Re: [ga] European At Large meeting announcement (today)

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> > What's wrong with simply letting each individual user have one vote?
> 
> I'm not sure you're serious but in case you are, here are some
> problems with the ideal approach:

This is a long debated question, and the tension between representative
systems and direct election systems is a tension that has existed for
thousands of years.  It is worth mentioning, that we are not asking for a
totally direct system, in which people vote on every issue, but rather a
representative system, with direct elections for the representative body,
the Board of Directors.  The ALAC form of representative system is an
extreme form of layer upon layer upon layer of representation and is, in
the minds of many, including myself, so dilutes the voice of the
individual voter that it is not a democratic system at all.

I find one person/one vote to be a quite reasonable answer.  And it is 
certainly a better answer than the unbelievably complicated system that 
"reformed" ICANN has used to replace the direct election systems that a) 
were used, b) worked and would have improved had they been continued, and 
c) had alredy begun to build a body of authenticated voters.
 
> 1) Defining the electing body. Should every human on earth vote,

Some have said "every person who has registered a domain name."  I go for 
the broader "every person who is affected by the internet and who is 
considered legally competent in their place of residency."

Certainly technical knowledge ought not to be a prerequisite - if that
were the case a major portion of the participants in ICANN's supporting
organizations would be disqualified, those participants being largely
lawyers and business advocates with little technical knowledge.

And we have to remember that ICANN does so little that is of a technical 
nature - even the evaluation of sitefinder is, at the bottom, a matter of 
social policy about who gets to control the net - that a sense of social 
policy is at least as valuable as technical knowledge.

> 2) Ensuring a free election campaign, giving that many Internet users
> are in countries without free speech.

Do we abandon democracy because it can't be universal?  By the same token, 
there are countries that do not allow free enterprise.  Do we consequently 
abandon the "constituencies" for businesses and ISPs and other commercial 
forms?

> 3) Ensuring only one vote per user, giving that some human beings do
> not yet have a PGP key or a X509 certificate.

Registration is indeed a problem.  ICANN spent a pile of money 
establishing a postal mail based system - one had to demonstrate a postal 
address in order to obtain a token to vote in the sole election ever held 
in ICANN.  It was klunky, but it worked.  That investment in approximately 
170,000 electors has been abandoned by ICANN.  And it is my guess that the 
current system will never achieve even a tenth of that 170,000 people that 
we had in year 2000.
 
> 4) Combining the secrecy of voting (unless you plan to drop it, which
> may be an option) with the ability to check the tallying (and not in
> the Florida way).

I'm not sure of your point here - most people I know agree that internet
based voting is not as good a precinct based voting. However, we are not
electing people whose finger is on the big red "launch" button, so we can
affort the risk of a few experiments.  Certainly, it could be considered
as premature and overreacting if we were to abandon democracy because of a
hypothetical problems that have never materialized.
 
> 5) Spending less than the budget of Bangladesh on the vote.

How much money has ICANN wasted, not merely its own but also of the
public's, already because it has lacked the systems to put into position a
valid voice of the public?  The number is measured in millions upon
millions of dollars.  For example, the current Verisign mess can arguably
be traced back to the fact that the public's voice was strongly muted when
ICANN built the current contractual morass.

ICANN is legally structured as a public benefit body, ICANN receives tax 
immunity because it is a public benefit body.  Part of the reason it pays 
no taxes is that it is recognized that such a body would normally have to 
spend some money to administer itself to provide those public benefits.

Given the amount of money that ICANN has spent protecting trademarks, and 
the amount of money it spent avoiding elections (not to mention the money 
it spent to prevent the public's directors from exercising their duties), 
I have no sympathy for concerns that ICANN would have to spend some money 
to reestablish the election system that it once had and once operated.

		--karl--