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

[Vittorio Bertola]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 08:15:30 -0700, you wrote:

>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;

Of course, but you shouldn't forget that an electoral process *is* meant to
bring up the interests of those who vote, weighed by the number of votes
they can aggregate. Surely there should be measures to prevent that, for
example, someone that acts as a SO costituency representative can also try
to be elected as an At Large representative; and the system should try to
encourage a worldwide approach rather than a nationalistic one. And anyway,
it's much more probable that national and industrial interests will be
promoted by an ICANN ruled by industry lobbies and national governments,
rather than from an ICANN ruled by elective representatives of all the
Internet users of the world.

>    - 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

This is or could be true of anything on the Internet, and either you think
that no secure activity is possible on the Internet (but then why do you use
it?) or that election.com was a bunch of incompetent people (but then we
should change them). Anyway, I assume that since they are doing this as
their core business they are quite careful about security...

>    - 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.

While I partly agree on the conclusion that there can be doubts on the
effective representativeness of at least some of the elected Directors, the
way to solve this is to have more people involved in the election, not less!
So you should ask for a bigger involvement of the mass users, not for a
smaller one. If participation is low, lobbies can easily take over the
election. If it is high, it is much more difficult for them to do so.

>    - 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.

I am sure that there are difficulties tied to this. Anyway, there will
always be practical difficulties in anything you do. I personally have done
in the past many proposals about how to overcome barriers coming from
differences in language and culture, and many others did. It's just a matter
of finding the system that works better - obviously, no perfect system
exists.

>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. 

This is what you say. I don't agree. You are saying that because the people
of the world are so many and so different, we should accept that they don't
have a voice in governing the Internet, and that Internet government should
be left to... who? The SO's? The governments?

>To summarize: The question of the number of atlarge directors is
>basically a red herring.  The fundamental problem is the selection
>process.

I agree that the selection process is very important, but first I'd like to
see a principle clearly recognized: that all active and interested Internet
users have to be involved in ICANN, electing directly (at least) half of the
Board.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology

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