> As Diane says, "The At-large membership will elect half of the
> ICANN BoD and as such will have the single largest voice in the
It's usually slightly less than half. The president of icann serves
as an unelected board member, that makes the total 19. There is also
the fact that no SO directors can vote on a matter that came from that
SO, so sometimes the number could be more than half.... reading ahead
... I see that you mentioned all of this.
Remember the voice afforded by General Membership is merely to elect
directors. It isn't comparable SO membership.
Thus this should not be used as an excuse to keep individuals domain name
owners and non-commercial domain name owners from being able to stand
alongside corporations, ISPs, trademark holders, ISPs, and *TLD
operators in the more focused arenas of policy making.
> -- and Im trying to say it will only be the largest single voice if the
> ALM learns to interact cooperatively and democratically, sets itself
> an agenda and follows it, and follows through to see that its
> representatives *speak with a single voice.
As we know from all of these "discussions", the chance of anything
even approximating unaniminity is pretty small, vanishing small I'd say.
This stands against things like the PSO which is so highly focused and
distilled that it will contain only probably no more than three members.
Or against things like the DNSO in which only commercial entities, all
sharing a common goal of maximizing profits, may participate.
The notion of thinking that a body of individual voters is going to be
able to overbalance the focused and concentrated power of the SO
memberships is, to my mind, rather unlikely.
So yes, the potential is there, but, in my opinion, the reality isn't.
> Actually, even a couple
> or three voices would likely be fine, but at the rate we're going,
> when 'selections' are called (in September, isnt it?) the AL
> representatives (whoever they may be, it hardly matters) wont have
> any idea what positions they're to represent.
I'll be surprised if ICANN gets elections going in less than three months.
But I'll do what I can to help it happen.
As for the various platforms -- who knows. I know what mine would be
were I running. ;-)
> > If 2(e) and 2(f) were removed then there would be more of a sense of
> > balance.
> >
> > But those sections are there, and as long as they are there the locus of
> > policy formation is in the SO's.
> >
> For my part, I'd rather have Bylaws amended by an elected board rather than
> (to use a word I learned today) an inchoative one.
The current board is doing a lot of substantive decision making. They
should take a break and do something easy, like removing language
that their legal advisor indicates is both meaningless and misleading.
> > But even if they were to be removed then one still has to ask, why should
> > Individual Domain Name Owners and Non-Commercial domain name owners be
> > excluded from a forum which includes Trademark Owners, ISPs, Registrars,
> > *TLD operators, etc?
>
> Isnt the way to approach this to anticipate what issues are likely to
> come up, and to develop a position -- gee, even a policy! -- on
> those issues? If it makes sense, nobody has to give a tinker's dam
> what the *technical channels are by which it gets on the table.
You're being far to constructive. ;-)
Yes, we need to find "answers". They've almost certainly been part of the
ebb and flow of discussion over the last three+ years.
I would personally say "multiple roots" are good, but there should be
but one master source (registry) for each TLD with portability among
registrars. And I'd allow for the creation of TLD subsets,
i.e. community views that reduce the content of a TLD for some
community that choses to limit is view of the net. (Ie. for things
like filtering out sites specializing in content they don't like.)
etc etc. (I don't want this to become a campaign speech -- besides,
nobody would ever vote for me because I tend to speak my mind, stand
by my principles, and thus create enemies.)
> The more energy goes into grousing and moaning about what's
> been done, the less there is for seeing what's next to do.
What has been done is pretty awful.
You are asking us to accept the goal of reaching a mountain peak after
we (individuals and non-commercial interests) have been tied-up,
gagged, put into a sack filled with rocks, and tossed into the East
River.
Is it too much to demand that we have, at least, parity with commercial
and trademark interests?
Process is important. He/she who controls process often can dictate
the outcome of a particular issue.
--karl--
