[ga] GNSO Council Votes

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Could somebody confirm the number of votes the gTLD Registries and Registrars have on the GNSO Council? And how that compares with the number of votes the Non-Commercial Users have on the GNSO council?

My reading of the ICANN By-Laws Article X Section 5 Subsections 1 and 2 here:
http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm#X

suggests that the combined voting power of the Registrars and Registries is EIGHT votes, whereas the voting power of Non-Commercial Internet Users is TWO votes. Is this correct?

Given that some Registries (eg Afilias) are simply cartels made up of Registrars, it seems to me that the Domain "Supply" Industry enjoys a wholly disproportionate voting power, compared to the millions of ordinary non-commercial internet users who they are supposed to serve. At any given time, these millions of people can be outvoted by a group of "insiders" who probably represent the interests of a few hundred people at most.

The DNS should surely be run for the benefit of USERS, not for the benefit of its own Supply Functions, and it therefore seems illogical that priority in policy decision making is given to a few commercial interests who are only meant to be "go-betweens" to help the system work for users worldwide.

When you consider that even the GNSO Council is a small sub-structure in the ICANN process, with marginal voting influence at Board level, and when you consider that the ALAC is the only other representative of general users, and has no voting power at all on the ICANN Board, it is reasonable to conclude that ICANN has chosen to marginalise and disempower the interests of the millions of ordinary internet users worldwide for whom ICANN should principally exist.

Why so many votes on the GNSO Council for the Domain Supply industry?

Yrs,

Richard Henderson