[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Milton L Mueller [21/11/07 09:44 -0500]:

>If you look at US regulatory agencies, which are required by law to
>institute notice and comment, there are only a few professional or
>semi-professional lobbyists who can afford to keep up with everything a
>specialized regulatory agency does on a weekly basis. The day to day
>policy machinations of ICANN will increasingly become the province of
>specialists

[...]

* It already is the province of specialists. And while it does have an open
comments mechanism, so far, only the specialists, and specialist lobbyists,
have enough of a stake, and enough expertise, to make meaningful
contributions.

* However much of a mess FEMA was, or any other federal agency is, there
isnt any way the public can "throw out" the people running that agency -
those are not elected posts. The one way that is possible is oversight from
elected representatives - the senate subcommittees in charge of whatever,
the secretary of state for whatever, and finally up the chain to the white
house. 

* So, who do you give oversight over ICANN?  You are not going to get DoC
give up its oversight, face it. And even if you hand it over to the UN,
what would happen is that broad policy directions get set by the
politicians and some UN agency (an existing one, or an entirely new one) is
set up with employees to run it. With oversight from the general assembly,
and from UN member states who are members of that UN agency.

>this accountability to take the form of large numbers of ordinary people
>directly participating in ICANN processes. It can only take the form of
>some low cost preference aggregation mechanism such as voting. 

Participation in icann processes doesnt really need you to fly to whatever
resort ICANN is meeting in (in fact I do wish they would go meet in some
completely ugly city like Des Moines IA so you wont get too many people
motivated to go there just for the beaches.. oh wait, there's an ICANN
meeting coming up sooner or later in new delhi, I guess .. yup that will do
very nicely indeed)

And participation + awareness in a process is kind of essential when you
want people to vote for policy decisions and representatives charged with
setting and implementing these policies.
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