[governance] RE: [NA-Discuss] ALAC and NCUC

[Karl Auerbach]

Norbert Bollow wrote:
> Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:
> 
>> It is sensible to adopt the normal constraints that require a person to 
>> be of adequate age and mental competency.

> What is gained in internet governance by adopting these constraints?

It's pretty normal to recognize that children are children and not small 
adults.  And there are people who have limited capacity to form judgments.

The former case is usually done via a somewhat arbitrary age of majority 
- 18 years, 21 years...; the latter is usually a rather more complex matter.

It does make sense, at least to me, to adopt the practical wisdom of 
these normal distinctions.  Moreover, internet governance would lose 
credibility if it were somehow painted as an electronic era form of 
children's crusade.

> Verifying age and mental competency requirements via the internet has
> some difficulties, which probably can't be resolved without
> significant cost.

Yes, it is hard if done "via the internet".

Indeed, I do not believe that it is possible "via the internet" alone.

In the ICANN elections of year 2000 a somewhat cumbersome system of 
internet registration coupled with a parallal postal link was used.  It 
wasn't a completely irrational system, but did suffer from costs and, 
unfortunately, some technical bumbling - but it could have been much 
better had it had been refined for subsequent use.

Others have proposed mechanisms that ride on the coat-tails of other 
systems ranging from domain name registration to bank credit/atm cards. 
  None of these is, in itself, perfect, and they often give preference 
to people in wealthy regions over less wealthy regions.

My own feeling is that a composit system - constructed by "or-ing" the 
registrations from a number of these systems - would be appropriate.

I would suggest that our goal not be a perfect electorate but rather a 
workable one.  In the US we have had some really terrible manipulation 
of the electorate, particularly during the 19th century.  But even with 
those flaws, it was a better system than no electorate at all.  And 
things can improve with time and experience.

As someone mentioned, we ought not to expect the numbers to be 
particularly huge - multiples of hundreds of thousands is a number 
suggested from the ICANN experience in year 2000.  For most internet 
users, the matters we are dealing with are arcane, esoteric, and boring 
- hardly the kind of thing that generates a tsunami of interest.

I find it interesting that questions are raised about the nature and 
quality of natural persons who would participate in internet governance 
when, at the same time, we routinely accept that people who claim to 
represent legal fictions/creations, such as trade associations and 
corporations, do in fact represent those legal fictions/creations.

For example, do we demand that those who claim to represent a 
corporation show the articles of incorporation and prove the chain of 
delegation of authority from the plenary body of the corporation?  I've 
never seen it, but we routinely accept such claims.

It strikes me that we should not require natural persons to jump through 
burning hoops of identification unless we make all "stakeholders" 
similarly demonstrate that they actually represent the entities that 
they claim to represent and demonstrate that those entities are real.

		--karl--





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