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

[Mike Roberts]

Sandy -

If you want to do something expensive, like another ICANN  At Large 
worldwide open election and the related organization to support it, 
and you don't have the money yourself, then you've got to convince 
some folks who do have money to fund it, or you have to round up a 
whole lot of people like yourself with a little money, or both.

So far, advocates of At Large have done neither.  There is no obvious 
momentum, and as Joop said earlier today, there is no leadership.  Of 
the over seven thousand subscribers to this list, 90% of the postings 
come from fewer than 20 people.

This is not popular democracy at work.

John Gardner died this weekend on the Stanford campus just over the 
hill from me.  He was an idol to young Americans like my wife and 
myself in the idealistic '60s.  He got us into public sector 
organizations to help make democracy work, and some of us stayed 
there the rest of our careers.  He wrote books like "Excellence" and 
"Self-Renewal" that energized students and adults alike.  He had an 
eye and an ear for the art of the possible.  He was the author of the 
famous phrase that a society without plumbers is a society that won't 
work. When he thought that the political process was becoming 
corrupt, he founded Common Cause, which has 200,000 dues paying 
members who care about effective democracy and are willing to pay to 
help make it happen.

ICANN doesn't need a self-organized, self-sustaining worldwide At 
Large organization to do its job.  Names will get registered, root 
entries will get made, new DNS technology will be deployed - all 
without the participation of an individual users organization.   As 
the ALSC and others have said, the existence of an ALSO makes process 
for ICANN harder, not easier.  It would be noisy and it takes time 
and energy and dollars to separate signal from noise and balance it 
against other stakeholder interests.

When push comes to shove, the legitimacy argument comes up short, way 
short.  There is no statute for ICANN to enforce, there is no 
legislation, there are no governmentally imposed taxes.  There is a 
four year old cabinet agency policy paper whose citations of 
authority are so flimsy that Michael Froomkin gets a lot of journal 
space calling them flawed and the European Commission is rattling its 
saber saying it's no longer convinced they are valid.  Other 
approaches are readily available.

No, all there is to make AL work is us.  Browning said that our reach 
exceeds our grasp and the difference is aspiration.  But so far, and 
there is still time left, ICANN At Large has not even demonstrated 
its threshold of grasp.

- Mike


At 12:18 AM -0500 2/18/02, Sandy Harris wrote:
>Mike Roberts wrote:
>
>>  What the 2000 voting proved ...
>
>Was that running such elections is a hard problem and, not much to
>anyone's surprise, ICANN didn't solve it completely on the first
>try.
>
>>  Let's face it, the ALSC does not recommend a repetition of such an
>>  election;
>
>I agree that the 2000 election did not work very well, and that the
>process shoiuld not be repeated without changes.
>
>However, the nonsense about cutting the At Large Board membership to
>six does not solve that problem. Running an international open election
>is just as hard whether you're electing 6 or 9 board members.
>
>So let's drop the irrelevant crap about reducing representation of
>users at large, and talk about the real issue: how should ICANN run
>elections for At Large Board members?
>
>Here is a 1998 letter assuring NTIA of ICANN's excellent intentions:
>http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/press/ICANN111098.htm
>
>" ... elect the nine At Large Directors. ... the Board has an unconditional
>     mandate to create a membership structure that will elect the At Large
>     Directors of the Board
>
>" ... the Board, which will consist of the elected representatives of the
>       entire Internet community
>
>" Esther Dyson
>" Interim Chairman
>" On Behalf of the ICANN Board
>
>Note that word "unconditional".
>
>Given that ICANN has an unconditional requirement to elect half its board
>as "elected representatives of the entire Internet community", how should
>we set about doing that?
>
>In other words, how can we run elections to elect nine At Large board
>members as soon as possible?
>
>As I see it, that is the on;y question that belongs on the table.
>
>>  democratic governments elected by systems with respectable
>>  measures of democracy will not sanction it;  and the current ICANN
>>  Board will never vote for it.
>
>So let's get a properly constituted board, with nine openly elected
>At Large members, and go from there.
>
>>  A year ago, I suggested that if there were genuine support for a
>>  self-sustaining At Large organization,
>
>It is not clear to me that we need such an organisation. We clearly
>need a mechanism for "the entire Internet community" to have some
>opportunity both to follow ICANN events and to vote for directors.
>I completely fail to see that this requires an "At Large organisation".
>
>Of course this might be your answer to Esther's:
>
>" ... the Board has an unconditional mandate to create a membership
>" structure that will elect the At Large  Directors of the Board
>
>but, even then, it is not clear why this requires an organisation,
>let alone a "self-sustaining" organisation.
>
>What it appears to me to require is dropping the part of the bylaws
>that says ICANN does not have members. That would seem to be an
>obvious pre-requisite to "creating a membership structure" of any
>kind.
>
>  > 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.
>
>Depending on finances, I sometimes do that for EFF and ACM, and have
>often thought I should get around to joining CPSR.
>
>As you are no doubt aware, all these organisations and several other
>public interest groups take positions on matters relevant to ICANN.
>See for example:
>
>http://www.eff.org/IP/Internet_address_disputes/
>http://www.acm.org/serving/IG.html
>http://www.cpsr.org/internetdemocracy/
>
>Show me some evidence that ICANN has "programs [I] can believe in".
>Dealing seriously with some of the criticism on the above pages,
>especially the CPSR critique of the ALSC report, would be a fine
>start. Then I'll consider contributing.


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