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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.
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!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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."
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.
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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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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
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.
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
It's bad enough now trying to work out what a company's domain name is. What if they could be under several other tens of TLDs?