Re: [ga] ALAC: Individuals Not Wanted
At 07:30 a.m. 18/09/2005, you wrote: Well I've told you this all along.
It was on Sept 17, 1998, exactly 7 long years ago that IANA and Network Solutions jointly published iteration 4 of a proposal to create a California corporation, ICANN, to coordinate the administration of domain names and IP addresses. The first hopes of true global participation by Individual Internet stakeholders in a very limited area of governance had been raised by the Clinton administration's white paper and the commissioning of Ira Magaziner to get the US out from under the unilateral governance burdens that came with the creation of the Internet. In spite of the obvious flaws the illusions were kept alive by the first Bylaws of ICANN, that left an open door to self-forming constituencies other than the 7 initial stakeholder constituencies decreed at the Singapore meetings. Followed the founding of the IDNO , its application for constituency status for Individual Domain Name Owners at the Berlin meeting and the Board's "non-consideration" rather than specific rejection. That foreshadowed its multiple rewrites of its Bylaws. We saw the Membership Advisory Committee and (briefly) MAC2, trying to draft At Large membership rules; their quiet disbandment followed when too many members had too many idealistic ideas and not enough tame ones were left to populate the inner mailing lists. Then came the Board's decision to appoint a hight-level International Commission to deal with the inherent contradictions of the situation. Karl Auerbach still on the Board at that time. You remember how a year later Swedish politician Carl Bildt and most of that expensive At-large Study Committee committee slinked (only Chuck Costello protested vigorously) away after the Accra Board meeting rejected their recommendations for even a limited democracy of Individual Domain Name holders. Lamentable! We have struggled and lost some illusions. Some of us still do good work by keeping the spotlight on ICANN's accountability obligations. But none of us can change the direction of the new currents in the excercise of global power, governmental or corporate. Especially after sept. 2001 it became unrealistic to entertain further illusions of global direct democracy, even of the most limited kind, dealing with the regulation of global (public) resources such as IP numbers and the name-space. Who in his right mind wants now to lead or join a real membership mass-organization that is doomed to knock at closed gates for perhaps another decade? Most of the thousands that were once actively involved, have dispersed or, as you say, voted with their feet. There are more promising endeavours for people who want to work for a better world. But perhaps some continuation of democracy experiments such as www.democracy.org.nz/ or icannatlarge is still feasible. I still believe that the maintenance of a small, transparant MODEL of an At Large Membership organization that experiments with the maximum amount of democracy that makes a cyber-organization of that kind still workable, would be a good thing. Perhaps the rejected Hawaiian lawyers will be interested. :) Lamentable indeed that such a model At Large will be unable to tap into the Domain Name Tax-based funding that sustains ICANN. --Joop-- www.icannatlarge.com
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