[ga] Re: Election of ICANN Board

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Roberto Gaetano ha scritto:
> I wanted to stay out of this discussion, but maybe better to give my 
> thoughts.

I think I made my opinions on the 2000 elections quite clear in the past.

However, apart from any selection mechanism one might want to establish, 
we do need some kind of clearer and more direct representation of 
registrants and users in the ICANN Board. I am happy to see a wave of 
new Directors, appointed by the Nomcom, who have the public interest in 
mind (and partly, I take it as a result of our struggle to have a 
significant representation of the At Large in the Nomcom), but there 
needs to be a mechanism to ensure that this will happen also in the 
future, especially if the chain of external checks over ICANN is going 
to be weakened.

I am not convinced that "voting by paying" is sufficient. The interest 
of registrants is a good approximation of the general public interest, 
but it does not always coincide with the interest of the average 
Internet user. Moreover, not all parts of the Internet and of the world 
have the same buying power, and the same awareness of how this market 
works and how to influence it through consumer choices (there are parts 
of the world where the very concepts of "consumerism" and "consumer 
rights" are practically unknown, and everything relies on regulation). 
And finally, this is a regulated market, where there are dominant or 
monopoly positions, some of which (e.g. the registry) cannot be avoided; 
not everything can be influenced by consumer choices.
--
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
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