[ga] ALAC - powerless and unrepresentative

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Article XI of the ICANN By-Laws, Section 2, Sub-Section 4 states:
http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm#XI

a. "The role of the ALAC shall be to consider and provide advice on the activities of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual Internet users."

POINT 1: ALAC IS POWERLESS.

The interests of hundreds of millions of individual internet users are not represented in any voting capacity on the ICANN Board, and it is wholly unacceptable that such a large constituency - the greatest constituency of all - should be limited to "observer status" and "providing advice"... advice that can simply be over-ruled by ICANN.

POINT 2: ALAC HAS NO MANDATE AND IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE

The ALAC is insufficiently representative of individual Internet users, and it is wrong that membership of the ALAC should exclude the right of individual users to apply or be voted for membership as individuals, in a committee set up to represent the interests of just that category of people. There is, in addition, no process for mandating ALAC members who purport to represent the interests of individual Internet users, except for the claimed mandate of a small number of 'validated' structures, that first have to be accepted by ALAC itself. In short, there is a total lack of accountability to the Internet users of the world. Membership of ALAC should be open to all, and should not be a "closed shop" selected by ICANN to create the pretence of participation, while locking out individual users themselves. If one-person-one-vote works in all other democratic processes around the world, why is there so much opposition to the same democratic principle being applied to all those individual internet users who want to be involved in helping to determine policy and representation for ordinary users in what is, essentially, their own resource?

Yrs,

Richard Henderson