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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)."
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.
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?
..."