know that the importance Technical Community is top of mind for many of you in the room. I think this research that I've done sort of speaks to both the capacities and limitations and the importance of including Civil Society explicitly into the work that the Technical Community does.
And you can also find my PhD research which is published on my website. Next slide, please.
Now, I know that all of you have better things to do than to read 180 odd pages of thesis. Let me summarize some of my findings about the exclusionary and sometimes discriminatory aspects in Internet Governance organisations for you as I've outlined in the report that you can see over there or over there. Next slide, please.
In the report as in some of my other work which is multiple years of field work and participant observation of the Internet engineering task Norse as well as numerous interviews who work in these kinds of spaces, I really ask the question of how suitable certain Internet Governance organisations are for Civil Society participation. And what this tells us about Internet Governance cultures and how those can be both open and exclusionary at the same time.
The reason why I think it's important to look at this is because if all of us didn't, to a certain extent, believe in the importance of the openness of Internet Governance or the value of the multistakeholder model, we wouldn't be here participating in the IGF today. Especially for some of us it's the dead of night.
And this is all very true. I found two things can be truth at the same time. The multistakeholder model can be important and an important model of governing the Internet and other technologies. At the same time, the practice by which it is done can be discriminatory to minority voices, especially those in Civil Society representing the voices of women and those from the majority world.
If we want to maintain the openness of the multistakeholder model, we need to, with some urgency, address these ways in which Internet Governance cultures can be exclusionary and discriminatory.
And as I'm sure you know, I'm not the only one stressing the urgency of dealing with the ‑‑ some of the inequities that are inherent to who can afford to be part of the Internet Governance communities. Tackling these inequities is a better and preferable route than others suggested that Internet Governance in a multifactorial fashion.
I believe that pursuing a multilateral approach just because the multistakeholder model is one that is less perfect is perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath water. But at the same time, I also believe we need to go much beyond deepening and broadening participation as some people advocate for. As participants are still going to be, especially, minority voices, are going be unlikely to stay involved in the cultures in which they're expected to participate are going to be hostile to their needs and their presence.
Next slide. So my report lays out what loud men, as an organizational culture in some Internet Governance organisations costs us when we're striving for an Internet that serves a diverse public interest.
Next slide, please. Some of the findings that I want to share with you today are on this slide. So what we see is that many seemingly open, accessible Internet Governance organisations are in the policies happen where web standards are discussed where the functioning browsers are discussed, et cetera, even though they seem procedurally open are culturally closed off. It can be hostile; it can be surprisingly hard to participate in especially for Civil Society folks and women and participants in the majority world.
And what happens these exclusionary cultures create this barrier that make it hard for these groups to participate, even though they're bricking a very much perspective to debates both technology functioning of the Internet.
And while many Civil Society practitioners in this room may not be surprised by these findings or by these different barriers that are outlined in the rest of my research, there is comparatively very little of documentation of this type of hostility existing in research literature or policy maker conversations about Internet Governance.
And it is another topic that we need to put on the table if we are to maintain the good bits of the multistakeholder model.
Next slide, please. And we often tend to talk about how open Internet Governance organisations are. And that's true along some access. I found however there is a bit of a disconnect between procedural openness, which is a slightly lower bar that many Internet Governance organisations will meet, to some extent at least, and actual accessibility. This disconnect in part stems from different cultural dynamics.
What we see that in Internet Governance organisations routinely tend to cater to particular groups of people, taking their assumptions and their expectations as the standard and doing not enough to accommodate and different aspects and needs.
For example, we are all here, primarily speak English to each other. So English is often the working language and a lot of these organisations with an American orientation Edward the market as the primary form of governance also being endemic. Meetings occurring at different sites across the globe. IGF being one example. A lot of these locations are hard for people to access in the majority world that face all sorts of Visa challenges and are a heavy financial challenge. Same with child caring and employers who can't foot the bill and those with disabilities, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes hard to participate.
The group that is left is a group that can participate but a smaller group, much more homogenous than the group they serve. It is the cultural ways that the day‑to‑day Internet Governance can exclude groups that need to be heard.
And if we take ourselves serious as a community, then we need to address these rough edges in earnest.
Next slide. So the open multistakeholder model of Internet Governance in which all different parties joining in using the network contribute to decisions about its functioning is integral to the Internet success.
Now this is especially crucial at this moment in time when we see corporate power over Internet is growing, government and private sector is growing and the space for Internet Governance to work. Internet Governance are still a place where the public can claim a seat at the table. In order for that seat to actually lead to anything concrete, more work is needed to ensure that these Internet Governance bodies are open and accessible to all.
The work I've done provides one entry that shows why that is not always the case. If you take one thing from this presentation, it would be this, Internet Governance organisations may be procedurally open, but they can be culturally closed off. And unwelcoming in practice. The gap between the rules on paper on the one hand and the reality in practice can be explained in part for the exclusionary effect of these cultures. It is these cultures that make it difficult for Civil Society to be able to join decision making processes they so urgently need to join.
Again, understanding how this plays out should curb our impulse to position Internet Governance organisations as naturally capable of delivering a notice that answers to the public. It's unfortunately not that simple.
So coming to my final words here, designations of Internet Governance organisations is exemplary in this regard often depends on ignoring or disregarding the exclusionary effects of cultural dynamics in favour of surface level access. We as a society need to do better not only by our sake but to push back at the multistakeholder model. I think the fact that we're coming here today is a clear sign that we as a community can and must do better. Thank you so much.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much to Dr. Corinne Cath for sharing her presentation.
So it's been my pleasure to share my own presentation about youth participation in Internet Governance.
So my research for my PhD has been looking at multistakeholderism and Internet Governance and specifically the Stakeholder Group that I've chosen was youth. We always talk about meaningful youth participation. Our common agenda asked for looking at mechanisms on how engage our youth in policy making processes.
We have spoken about an IGF working strategy on the inclusion of youth. We have the IGF youth track. And so one of the things I set out to do is to understand youth in these spaces.
And for this my research looked at an agent of change youth participation at the IGF where I looked at how youth are creating new spaces within the IGF when they see the processes, they're getting involved with do not reflect or engage in the manner that they find approachable or that they have access to. So they use existing mechanisms within the IGF to create new spaces or they create additional spaces that align with the values of the IGF.
I created a policy brief on youth participation and Internet Governance with recommendations on how youth can be further integrated. And for this year's annual symposium of gig net, the dynamics of meaningful youth participation.
And with this latest article, I proposed a definition for what is meaningful participation, which is based on the definition from Malcolm. And the definition I came with is aiming to capture the extent to which the processes in question are effectively designed to incorporate the viewpoints of youth participants into the development of Internet Governance policies in a balanced way, in being the essential feature from which this subset of multistakeholder processes can claim democratic legitimacy.
Building on that, I used a revision of Arnstein's ladder. It looks at nonparticipation, tokenism, and citizen power. And when they describe Arnstein's ladder in case studies, they use each rung and give an example. What I find at the Internet Governance forum is it is an ecosystem. It is more than just this individual component is separate from each other.
So I proposed a pyramid of participation. I used elements of the leader to propose a pyramid in which we see how we integrate within the IGF.
So we integrate first. You're sitting here today. I'm speaking with you now. And our other speakers shared their thoughts and ideas with you about their research, about the work that they've done, their perceptions, their interpretations of what they see and what they've researched. So you're being informed.
But we will open the floor and we will have reflections from our discussants and have asked them to consult to provide input and exchange. This is how we integrate. We become familiar with content and processes.
At some point you come into this leadership position. You come here as a partnership. Maybe some of you are organisers and you collaborate with the community to create your sessions.
And maybe some of us will work closely with the IGF Secretariat as consultants or a form of facilitator, the way you have delegated power to facilitate particular positions.
And I mentioned before, when these structures are not achieving the aims and goals that you have, you can go into metaparticipation where you feel you can have some control to create the systems you want which can be used to create your own processes, a side that you align with the IGF.
And then, of course, what Arnstein's leader talks about is tokenised participation. This is something when I created the pyramid of participation, I believed it was outside of the scope. I believe that when we have purpose, we want it to be meaningful.
And there is a tokenised processes but tokenised processes were not included in this study. So when we felt that there were tokenised activities or things that were interpreted as tokenised, it means that meaningful participation has failed us. And then in this research that I've done I analyzed it through the lens of why and how they're not able to meaningfully participate, rather than looking at it is this process was made to tokenise you.
I believe that we want to have meaningful participation. And sometimes we fail and how did we fail that?
So here are just a few examples. Using the purpose of participation and interviews with European participants from EuroDIG and YouthDIG, I looked at which activities that they participated in and what they felt was their purpose and how they thrived, but also how they felt that the structure or their personal ambitions failed them.
So when they come into the integration part where they're informing and consulting at EuroDIG, they were learning about the content. They are looking at how EuroDIG worked, the processes. They assessed what was the structure of accessibility? Are you capable of engaging or not? They learned that when you are a part of the EuroDIG community, this can lead to responsibilities. That's a form of integration. You move to a natural way into the leadership positions.
But on the other hand, when we see that meaningful participation has failed is when personal reasons, motherhood, for example, or fatherhood, or they found their career opportunities were not aligned with their ambitions, or they had structural reasons why they were not able to engage. For example, when there are time zone problems, when there are different opportunities that were not aligned, such as the topics of that year does not align with your personal ambitions.
And then we go through the entire system at both EuroDIG but also at the global IGF. We looked at the different ways that participants participate in EuroDIG and YouthDIG and where they contribute and where meaningful participation had failed.
Therefore, I am pleased to share with you because of my research and the support of the EuroDIG Secretariat, I was able to look and reflect on YouthDIG, the Youth Dialogue on Internet Governance, to present for youth to EuroDIG for them to learn about the context in which EuroDIG will present that year to learn about the processes and how to integrate into EuroDIG community.
Based on this, I created a publication which you can find at the EuroDIG booth which talks about the youth did I go philosophy. If you remember the definition of meaningful participation, remember I spoke about structure, about how to contribute, and how youth are continuously evolving. And this publication reflects on how we approached YouthDIG. How can we integrate them? And how can we further integrate their continuous participation? We hope that you'll reflect on this publication and come back to us with feedback. Because it's always important that we have with YouthDIG that we always engage our participants to ask them if they come back next year, how would you do it? What would you change to make your participation more meaningful?
They give us their feedback, and then we invite them to join the YouthDIG work team to implement what they would like to see, the change they would like to see.
And that is what this publication hopes to do to further continue this discussion about how can we continue meaningful participation from the regional to the global IGF. So thank you very much.
I would then like to ask our discussants for their initial reflections of our three presentations. And the questions that we had. In the meantime, if you have any comments or questions, please do come to the microphone. But then I would like to ask Ms. Lindeberg, if you could start with your comments.
>> ELISE LINDEBERG: Thank you. Thank you for being invited. There's a lot of questions you asked us. So what is the relationship between inclusive participation and the legitimacy of the multistakeholder model? I don't think anyone questions that there is a strong link. We discuss it all the time. Also, in the high‑level panels that ensuring inclusive and meaningful participation from the broader communities is crucial from the multistakeholder model.
And some of the research and surveys that you mentioned now shows that there are several important voices of stakeholders that are not aware of the discussions we have in Internet Governance. Of course, that's a huge challenge for the legitimacy of the multistakeholder community.
And the responsibilities of us who are already participating on what we should do with that problem. I don't think anyone questions the importance of discussions like this.
And what can we do then? Well, I think that one thing we should look into is also the various forums that we have. As a small faith I represent the Norwegian government. We are concerned that if we have a lot of arenas that discuss the same topics. Because it is challenging to follow all the different discussions if there is a lot of different forums. I'm not talking about the forums that are national or regional. Because that feeds into this discussion and it's very important.
But we should also, I think, concentrate on making the forums we already have stronger.
So that's one thing. Making the most out of the existing structure we already have. I also think that we should go deeper into sharing best practices within the IGF and the multistakeholder community.
I think the report from auDA shows that you have room within the multistakeholder system like IGF for more focused dialogue between experts and sharing best practices. I think that's one thing that would make it even more meaningful to participate. And would draw broader groups into the IGF and the multistakeholder discussions.
So good sharing of practices the maybe we should start measuring what we're doing in some way to see how we impact the involvement of the Internet in these forums. Because it is discussions, but we also need to see some meaningful results for others to take from this community and take home. And to make best practices more shared.
I think that's one thing we can contribute more to. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much. Quickly Ms. Receiver, if I could have your reflections.
>> Yes, thank you. I'll try to keep it very brief. I saw we're already over time. Coming from the Netherlands, working together with a broad array of stakeholders is very common. We've been polaring since approximately 1200 that was to protect ourselves from the North Sea. And we've done that with a broad array of stakeholders. I could maybe say it's in my veins to talk with stakeholders.
But it's not something that's always common for governments to do. And I think that's very special about the IGF that we're talking together on the equal footing and that we have the opportunity to talk with Civil Society with the tech community, with the Business Community, and with government. That it's not government inviting you to say whatever you think. Well, okay, thank you. We'll see you next year.
But I really hope for meaningful participation. And I just wanted to reflect briefly on ICANN as I'm the Dutch GAC representative. That's for the government stakeholder ‑‑ government Advisory Committee in ICANN. And about participation in ICANN. I still don't see that all governments are represented in ICANN.
At the moment there are 182 members from government and 38 observers. That's not the 193 that the UN counts as government.
But also, at the last ICANN meeting there were 73 government members participating and eight observers. I didn't do a quick regional check, but I'm pretty sure it's not an equal distribution across the world. And despite the fact that it's not equal in the GAC, it's even less equal, I'm pretty sure, in the other stakeholder groups.
So I personally hope to see with the next round of GTLDs, that's generic top-level domains, I would hope to see that this Stakeholder Group becomes more diverse with a broader array of top-level domains in other languages and other scripts and ensuring that more registries and registrars are equally distributed across the world. And that it doesn't have this immense Western grouping where they are currently.
So, yeah, that would be two of my reflections on your questions. And hopefully we can have one or two remarks from others. Thanks.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much. I fear that there's not a lot of time left over because the opening ceremony will start soon. And I think everybody would want to join that. But certainly, I do now believe that this conversation has to stop here. I would be welcome and my colleagues are also keen on furthering the discussion. I would like to thank you all so very much for coming here today on the reflection. I apologize for the technical problems we had today that we could not engage better. I would also like to thank very much the staff to do their best to ensure everything is running smoothly but also the captioners that are writing things live and those who are interpreting into English and Japanese for their services here today. Thank you all very much. And we hope to continue this conversation. Have a really lovely IGF.
(Applause)