Re: [ALSC-Forum] ICANN forum question

[Esther Dyson]

thanks for some thoughtful opinions on some tough questions.

Esther Dyson

At 06:04 PM 10/15/2001, Mary Jaekl wrote:

> >If membership were to be open to literally anyone with access to the
>Internet, what might be the positive and negative repercussions?
>
>As I think the original elections demonstrated, there is a real
>identification difficulty.  How do you know that user ID 1 is not the
>same as user ID 2, or that user ID 1 is unique to a single individual?
>On the other hand, opening the membership to everyone with Internet
>access would dramatically reduce the so-called "barriers to entry".
>There's a trade off to be made here.  Personally, I think the idea of
>restricting membership to domain owners provides a good balance.
>
>However,  one of the main benefits to ICANN of having the at-large
>component (as I see it anyway) is the potential involvement of users who
>do not necessarily have a strong corporate or technical agenda.
>Instead, users have an idea of how they expect the Internet (eg TLDs) to
>work and what would be the best for the average web surfer is not always
>the best for (or may not even occur to) the corporations, legalistic
>(lawyers and governments) and technical gurus that seem to make up the
>rest of ICANN.
>
> >Should membership come with some responsibilities, such as knowledge of
>ICANN's mission, or participation in discussions and decision-making, or
>voting for representatives?
>Yes.  I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek because I am actually one of
>the huge numbers of validated members who did not vote.  I did not end
>up voting because after validating my membership, I then put my mailed
>PIN away.  And when it came to elections, it was WAY too much effort to
>retrieve it from the filing cabinet, bring it to my computer (half way
>across the city in my case) etc etc just to vote on an election where
>the outcome (I did monitor closely) was already going the way I would
>have voted.  (Talk about barrier to entry!)
>
>I decided that I was only going to make that effort if I felt that a
>single vote was necessary to express my opinion.  I did carefully review
>the material for all the candidates for North America (!) and determined
>which platforms I agreed with most.  As it turned out, I didn't need to
>vote in order for the outcome I felt was best to occur.
>
>However, I do think that membership of ICANN should require members to
>know ICANN's mission, to have a general idea of what (and opinion on)
>issues the board members are discussing.  I think participation in
>discussions should be strongly encouraged, but perhaps not mandatory.
>And unless the voting process became significantly easier, then I don't
>think voting should be mandatory.
>
> >How should an At-Large membership be funded? Would a membership fee
>prevent or discourage participation of users in developing countries?
>Would they encourage only the committed and informed to participate?
>Should membership fees be scaled in some way?
>
>I think it's interesting that the assumption here seems to be that
>membership fees would mainly be a problem in developing countries.
>Don't forget that even in so-called developed countries there are also
>those where a "modest" fee is completely out of reach.  To be honest, I
>am not completely sure what expenses would be required in order to
>"allow" At-Large membership.  Personally, I thought the snail mail
>verification procedure was a waste of money and I would be reluctant to
>pay a reoccuring fee in order to fund this type of activity.  In general
>I would be reluctant to pay a yearly fee unless it was extremely low and
>the payment method would have to have a low aggravation threshold.  For
>instance, asking me to write out a cheque and mail it in would be
>annoying.
>
>I would be open to paying a one-time membership fee, but it would also
>need to be low in order to be accessible.  Further, I don't think that
>fees/no fees will weed out non-committed/non-informed.  Rather, fees
>will weed out those who have less cash. If you really wanted to ensure
>that only informed/committed members participated, then implementation
>of some kind of pop quiz would be more likely to accomplish the goal.
>
>In terms of scaling fees - this would potentially solve some problems
>but it would be difficult to implement fairly.  I personally disagree
>with the idea that fees should be scaled "based on economy of a region".
>In one extremely poor region you might have an individual who has much
>more money than someone living in a rich region.
>
>As discussed in the Membership Advisory Committee report
>(<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rcs/macsing.html>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rcs/macsing.html) 
>I tend towards setting a
>low fee and asking people willing and able to contribute more than
>others to specifically donate funds towards the At-Large membership.
>
> >What would you, personally, like to gain from being involved in ICANN?
>
>As someone else said: I would also like to retain my existing rights of
>being able to
>elect a member of the Board from my area.
>
>I like the information that my representative (Karl Auerbach) posts on
>his site about the decisions he has made (or not made) and reasoning.
>Although I have not actually emailed him with an opinion on any topics,
>I do have the sense that a) he would read the email and b) would
>consider it fairly. This is much more than I can say about my "real"
>government...  As part of being involved in ICANN, I like the feeling
>that even though I am a very obscure member of a very large organization
>(perception, anyway), my opinion would be noted by someone.
>
>I also agree with the premise that there should be a mechanism for
>removing "rogue" representatives.
>
>I also think that there should be some mechanism for soliciting opinion
>on given topics (perhaps a secure poll on various issues by each
>representative)
>
>Cheers,
>
>Mary Jaekl
>Mary@Phibian.com


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Esther Dyson			Always make new mistakes!
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