Re: "stakeholders" was: Re: [ga] Re: ICANN before the US Senate...

["Roberto Gaetano" <ploki_xyz@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Karl Auerbach wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
>
> > There are stakeholders for which the ICANN circus has a fundamental
> > life-or-death importance, others for which it is largely irrelevant.
>
> Who makes that choice?

Obviously (from my point of view) it is the stakeholder him/herself, as 
he/she is the only one able to determine the importance.
I fundamentally agree with your argumentation below, and that it is not up 
to ICANN to decide who can be excluded from the process.
However, I have doubts about the forced inclusion (possibly via intermediate 
bodies who claim to speak for the masses) of individuals who could not care 
less about ICANN, Internet, the process, the outcome, and so on, even if 
they might be impacted. This is my understanding of the word "stakeholder", 
upon which we might of course argue.

> ... <snip>
>
> The word "stakeholder" implies that someone other than the individual
> person is making the choice whether that individual is worthy enough to
> participate in icann.

Not in my Weltanschauung: the individual is the only person who can decide 
whether he/she is a stakeholder. But the indicvidual has also the right to 
say "I don't care", and exclude him/herself from the process. I agree that 
ICANN should not exclude people a priori, by stating that they are not 
stakeholders.

> ... <snip>
>
> It is interesting that you mentioned the nomad in central asia.  A while
> back I came across a copy of a printed newspaper called the Outer
> Mongolian Times - it was a real newspaper and it had a financial section
> that was as rich in trading options and reports as any US or European
> newspaper.
>
> When I was designing combined voice/video/data network products over at
> Cisco one of my focuses was on products to bring the net and telephone and
> video to folks in places where wires don't go.  To the degree that such
> products are eventually deployed, a nomad in central asia may very well
> have a greater interest in new TLDs, and particularly in ENUM, that exceed
> the interest, and thus the "stake" of the typical person with a hard wired
> telephone in the US or Europe.

Absolutely agree. In fact we have already an example: the cell phone was 
deployed faster in places that lacked the traditional phone infrastructure. 
But my point is that in order to participate in the process, you must show 
an interest in participating. What I would like to avoid is that nothing is 
done for the people that *now* want to participate (for instance, the domain 
name registrants), that might have to wait the moment in which we will have 
a perfect global online democracy. I would like to start by a (maybe 
partial) solution, but thet is already more inclusive than the current 
situation, rather than build in abstract.

Best regards
Roberto

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