Re: [ALSC-Forum] Self-regulation and ICANN

[Eric C. Grimm]

Part of this has to do with the reality (and no disrespect to Esther -- she 
may not have understood this at the time) that the fix was in from the outset.

If you want to incentivize the process to get At-Large voting to work, then 
state from the outset that no major policy decisions can be made by ICANN 
until the Board has concluded that At-Large voting has worked effectively and 
the representation system is functional.  All of a sudden, the resources of a 
lot of powerful players are focused on making At-Large voting work in their 
favor.  We could even incentivize the process NOW by saying that ICANN's 
pre-At-Large decisions are all suspended until we fix the At-Large process 
and submit them to a referendum of the modified and more-representative Board.

Instead, what we did was permit certain large institutional players game the 
system, by making sure all the IMPORTANT fixes were already in (i.e., UDRP 
was ALREADY established, a go-slow track was ALREADY in place on gTLDs, etc.) 
BEFORE any at-large voting took place.  So, from the Corporate American 
viewpoint, all At-Large could accomplish was undoing the agenda that they had 
already purchased.  

So, now the incentives are all backwards from the standpoujnt of Democracy.  
There is a very influential constitutency now whose incentives are to prevent 
At-Large ever from working, and to kill At-Large to the degreee it is 
possible.  Instead, I predict that At-Large will follow the same track as any 
other issue that does not line up with the agenda of those in charge.  It 
will be discussed and studied to death and nothing will ever really get done. 
 But ICANN will at least contend it "listened" -- for what that is worth.

ECG

On Wednesday 18 July 2001 11:15, Kent Crispin wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 12:41:33AM -0400, Sandy Harris wrote:
> > desertbobp wrote:
> > > I agree.  Instead of complaining that it's not *perfect*, let's move
> > > on and at least broaden the number of atLarge board members to
> > > what was originally proposed.
> >
> > Absolutely. that should be the first recommendation the At Large Study
> > makes.
>
> Unfortunately, it would be an incoherent recommendation, since it begs
> the question of what is meant by the term "at-large board member".
> Without defining the selection mechanism the term is essentially
> useless.
>
> The current proposed selection process is a global election.  Completely
> independent of the quality of the new directors, the global election
> experiment we went through was an abysmal failure:
>
>     - It was in vastly over-budget;
>     - it was in very heavily gamed by national and industrial
>     interests;
>     - security-wise it was a disaster waiting to happen -- we don't know
>     if hackers broke in and manipulated the data, and worse, we have no way
>     of knowing
>     - while I know Nii, and think very highly of him, the fact that he
>     won with 67 votes out of 130 for the entire African region is
>     at the very least compelling evidence of how far all this from the
>     everyday concerns of the average human on the planet.  It certainly
>     is evidence that the elected directors are not in any
>     meaningful sense elected representatives of their regions.  And,
>     while the African region is a rather stark example, examination of
>     each of the other regions voting results leads to similar
>     conclusions.
>     - the huge piles of returned envelopes, mostly from China and other
>     Asian countries, are compelling evidence of the difficulties that
>     come from language, infrastructure, cultural, and other barriers.
>
> It is important to note that the above failures are based on intrinsic
> problems.  The fact is that kind of global election proposed for the
> "atlarge directors" cannot be supported by the the technical, social,
> and cultural infrastructure that currently exists.
>
> To summarize: The question of the number of atlarge directors is
> basically a red herring.  The fundamental problem is the selection
> process.