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ICANN At-Large Study
perp writes: "ICANN has published the draft of its At-Large recommendations. It's long, but it looks like they're trying to raise the bar for at-large membership by requiring at-large members to a) pay a fee and b) be a registered domain holder. Their comments about all the non-committed at-large members who "enrolled only because it was easy" gave me a laugh; it took three days of trying for me to register." The draft also proposes slashing At-Large board members from 9 to 6. But there are some good points in there about organizational issues.
...I tried numerous times, repeatedly, and couldn't in over a week of random attempts. ICANN's "legitimacy" to me is ALWAYS in question when they pull stupid stunts like this. If anything, it should be administered as the United States political system is-- each netizen can vote for a person to represent their part of the world, and each part of the world is given up to X many reps to represent them. (This would more closely model the U.S. Senate I suppose.) These same netizens would also elect a Director or President which would have veto power and be able to try to define the tasks ICANN tackles.
As it is right now, ICANN isn't much more than a government (DoC) mandated farce.
(Forgive me if this seems flame-like, but I'm sincerely unhappy with ICANN (on so many levels this post probably only hit the top one or two things I dislike about them).)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
ICANN represents an effort at global self-regulation that, if successful, has great merit in a number of different ways and if it fails, it has the potential to fuck up our lives in a number of different ways. I don't think that making it less accountable is likely to make it more successful.
The reccomendation that the at-large membership be comprised of domain-name holders rather than the broader internet user population is setting up a conflict of interest.
Domain names are primarily valuable currently because they are a scarce resource. By creating an at-large membership comprised entirely of domain name holders, they are setting up an entrenched interest that will oppose the proliferation of gTLDs, as Karl Auerbach has been pushing for.
Clearly, they hope that this action will not lead to his re-election, but will place someone more 'reasonable' in his place.
This is just another tactic aimed at maintaining an artificial scarcity of domain names, and sharpening ICANN as a tool to manufacture and maintain this scarcity. ICANN is looking more like the diamond cartel every day.
For the record, I currently own 35 domain names.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.