Re: [ALSC-Forum] Membership

[Karl Auerbach]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Mike Roberts wrote:

> Danny, you've got to be pulling our leg on this one.  The statutory
> membership issue has been hashed and rehashed innumerable times since
> it got a thorough going over by the first membership committee in the
> winter and spring of 1999.

It may have been hashed and rehashed, in private, by those who somehow
think that ICANN, a California Corporation, can declare itself immune from
the laws of the state in which ICANN chose to incorporate itself.

ICANN could also declare, with equally null effect, that its employees are
exempt from taxation and traffic laws ... or that pigs can fly.

Simply stated, the Board of Directors of ICANN has no power to nullify a
law duly passed by the legislature of its voluntarily chosen home,
California, and signed into law by the Governor of the state.

I posted my analysis quite some time ago:
http://www.cavebear.com/icann-board/platform.htm#full-members


> It's very clear that granting corporate statutory membership to
> individuals would fundamentally discriminate against other stakeholder
> interests in ICANN

The notion that a fully empowered At-large would "fundamentally
discriminate against other stakeholder interests in ICANN" is a claim that
is as clearly flawed and obviously invalid as a claim that granting the
right to vote to women is a fundamental and impermissable discrimination
against men.

ICANN is so far tilted in favor of commercial interests, that it can be
fairly said that the public has no role in ICANN except to pay,
indirectly, the bills, and suffer the very anti-user lex-ICANNia called
the UDRP.

The premise that there are corporate and institutional "stakeholders" that
must have a role in ICANN is as valid as would be a demand that claims
that the United States must balance its elections by giving the vote to
the "stakeholders" known as Exxon, ADM, Ford, Bridgestone/Firestone, and
Verisign.

Those institutional "stakeholders" are perfectly free to make their
positions known, to spend their immense assets to influence public
opinion, and to otherwise try to convince the electors of the worth of
their claims.  However, when it comes to the governance of the Internet -
and ICANN is no less a government than the Pacific is an ocean - the power
of the vote belongs with the individual people, not with artificial legal
constructs known as corporations.

ICANN has spent the last three years serving the Internet up on a gilded
platter to wealthy corporate bodies.  For example, as the result of one
ICANN vote alone, Versign's net worth went up by $3,500,000,000 in one
day.

And now, this ALSC report wants to further enrich Verisign (and its new
friends, the owners of .biz, .info, and .name) by forcing those who want
to partake of the meager leavings left to the net community by this ALSC
report to pay money, in the form of coerced purchases of domain names, to
these companies that already dominate ICANN's policymaking and derive
large cash-flows from those policies.

		--karl--