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ICANN Board Spurns Democratic Elections
Pelerin writes "At its meeting in Ghana, ICANN has
voted against the proposals made
in the Final Report on ICANN At-Large Membership, which among other things proposed
an At-Large Supporting Organization (ALSO), which
would hold elections for At-Large seats on the
ICANN board. Membership in ALSO would have been "based on individual domain name holders". In today's resolution ICANN says that it "is not persuaded that global elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process" and proceeded to reject the proposals,
while at the same time engaging in a bit of
double-speak about its action according to dissenting board member Karl Auerbach. It looks like ICANN is leaning towards its presidents' reform proposal which argues that ICANN suffers from "Too Much Process" among other problems, and that seats on the board should be chosen by the board itself, from among
nominations submitted by governments and a new
Nominating Committee (NomCom)."
"based on individual domain name holders".
This would bias the membership heavily in favor of corporate members.
In a way, I'm at least a little bit happy to hear that they won't be conducting elections. This sounds bad at first, but consider this: the only people who would have been allowed to vote were domain name holders, and who owns most of the domains out there? Large corporations. Things are bad now, but if these corporations got to choose who to put on the ICANN board, they wouldn't get any better. No, they would vote for the candidate who would best represent their corporate interests (and screw over the little guy). There's got to be a better way.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Just so many bad puns with that name... anyway..
In today's resolution ICANN says that it "is not persuaded that global elections are the only or the best means of achieving meaningful public representation or the informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process"
...What? So suggest something that is. OF COURSE it's not the ONLY, probably not the BEST, but unless you suggest something BETTER, let's go with this one. I personally think a global Internet election would be perfect for this. You'd have to find some way to make it secure against kiddies bombing the votes one way or the other, but I'd say that'd count as "informed participation of Internet users in the ICANN process."
Except they won't do that. They just want to be gods on the Internet... "NO DOMAIN FOR YOU!" Egh..
You just have to have a trusty worthy dictator.
I somehow do not see these folks as all being properly qualified in this regard.
at least, in other times, there was the appearance of legitamcy where a large body voted power to a few strong men. Here, there isn't even that.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So, what we're seeing here is the same process that goes into forming a gov't. The people want representation, but the gov't claims they don't want huge processes, so they may allow other gov'ts to suggest (or maybe appoint) members of the board, but then you'll have the same problem of a country of states - some gov'ts represent a larger portion of the internet population, so we should get more representatives, but other smaller countries would be equally drowned out, so we set it up like the US republic?
No, this is going to be another "Good old boy" club, where all the board memebers do things for each other and for their own prestige and power. They nominate others who will help them in their own work, and shun anyone that doesn't comply.
They claim no responsability to anyone, least of all their users, so they will actually become targets of corporate lobbies and 'gifts'.
So, let's look back on history, and see if we can find examples of how such organizations and governements were effectively changed by their citizens.
Move along, nothing to see here, politics as usual.
-Adam
Does anyone else find it funny that the meeting were held in Ghana, which is relatively proximate to another area where democratic elections were 'spurned'--that's right, Zimbabwe.
ICANN is no better than Mugabe and his henchman--hell, at least they gave the impression that the election was fair.
<steam>Anyone want to join me in a holy crusade against ICANN?</steam>
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
" ICANN Reform - a personal view
Note: This is not the view of any body, organization or entity that I
sometimes represent. It is my personal attempt to organize thoughts that can
form the basis of saying something about how ICANN should be organized.
What ICANN was designed to do
ICANN, as designed, was supposed to carry out a few tasks:
All these functions can occupy a full-time person. Making sure the
information about those changes and modifications are visible to the world at
large throuh a web service can occupy another.
The rest of ICANN is concerned with one matter only:
Who gives those two people their instructions?
..."
I'm just repeating what someone else posted in a comment to a previous ICANN-related story--but isn't it strange that it costs ICANN millions of dollars a year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time on his personal workstation?
All the centralization the Internet really needs is someone to dole out IP addresses and suggest where to look for root nameservers. Okay, well-known port assignments too. (E.g., tcp/25 is for SMTP, tcp/80 is for HTTP, etc.)
Anything else that ICANN does is superfluous to the actual need, and much of it is dangerous.
I wish Jon Postel had appointed a Benevolent Dictator Heir-Apparent before he passed away a few years ago.
We aren't control freaks. We don't have some sinister motive. We thought that it was in the best interests of the organization that this be done. Why?
In our situation we had three types of voters. The first type was the people who just didn't care. They represented the majority of eligible voters. They didn't really understand the issues that board dealt with, primarily because they just didn't care.
The second type was a small group of concerned individuals who actually cared and educated themselves on the issues. Unfortunately their numbers were very small.
The last group was the cause du jour voters. They were voting because of one particular issue. They often engaged in relentless political attacks to get their one small issue recognized. They were quick to villify and eliminate anyone who wasn't blindly supportive of their cause. They could quickly destroy years of work. I'm not including those dedicated people who believed in an issue in this group. This group consists of people who, after causing everyone a lot of pain, simply disappear and leave others to pick up the pieces of the organization and move forward.
By eliminating member voting we have allowed the Board-- a group of people who understand the issues and care about the organization, do their job. There is an obvious danger, of course, because the Board has lost oversight by the membership, but it has made the organization a whole lot better.
I'm not saying I support ICANN's decision 100%. At some level the oversight is needed. In our case, if the Board screws up people can always go to another company. The ICANN situation is not nearly so simple. I'm just trying to show a peek at the other side of the fence.