[ALSC-Forum] Re: User Interest in ICANN is Broad and Deep

[Mike Roberts]

Hans -

With all due respect to your continuing efforts on behalf of ICANN At 
Large, the public interest in At Large is hardly broad and deep. 
And the statistics contained in the latest issue of Cyber-Federalist 
do not sustain such a claim.

What the 2000 voting proved most importantly is the ease with which 
such an open electronic election can be captured by self-interested 
national campaigns.  Four countries out of the 180 or so in the 
United Nations - Brazil, China, Germany and Japan - accounted for 
98,273 or 62% of the total registration count of 158,593, and three 
of those countries put their candidates on the Board.

Let's face it, the ALSC does not recommend a repetition of such an 
election;  democratic governments elected by systems with respectable 
measures of democracy will not sanction it;  and the current ICANN 
Board will never vote for it.

A year ago, I suggested that if there were genuine support for a 
self-sustaining At Large organization, then a few thousand relatively 
well off cybercitizens ought to be willing to contribute $100 to help 
get things started.  This is an amount that professionals, at least 
in the US, pay to their engineering society, their academic 
discipline society, and similar organizations whose programs they 
believe in.  The result was not only silence, but yet another 
outbreak of "chip-on-the-shoulder" righteous rhetoric that "they" - 
an undefined set of other ICANN constituents - had an obligation to 
pay for At Large.    "They" have made it clear that they decline to 
be taxed for this particular cause.  The current ALSC survey is 
asking for expressions of willingness to pay membership fees and we 
can only hope that the results will be encouraging.

The efforts of the ICC are laudable, but hardly plausible in the 
total absence of any financial commitment by the individuals and 
organizations involved.  There is an unfortunate "free lunch" 
atmosphere surrounding the pronouncements about an At Large 
entitlement.  Some have even asserted that paying for the privilege 
of a voting membership in At Large constitutes an anti-democratic 
poll tax.

The fact of the matter is that democracy is not free; it takes 
individual energy, commitment and money to succeed.  We pay a lot in 
America for our voting rights - I see it twice a year in the 
thousands of dollars I pay in property taxes to local and state 
governments who provide election services, and those who do not own 
property pay it in their monthly apartment rents.

At Large comes up for the final vote in Ghana in March and it's 
nearly dead.  If' there's no money where the mouth is, if there is no 
genuine personal commitment to form and invigorate local and regional 
At Large organizations, the handwriting is on the wall.

- Mike
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