Bret,
Sounds reasonable to me. Since the ICANN board's recognition of the groups
is provisional, perhaps the issue of individual membership in other
constituencies can still be pushed. That's certainly a telling clause. I
do think the whole idea of open-ended overlapping constituencies electing
names council members is difficult--and Byzantine--but we appear to be
stuck with them.
As for IDNO and NCDNH--yes, having trouble both organizing and getting
recognized. The latter seems to have more than one flag-bearer saying he
or she is the "real" NCDNH, and in Berlin the negotiations were ongoing
among them. ...JZ
At 11:18 PM 7/13/99 , Bret Fausett wrote:
>Jon Zittrain wrote:
> >This is one reason why the constituencies seem so unwieldy to me, and the
> >arbitrariness of their definition is clear: commercial trademark interests
> >get votes both through the tm and commercial constituencies; include
> >individuals within non-commercial and they get one set, include them as
> >part of an IDNO and they get two. Funny, though: I was there in Singapore
> >when it seemed clear that consensus had been built around the
> >constituency-based DNSO proposal. At the time it must have seemed like pie
> >slices for everyone.
>
>At the time, it seemed like a fair compromise.
>
>In exchange for the constituency pie slices, we also received this:
>"Individual domain name holders should be able to participate in
>constituencies for which they qualify." (See,
>http://www.icann.org/dnso-formation.html). At the time, I was
>extraordinarily pleased.
>
>This phrase, "Individual domain name holders should be able to
>participate in constituencies for which they qualify," should have meant
>that individual domain holders with commercial sites could participate in
>the commercial constituency, non-commercial sites in the NCDNHC, etc. And
>individuals with trademark rights in a domain name should have been able
>to participate in the trademark constituency (but the ICANN Board thought
>otherwise).
>
>Since Singapore, constituency organizers (and the ICANN Board, via its
>oversight role) have viewed this Board resolution as a problem to be
>routed around. They've eliminated individuals from every single
>constituency. Individuals just don't "qualify" (even if they have
>commercial businesses, non-profit interests, or hold and use trademarks.)
>
>And so you're right. We now have arbitrary distinctions.
>
>The fact that a site is operated by one person rather than a company or
>organization seems a very artificial distinction. Especially when applied
>to domain name policy (or better, domain name "technical coordination").
>It's not at all clear to me that a museum or university has a different
>set of interests in domain name policy than an individual who runs a
>not-for-profit informational web site. And why the ICANN Board believed
>that trademark organizations were better able to represent trademark
>interests than the actual owners/users of the trademarks continues to be
>a mystery (the minutes are silent; so much for "transparency").
>
>When we agreed to the compromise in Singapore, some may have wanted a pie
>slice, but others of us wanted the other components of the compromise.
>We're still waiting.
>
> -- Bret
>
>
>
