Proposal by Vittorio Bertola
OPTION K
- Rationale behind Option K
This option is based on Karl Auerbach's "one man one vote" principle, and on
the fact that ICANN, first of all, has to be representative of the worldwide
Internet community to be legitimate to manage the only DNS root. The problem
of bringing skills and representation of specific private interests to the
Board is solved through Advisory Committees.
1) Definition of Terms
An At Large member (ALM) is any individual with a working (not permanently
bouncing) e-mail address and a verifiable postal address.
An At Large Community (ALC) is any set of At Large members that choose to
form a named group. The choice should happen online, on the At Large site,
by choosing from the list of existing ALCs, and could be changed at any
time. Any ALM has the option of founding a new ALC if no existing one
satisfies him - simply click on "add an entry to the list". Any ALM can only
be part of one ALC. Any ALC can self-organize as it likes - it only has to
provide ICANN an ALCR (ALC representative) that can act on behalf of the
ALC.
An Advisory Committee (AC) is a set of member entities that hold a specific
skill or interest relevant to the domain name system. So it is made by
entities, not by individuals.
There are no SOs in this model.
2) Participation Structure Overview
The basic principle is "one man, one vote". ALMs elect the Board, that
reflects the opinions of the worldwide Internet community, and thus is
legitimated to manage a worldwide public resource.
The technical skills are provided by the ACs, and are used at a consulting
level to avoid that the Board takes unapplicable decisions, and at a
verification level: ACs can veto specific decisions once and send them back
to the Board for reconsideration.
Anyway, as in other proposals, there is sort of "parties" - the ALCs. This
is however a more general concept, as it is not clear whether people will
effectively like to form groups by social interests, by specific charters,
by country, or by whatever else. It is even likely that this could vary
among different parts of the world. So ICANN should limit itself and just
provide a light infrastructure to let users aggregate the way they want.
3) Supporting Organizations
There are no SOs. De facto, the SOs are substituted by ACs. ICANN defines
which ACs are useful and which entities should be part of them; then, those
entities can self-organize as they want. It is likely that big ACs (i.e. a
TLD AC, which would have all TLD registries as members) will organize
themselves in a council plus a GA, to make decisions easier.
4) SO Councils
There are no SOs. Any AC should organize itself as desired.
5) SO General Assemblies
There are no SOs. Any AC should organize itself as desired.
6) Funding / Staffing
ICANN gets funds via the TLDs (either a fixed yearly fee or a percentage of
any registration) and supplies adequate staff and logistics to the system,
also funding the costs of the At Large membership. Anyway, ALCs and ACs
should fund themselves for any activity outside ICANN's official meetings:
ICANN should only provide funds and means for participating to meetings and
keeping contact with members.
7) ASO
Would become the AAC (Address Advisory Committee), representing the same
interests as now.
8) PSO
Would become the PAC (Protocol Advisory Committee), representing the same
interests as now.
9) DNSO and At-Large Membership
TLD registries would form the TAC (TLD Advisory Committee) (in fact, it
could be explored the option of having different ACs for ccTLDs, sTLDs and
uTLDs). Registrars of all the world (including registrars of specific TLDs)
would form the RAC (Registrar Advisory Committee). The rest would go in the
At Large as individuals.
10) GAC
No change - would be another AC representing the Governments of the world.
11) Other entities
IRP is fine.
In this model, ALCs would only act as opinion and candidate makers,
facilitating the aggregation of consensus, but would not get direct
representation inside ICANN (just some space for meeting at the meetings).
They are free to self-organize as they like; technically, ICANN should
provide them with an online identity/affiliation verification system (so
that they can build websites with forums and voting booths on their own,
using ICANN's password and PIN).
If an ALC is cheating and exploiting its own members, they will simply vote
with their feet and go to another ALC, so there is an intrinsic warranty
against "membership hijacking". There is no requirement that an ALC is
internally democratical, but people that like democracy won't join a
dictatorial ALC, would they?
12) Representation structure overview
19 Directors. 18 elected by the ALMs, 1 CEO. Each AC would have an
additional non-voting member in the Board. Incidentally, 18 is a much more
reasonable number than 9 or 5 if you want to get a decent representation of
the world.
13) Election/Selection of Directors
10 Directors elected in Regional elections, so to ensure geographical
difference. 8 Directors elected in global worldwide elections. Elections
should happen on lists of candidates, not on single names, to reduce
dispersion of the votes. Then, each list would get a proportional number of
the available seats, which would go to the most voted candidates in the
list.
14) Nominations
ALCs that have at least X members (with X reasonably high, i.e. 5-10% of the
members in the voting district) could present a list (via their ALCR)
without any further requirement. (It is reasonable to think that such big
ALCs will have primary elections on their website, but this does not regard
ICANN.) Other ALCs, or individuals who could not enter their own ALC's list,
can present a list of candidates by collecting at least X/2 endorsements by
ALMs who are not part of ALCs who presented a list, in a list endorsement
phase. ALCs should be allowed to "add up" their members to present shared
lists.
15) Voting/Policy Process
As noted before, all Board decisions should be submit to the ACs for formal
verification. An AC can veto a decision and send it back to the Board once,
with adequate motivations; the Board can then confirm it finally, or amend
it following the suggestions of the AC. So the Board has the final word, but
the ACs have a strong power to make its life difficult.
The Board should be allowed to meet and decide online if necessary.
Important changes (such as Bylaws amendments) should be subject to a general
confirmation vote of all the ALMs.
16) Communications with members
ALCs should get the list of their members. If an ALC starts spamming their
own members, I doubt it'll live long. Before elections, lists of candidates
should be allowed to send e-mails to voters. On the At Large site, other
opt-in lists should be proposed (with freedom to anyone to be included in
that list).
17) Notes
At Large Membership must be free to ensure that anyone can get a voice
independently from his conditions and direct interests. As ALC will try to
attract new members to gain importance, they will be a powerful sort of
"MLM" tool for increasing the membership :-)
…………………………………………….…………..
Hello,
sorry for the (as usual) long post, but I wanted to expose my sparse
thoughts on the whole thing and a few comments on the options. In the next
posts you'll get my proposed options - but I really wanted to explain the
ideas behind them.
= My general ideas
* Why the At Large Membership
The Internet is for everyone. So everyone should get a voice in its
management, independently from his social and economical position,
geographical location, and technical skills.
Moreover, ICANN's legitimation is questioned, and still is questionable.
ICANN's decision can deeply affect market competition, e-business
development, freedom of speech and personal rights all over the world. It is
thus necessary that ICANN gets some kind of authority. The SO's only cover a
tiny fraction of the Internet community, mainly composed by closed academic
and governmental organizations, very technical entities, and private
businesses who have direct economical interests that may conflict with the
public interest. It is very hard to think that an organization controlled by
this kind of stakeholders could advance any reasonable right to rule
significant parts of the Internet.
On the other hand, ICANN's need for worldwide legitimacy can be met by
establishing a system through which all affected entities and individuals of
the world, including those without any technical skill, can have a voice in
the decision-making process. As technical skill is brought to ICANN by the
SOs, the individuals' participation should bring to ICANN accountability to
all different facets of the worldwide Internet community, and should thus
prevent the risk of its manipulation in favor to limited or local economical
and political interests. For this reason, the bigger the number of
individuals that participate in ICANN is, the more ICANN can claim the right
to be the only ruler of the DNS and address space: raising the number and
variety of individuals involved should be a primary objective for ICANN in
the next years.
If ICANN fails in involving a huge number of individuals all over the world
and giving them true power (not just "input" or "consultation" or a couple
of seats in a board of 20, just to say they're there), it will just end up
in being a private group of entities that try to establish a monopoly over
the DNS management; it will be easy for governments to attack ICANN because
it is too US-centric, or for new TLD proponents to attack ICANN because it
limits the market competition without having any public authority to do so.
* How to avoid exploitment
Many pointed out that general At Large elections are dangerous, because in
some continents you had few voters which made the result not so meaningful,
and because lobbies and big corporations could try to subscribe big sets of
"dummy" people just to support their candidates.
This is absolutely true, as it is in any election, but the only way to avoid
it is to make participation higher, not lower. If you have 1000 At Large
members it is very easy for anyone to collect a significantly relevant list
of "dummy members" and subscribe them. If you have a million of them, it is
much more difficult. So ICANN should take a commitment to promote the
membership, not to reduce it.
* Membership fees
For the aforementioned reasons, you *need* to get as many members as
possible, to make the thing work. This is why you really want not to have
membership fees. This is especially true if you want to gain participation
in developing countries, where, no matter how low the fee is by Western
parameters, it will always be huge. But also in developed countries, as the
individuals you have to involve to make ICANN legitimate don't have the DNS
as their first though when they wake up in the morning, you have to lower
the entry barrier as much as possible.
* Incompatibility
I feel the need for some degree of incompatibility between the At Large and
the SOs. However, it is also true that many people among the At Large
activists are in fact techies and somewhat involved with the SOs, and that
for example, as users representation grows also at the ccTLD level, it could
happen to have ccTLD representatives coming from the users rather than from
the registrars/registries. So I'd just establish incompatibility rules at
the nomination level - you cannot run as a candidate both for a SO
directorate and an At Large directorate at the same time. And then, there
should just be disclosure of interests clauses, that force you to expose
your ties when you ask for a nomination.
* Intermediate levels
How could you think that a few people can represent the whole world? And how
can you avoid to discriminate non-English speaking people? You should
provide a discussion and opinion-making environment in all languages and
cultures of the world.
This is impossible to do from a central level, but has been the power and
the success of the Internet. So it is absolutely clear that ICANN must
support the birth of lower level of aggregations inside the At Large
Membership, but it also must delegate it to the users, since there is not a
single system that can be implemented centrally and will work for all the
world.
The solution to this problem, by me, is to allow members that think they
have something in common - the language, the political ideas, the objectives
- to aggregate and build their own forum and structure, and then to
propagate their voice to the top through a representation system. This is
what was addressed by my proposal of "At Large Communities" (see options K
and R).
* Hierarchy: how to avoid multi-point entry for users
One of the issues is how to avoid unnecessary multiplication of the users
representation structure. For example, I've started following the .eu
creation process - and many people there want to build a sort of European At
Large. But then, would I have to be part of ICANN At Large, .eu At Large,
.it At Large, and perhaps .net At Large or .foo At Large?
Definitely, there needs to be a semplification process in this. ICANN's At
Large should be built as "the mother of all users memberships", and ICANN
should provide support for the TLDs that wish to do so to use a geographical
subset of the At Large as their own users representation membership.
Reflecting the DNS structure, ICANN is "the root" from which all TLDs are
born. This should happen also for the membership (though it should not force
anyone to use it if they don't want to).
* The common denominator principle
Any civil community can live because democratical rules exist and can be
enforced. The cancellation of the domain is the virtual equivalent of a ban
from the community, and is the only easy and quick retaliating action the
community has to enforce its rules at a worldwide level. These rules include
dispute resolution policies, but also anti-spam and pro-netiquette rules,
that sooner or later will have to be introduced at a global level; even if
ICANN won't be the body to take care of this, it will still have in its
hands the main key for rule enforcement - a global control over domain
registration contracts.
Let's say that, for example, ICANN, on behalf of the Internet community,
decides to establish a .ngo domain for NGOs. Let's say that, for example, a
NGO named "Foo" exists in any part of the world. Let's also say that "Foo"
is a registered trademark in the US by Foo, Inc. How do you avoid that Foo,
Inc. sues the Foo NGO for trademark infringement if they register foo.ngo?
You should have a clause in all your registrations (no matter which TLD)
that says that you should accept TLD charters and don't enforce your
trademark where the community doesn't want you to do it, or you'll lose all
your domains. (This is what happens, for example, in sports self-discipline
tribunals, at least in Europe: if a football player is disqualified for a
month and his team goes to the common tribunals against it, it is breaking
the league contract and could be kicked out of the league.)
As someone else pointed out, I fear that without a protection of this kind,
the introduction of new TLDs will be basically useless, as trademark owners
will simply get sure that no one uses their trademark in any TLD, even if
they're not allowed to register it themselves - or in the worst case,
they'll go for a tribunal to rule their right to register their trademark in
any TLD, even restricted ones. Anyway, it will be very interesting to see
what happens if any museum registers <famous trademark>.museum :-)
But this also applies, for example, for people spamming through a .net
server to advertise a .com domain to .uk users. There must be a way to
enforce a global anti-spam policy.
So - following the same "hierarchy" idea mentioned before - ICANN should act
as the mediation and coordination point of all TLD policies. There certainly
needs to be freedom at the TLD level to define different policies, but
worldwide issues should be debated at the highest level and should be
propagated down to TLDs - and this should be written in the gTLD and ccTLD
contracts with ICANN. (Note that this is not a top-bottom process, as ICANN
Board is created from the bottom, so it represents also those same TLDs that
will have to cope with ICANN's worldwide policies.)
= Sparse comments on the options
* Option A
Option A is not so bad, even if I wouldn't like to be one of those people
moved from the DNSO to a tiny group inside the crowd of the At Large
members. Definitely the better of the three.
* Option B
Not so different from option A (am I missing something?). There is only a
ridiculous statement (see "Ridiculous statements" below) - or is it a poison
pill?
* Option C
Unacceptable - de facto, the At Large membership would be meaningless. At
the best, it could engage an endless loop by presenting the SOs only
extremistic candidates so that they'll end up not accepting any of them.
Very dangerous - I think that it would enhance contraposition, not reduce
it.
* Option D (Crawford-Johnson)
It dilutes the At Large too much (2 seats over 19). It misses my first and
basic point about why do we want an At Large after all. Unacceptable.
* Ridiculous statements
"CSO [Customer SO] must be self-structured and self funded, since it would
not provide financial support to ICANN." (Option B)
Apparently it seems that those million dollars entering the pockets of
registrars and registries every year (and that allow them to pay ICANN's
bills) are falling from the sky. Damn, it is evident that currently
customers don't pay a dime for the maintenance of the domain name system.
Good grief.
* Less ridiculous statements, but I don't agree either
"Each open seat on the Board viewed as an opportunity to add additional
skill sets that may be required at the time." (Option C)
A management board for an entity is not meant to have skills. It is meant to
represent all stakeholders of the entity and to balance their weight so that
the entity's decisions reflect the weighed desire of its members. If I run a
company and need a skill, I hire someone that has that skill. Domain name
registration is a wealthy business and certainly money isn't lacking, so
ICANN could hire any technically skilled people it needs to support the
Board in its decisions.
Sure, it is better if people in the Board have skills and understand the
technicalities of the problems. But that's not what they're meant to be
there for.
--
Vittorio Bertola