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ICANN At-Large Elections Process
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Essentially, they have power over the entire internet addressing system: domain names and IP addresses. People criticize the U.S. FCC for stifling low-power radio, or Congress for trying to ban indecent speech - well, ICANN has more power over communications than either of those entities, and far less accountability.
ICANN's board structure is a complex one. Probably it cannot be fully analyzed except by people devoted to the task full-time. It was designed to give corporations the dominant voice in administering the internet. A great amount of effort has been expended in stacking the deck, making sure that individuals and public interest groups do not gain any significant voice in the process. You've already seen the results of these actions. One such is the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, which ICANN required all domain name registrars to adopt, and which makes sure that if any corporation covets your domain name, they can take it away without any problems.
But enough of that. ICANN is run by a 19-member Board of Directors. The original members were picked out of the blue (literally; no one knows how the original members were chosen, or , more precisely, whoever knows isn't telling). ICANN has been directed to move to an election process by the Commerce Department, and that's what is now underway.
Of course, the elections also have to be stacked. Business interests have already spoken. They get to pick 9 of the 19 members. Originally, nine more were supposed to be picked by the At-Large membership (that is, the general population of internet users). (The final seat would be the President of ICANN-the-Corporation.) So already, business interests would have had a 10-9 majority on the Board. I say, "would have had", because 10-9 seemed a little too close for comfort, and the At-Large elections have been cut down to just five members, to make sure they wouldn't get too much power compared to the corporate interests in ICANN. Each of ICANN's five geographic regions will elect one member.
(This is the way committees in the U.S. Congress works as well - the political party with a majority in either of the Houses gets a majority on all the committees as well, to ensure that if push comes to shove, their party wins. It is a poor omen for the future to note that corporate interests have a permanent majority in running the internet.)
The At-Large Nomination process is also skewed. The business interests in ICANN get to nominate candidates for the At-Large elections as well, and though it's theoretically possible to get nominated without going through the Nominating Committee (sort of akin to a write-in candidate), the bar is set so high that probably no one will succeed in such a candidacy. So it's likely that the choice of candidates for the At-Large election is going to look something like the choice between Gush and Bore for U.S. President - a choice between business representative X and business representative Y.
Nevertheless, you should get involved. It's your internet that ICANN is governing, and if you plan to spend any time on the net in the future, you'd better speak now. The electorate (the number of people who've registered to vote in ICANN's elections) is extremely small - less than 20,000 people all told. Because of the regional split, the members for Africa and Latin America could be elected with only a few hundred people participating! Your vote will count much more than it would in almost any other election process, and you're controlling the future of the worldwide communications network. It's worth the effort.
A few links:
- Declan McCullagh posted some info on the election process and statistics on the electorate
- ICANNWATCH's comments on the Board elections
- Join Now. The registration process could close at any time.
Could be our best hope for world peace and fair trade practices.
No, vote for ME! I have no constituency to speak of, therefore I have no baggage. Vote for me!
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Sour grapes, anyone?
Who wants to get elected?
"I think ICANN, I think ICANN"...
I say, screw 'em. What a dumb name. We can set up our own @#*( domain servers, to ensure that little kids, Scottish clans, and small countries (who have already sold their TLD's and pocketed the cash) can get their names before the big corporations do. Nyah nyah.
...or, we could just get a monarchy there, and let Al Gore decide! After all, if we let the Slashdot community run this instead, you know Alan Cox and Hemos would be running the show. (darn slashdot polls!)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Michael,
That was an over-harsh summary. Yes, corporations do represent the majority of ICANN membership, and this does skew things towards the corporation point. However, remember that board members are not supposed to be flunkies - they actually have to know something about the Internet. Look at the IETF - the vast majority of people involved in the IETF are sponsored by their companies to work on a group.
That said, I think we certainly do need to press for more representation, and we certainly need to use what we have.
The Nominating Committee needs to be done away with. All nominations should come from the Community-at-large. We'll have to see if the 10% nomination limit is over-restrictive (I suspect it is, and sometime like a 1% of all elegible voters would probably be better).
Remember, you can only vote for one ICANN member - the one covering your region. However, you can help NOMINATE someone from another region.
That said, I'm going to explore a Self-Nomination run. About the only way I could conceive of something like this working is to get the backing of some large /.-like forum that has a wide reach. USENIX, IEEE, or the ACM, maybe, too.
Just out of curiosity, would any of you vote for me (seriously)?
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I hereby nominate Jon Katz for the ICANN ...
board of directors
[Insert pithy quote here]
This is all very similar to what happened in 1776 in Philadelphia. A bunch of pissed off merchants and land owners got together and collectively said these things in this order:
...." etc, etc.
..."
"Fuck the Brits, we're running the show around here."
"We hate kings, so scrap that idea. Forget taxes without representation. Forget
"Ok, now what? Umm... there's gonna be a president that the people pick and there's gonna be a congress
You get the idea.
In order to "hijack the net back" what would you need to do?
First of all, let everyone know that we're in charge now. Get the names back. That means a group of people, probably academics or researchers or curious other parties, with access to some significant bandwidth would have to set up a loose network of root servers. Then publicize and get lots of people to start using those root servers. The difficult part is the next step... getting people to stop using the existing roots.
After you get the names back... Revert to pristine protocols, pristine policies, etc. This warrants an explanation... Regardless of each of our personal opinions about good and bad, I think we can all agree that certain extensions to various protocols are controversial. For instance cookies. There are lots of widely varying opinions about cookies, informed and uninformed and everything in between. And it's not so much the technology, but what companies like DoubleClick are trying or have tried to do with them. So the "Geek Congress" convenes somewhere and what all the shitty standards are and then scraps those that are.
Next the net has to be taken in a new direction. The corporate interests have taken all things Internet in a certain direction for, I dunno, two or three years now? After we take things back and clean them up, we take the net in a new direction. We write rules like (this is just an example), Slashdot elects one representative, UF elects one, ADM elects one, etc. and then we've got this body of rulemakers who are basicly running the net. And what is their basis of power? Two things: netizens elected them and they control the guts (root servers, standards bodies).
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Speaking as a member of WG-B, that "Sunrise + 20" proposal was most certainly NOT from "WG-B". It was from the Chair of WG-B, and from the TM lobby. WG-B wholeweartedly opposed it. If you look at the next-to-final report (the one that was originally the final report, until Palage decided that the final report should say something other than the final report did), you'll find many comments opposed to the Sunrise+20. You'll find alternatives.
Sunrise+20 was a back-room, outside-the-process idea cooked up to benefit registries and TM holders. Just like the UDRP is, which was a direct product of WG-A, and was achieved in the same manner: backroom deals, pushed through as the product of the WG, but without WG approval, and ratified by the DNSO names council against the loud outcry of the participants.
I want it to be known far and wide that the result of WG-B, and certain "results" of WG-C (to add new TLDs to the roots) are NOT the product of the WG themselves, but are products of several individuals who think the ICANN process exists to serve their specific interests.
Go read the archives, and see for yourselves. Don't sample them; read through them ALL. WG-A is supposed to be here, but mysteriously, all but a few messages have vanished. I've just noticed this, and am prepared to raise hell about it.
WG-B is here. Read through the archives, particularly at the end. Note that those who are not TM attorneys participating to protect their corporate interests are decrying the entire process. Something you'd see in the WG-A archives as well, if they still existed.
WG-C from Nov. 1999 to present.
Go. Read. Educate yourself. Make up your own mind. And if you think there's something wrong going on here, for crying out loud, GET INVOLVED!
Most of this crap has occurred because of the corporate dominance within ICANN.
.@.
Can I nominate myself? See my previous post at here
> Do you know what exactly a board member of ICANN does, or where they meet, when, if they ;-)
> have to pay for it...etc? Can you please enlighten me as to the responsabilities?
>
>Oh, yeah, and your qualifications.
They meet all over the world (the next meeting is in Yokohama, Japan), members are not paid, but their travel expenses are covered. (I travel pretty cheap, but I still could not afford frequent trips).
ICANN is responsible for "overall technical management of the Internet"(right, sure...). A board member votes on new rules governing registrars, guidelines on how namespace and addresses are handed out, standard port numbers (although I always that was what RFCs were for), name disputes, and improvements on the Root Server System.
As for why I want to be one... Well, I believe that most of the major figures in the community are major figures because they already have responsibilities to and projects in the community. So, unless they really want to add to their load, they might have to choose between this and whatever they were doing before. I would rather have Cmdr Taco working on Slashdot, or ESR writing that fourth paper. If someone like that were to go for this, I would disappear like fog on a bright day. I have not done anything important for the community and I would like to do so.
What are my pluses and minuses over the average reader? I have almost no conflicts of interest (list: I like slashdot, I have a few relatives that work for companies that contract out to the government, and I am still a student). I have a strong personal set of ethics, my goal in life is to teach CS to 6 through 12, and I know the internet was created because a guy at ARPA did not like having a different terminal for each system he wanted to access (Not to survive nuclear war).
On the other hand, I am getting my bachelor's in CS but I am going to get my master's in Education so I am not fully geek, and my professional experience is limited because I am in my early twenties, and I still have not finished my formal education.
With the "power of the people" already so diminished (only 5 seats out of 19), I think we need to play a little dirty to even the odds.
What if Slashdot holds a mock election for those 5 board members, with all Slashdot/ICANN members who participate agreeing to abide by the results and vote that way in the real elections?
That way, our vote will count for much more, since we won't be voting against each other.
This would be especially useful if we can get people helping from Latin America and Africa... Any Slashdot readers from there? We have a shot at influencing the selection of 9 board members, then.
Keep dreaming, pal. ICANN may have a lot of power, sure, but let's not get carried away here. Do you really believe that the Internet is the only, or even the major, means of communication in use today? Sorry, it's one of many. Even though it may be our preferred method, that doesn't mean it's the biggest. The US government's power to limit speech within its borders (First Amendment considerations notwithstanding) goes FAR beyond what ICANN is capable of.
This sort of haranguing from YRO is getting really tiresome.
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
>ALL businesses would be able to use their name. No cybersquatting, no sex sites and no infringement.
Oh? and there will be no commercial sex sites? And businesses in the same country can't have the same name? Good idea though, banishing all business to a separate part of the net.. makes it easier to avoid..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
wow.. bona fide business trademark. Is that like military intelligence?
.reg TLD as a lot easier to attain then a .xxx, because a trademark is checkable, whereas "being porn" is not something easily defined. And ofcourse businesses have hurt a lot more people than porn.
Ofcourse there are TMed sex sites.. playboy has a TM (probably.. I haven't checked this, it's really just made up). I see the
News at 11: porn movie leaves large slick of KY jelly on alaskan beach
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Nice to see that some of the functionality built into the process is at least beginning to run. I don't feel the At-Large elections will provide a huge voice for those of us on the sidelines looking in, but some is better than no voice at all.
-
I think the key is to -- in as much as the At-Large membership is able to -- rattle the cage of ICANN as much as we can so they remember why they are really there. This is not about power or control or even who'se the smartest one to lead; it's about forging and retaining some real direction, something sorely lacking at this time.
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Additionally if you are a member you can view the self-nominating rules. Because of the difficulty they have imposed in the nomiating process it seems only a canidate endorsed by Slashdot itself could get the support to make it to the ballet.
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www.securitygeeks.com
http://whittenburgs.com
Atlanta is Peace, love and traffic jams!
A huge number of the people who joined the ICANN are US Americans. Ok, that's obvious. The next country on the list is Germany with > 4000 people who joined. All the other countries are just minorities who won't be able to change anything through their right to vote ...
*ponder
With all the corporate representation, I think ICANN should make it's official motto "ICANN: The 'com' in .com"
-Denor
Hell, you don't even need to rewrite DNS resolution to use anything other than bind, you just need some new TLD servers. Anyone out there have bandwidth to spare? A lot of bandwidth?
The only reason they have the power to put 72 business execs and 1 non-biz-affiliated person on a board is because we give them the power.
If your PIN was of the format "PIN-12345", the "PIN-" is part of it. Mine was, and it took me about ten tries to realize what the problem was. Honest, it took me that long to realize that whoever was issuing numbers was playing games.
When will Slashdot editors start using some journalistic integrity and stop pandering to the paranoid extremes? At best, the above statement is barely true. More probably, it's an outright lie. Can XYZ corporation actually take any domain name they want? Then why hasn't any "corporation" snatched away slashdot.com?
Perhaps when Slashdot editors start to practice honesty and truthfulness in their articles, instead of the ethics of self-interest and paranoia, we'll have some objective reporting. Until then, I'll take most of what I read here with a big grain of salt.
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
ICANN is a standards body, nothing more. If the geeks of the world came up with an alternate standard, and put enough content up in a manner only accessable by the other standard, ICANN would be powerless to do anything to preserve their power. True, the fact that the standards body is controlled by corporates is a bad sign, but if they abuse their power too much (for example, forcing corporate access to info on users of all anonymity servers, under threat of loss of their domain) they could well discover that, unlike the world at large, the geek world has a rather high revolutionary content. How long do you think it would take us to hijack the net back? Honestly?
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
I was thinking about giving the vote it's due and casting a vote for Mickey Mouse. Then I considered that Disney would probably cheer the result, and have someone proxy vote for their verminous "property".
-L
Because of the restrictive nomination process, the only way for a consumer representative who is not nominated by the business interests to succeed is if a community like /. unofficially nominates a representative of its own as the default write in. That would ensure that people who want a true at-large representative have the option of voting for one who is not nominated through official channels, while ensuring that such a representive could receive enough votes to win.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
I submitted this article last week, but it didn't make it through. Since it's an ICANN subject, I'll just attach it here.
News.com had an article last week about the "Sunrise + 20" proposal from ICANN's Working Group B. It would allow trademark owners to register their mark and up to 20 variations on that mark in the new TLDs that ICANN is proposing -- before the general public has a chance to register a single domain. With over 1 million trademarks registered in the United States alone, the math works out to a possible 20+ million domains being registered before Joe Average gets a shot. (There are 17.5 million .com, .net, and .org total right now.)
The Working Group B comments regarding the proposal were overwhelmingly supportive -- not too suprising considering it's comprised of mostly trademark lawyers representing folks like Time Warner, Dow Jones & Co., Kodak, Bell Atlantic, Major League Baseball, Intel, 3M, the Motion Picture Association, Viacom, etc.
You know, the more I think about DNS, TLD's and internet name/adress issues, the more I realize that it's really a comfort-issue thing. The logical thing would be to de-regulate TLD's heavily, and in fact the entire way people perceive internet domains.
If company XYZ Holdings wantsThe way people perceive the "Internet" is mostly through URLs, most people use the net for Web browsing and email, and to a smaller extent IRC and other relay-communications protocols like ICQ. Now, these URLs are dreadfully boring and regulated. Why is "www" such an overused hostname? This is something that people CAN control. Why use www? What's the point? Well, simple: It's a comfort zone thing for most internet users. THat's what they're used to, that's what they're comfortable with.
In short, it would be great to de-regulate DNS and create our own TLD's. But unfortunately, because of a defined mindset, most people wouldn't want to, (common internet users).
- Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform- Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris
Cedric Balthazar Rotherwood
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform +
System Admin. for Solaris
Does this mean that we can, by popular election, vote in such wonderful TLDs as:
.sucks
.god
.atemyballs
.isawebsite
?
Slashdot is old news. To get the real scoop, try GeekFlavor.
After all, if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't have any of this!
Slashdot is old news. To get the real scoop, try GeekFlavor.