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

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >May I suggest that we forever drop the word "stakeholders".

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?

In the ICANN system, the choice is made by ICANN by its designation of who 
has "adequate" stake and who does not.  If you happen to be an trademark 
owner, you have enough "stake".  If you are merely someone who might die 
if you doctor doesn't receive your call on his/her voice over IP phone, 
then ICANN has decreed that you do not have adequate "stake".

In most democratic systems it is the individual person who makes the 
decision whether to participate in the processes or not.  The decision is 
vested in the individual, not in the system.

And most democratic systems don't give some people multiple votes by 
virtue of role multipliers, such as corporations and organizations.  A 
person is the atomic unit of democratic processes.  Corporate entities 
should have votes only through the means of individual people, who are 
free to vote the corporate party line or not.

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.  And it is pretty obvious, both in icann and in 
larger political events, that the ability to control who gets a vote is 
the abiltity to control the outcome.

In other words, unless everyone is allowed to participate in icann the 
outcome will always be rig-able.

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.

		--karl--