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ICANN Mulls Poll Taxes, Representation
Cutriss writes: "The ICANN seems to be thinking about giving in to public demands. According to this article on Wired.com mentions that ICANN is considering allowing domain owners to elect their board of directors. It's a step in the right direction. I wonder if domain owners could collaborate and cast a collective vote of no confidence, absolving ICANN of its responsibilities..." I wouldn't call it a step in the right direction since each revision to ICANN's Board involves less individual representation and more corporate representatives. There's another story with some quotes from Karl Auerbach. The At-Large study that we talked about earlier has now been released in its final form. If you don't like the way ICANN is going, please consider attending their meetings. Next one is in Los Angeles next week.
Frankly having people vote who have internet domains isn't all that much better than anyone who has an email address. I personally own nearly six or so domains (this is not even including the ones that I am listed at a technical contact for due to my web development work). This also shuts out a lot more people that would other-wise be able to vote, I can name several people who probably would choose to vote yet this will cut them out.
Unfortunately there is no good way to solve the problem of one person voting multiple times. There are tons of people with hundreds of domains under their belts. Granted while it is easier to get e-mail addresses than it is domains the elections could still be off balanced by a single person with many domain names. Perhaps an even better solution would be allowing one vote per IP address or something along the lines of that. Again, it wouldn't be perfect or promise that only one vote per person is counted. It's something to think about. If anybody has any other ideas for solutions, I'd like to hear about them. It seems like something I'd be interested in researching and refining.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
You can have a democracy of special interests, a democracy of thieves, a democracy of madmen, or whatever.
If you think your viewpoint is relevent and important, then you should do something.
In the People are Lazy theory, People tend to do only those things that are utterly important to them. This allows more ambitious folks a free hand.
This might not been in your best interest.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
How is that an improvment???
Ultimately, the problem is that ICANN is getting too cozy with the corporations that dominate the web.
As mentioned in the article, the problem with the last "public" election was that it suffered from massive fraud by people opening throwaway email accounts to vote with.
Certainly a "one domain = one vote" scheme would heavily favor corporations which regularly buy blocks of domains to protect their trademark turf.
However, even a "one domain owner = one vote" scheme would be unfair to the public. While they might be limited to a single vote for the majority of their domains, only big corporations (think M$) have the money to rig the elections by purchasing domains through shell organizations (think The Association for Competitive Technology).
At least when the primary mechanism for ICANN voting fraud was free, the public could still compete with the corporations.
ICANN is only relavent as long as everybody uses their DNS. I don't understand why somebody with some moral authority in the IT world doesn't just set up an alternative. I know there are in fact several alternatives, but these are private companies that nobody has heard about.
So who could do it? The IETF and the ACM come to mind. There are probably a few others.
Note that you don't have to switch all at once, you can still fall back to legacy ICANN domains if the new domain system doesn't find a match.
My "ultimate" domain name scheme would allow anything as a .tld (although you could set up a few with restricted access, perhaps '.trademark' or something like that). That way, for example, IBM could use "buy.ibm", while somebody who doesn't like IBM could use "dontbuy.ibm". There would be no way to purchase all the domains under a .tld.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
What I don't get, is that when I signed up for At Large membership, I think I remember that there was a snail mail step, where I received some code thingie on a physical piece of paper. Doesn't that limit the fraud to people with multiple physical snailmail addresses? That's still do-able, but a much bigger pain-in-the-ass than setting up multiple email accounts.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.