At 05:42 PM 1/31/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Bill Lovell wrote:
>
>> Not to poke a hole here, but what about all the great, unwashed
>> millions who own modems and flit about the internet with them but
>> have never heard of either IFWP or ICANN?
>
>What about them? There must be some good reason why they did not
>come to a meeting, join this list or read an article about ICANN
>in a discussion group or the "popular" press. Are they really
>interested in DNS or IP issues? Would you make them join and vote
>if they are not interested? No.
We may or may not be talking past each other here. I happen to be
interested in who we bomb next, the economy of Brazil, whether
Bill Clinton gets axed, etc., but I'm not a member of anything that
deals with those matters. There are millions of people who have a
high stake in what goes on here, from little Veronica to thousands
of college students and professors, to law schools and lawyers,
to online sales people galore, etc., etc. They all care about what
is happening here, whether they know that it is happening or not.
>
>We figured this out at our first meeting in Reston. We are it. A
>few others will join us as elections and referenda are held. But,
>you won't get 10,000 members no matter what kind of door prize is
>offered. I'll bet big money there are less than 1,000 voters in
>our first election. The number could actually decrease in
>succeeding elections.
I'm not exactly sure what you think you "figured out." And what
does "we are it" mean? That such a group as IFWP is all that
will happen so far as future public input to internet governance
is concerned? That may well be true, but since "we" at the
moment are no doubt mostly filtered out to include only those who
have a professional interest in the net, an axe to grind, a business
opportunity to pursue, registrations to get lined up, etc. and though
those here no doubt constitute the only source of technological
innovation that could do that, the internet involves a lot more than
technological innovation and making sure that various ones of this
group or that getting their chunk of the pie, how everyone comes
out in the power struggle -- oh, did I mention that this is all a power
struggle? -- and so on.
On the recent, well-put "flat constituency v. many constituency" issue,
I hate to say it but any flat constituency, which is what we have here,
I should think, consists mostly of technophiles who have specific
interests, while the majority of internet folks are probably technophobes.
And I say that for the reason you point out: we'd never drag in even 10,000
of the run-of-the-mill internet users. In other words, with the whole show
being run by technophiles, the interests of the technophobes who see
the internet only as a valuable tool that they want to use, and who could
care less over the details, are likely to be lost. So how we can avoid
having a strong voice for the technophobes, e.g., lawyer x with a divorce
case or banker y with investment problems, i.e., a "constituency" of
some kind, I really don't know. As soon as we pass on the "pure
democracy" model for "netizens" (Gad, I hate that word!) and begin
to speak of representative government, then we are stuck with
constituencies whether we like it or not.
Bill Lovell
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