[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Meryem Marzouki]

Le 21 nov. 07 à 16:46, Suresh Ramasubramanian a écrit :

> * 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.

Doesn't this advocate in favor of day to day policy making, as well  
as first levels of control, as close as possible to end users? And  
leave only higher coordination levels to global entities? The closer  
you are, the better you understand what affects *you*, the greater  
chances of control you have, directly or through elected or in any  
other way accountable people?

All other issues left aside, I don't find an election process a la at- 
large to ICANN satisfactory, though better than what is currently  
offered. I understand that an electoral process is never fully  
satisfactory, but we can cope with it as the "least worst", provided  
that it remains manageable. By manageable, I mean that, as a voter,  
you have enough means of finding your way through it, understand what  
is at stake, what are the proposals from the different candidates,  
and have a reasonable chance to make a reasonably informed choice;  
and as a candidate, that you have reasonable chances to convey your  
message (although we know that all candidates never have equal chances).

Municipal elections are more manageable than higher level local  
elections which are in turn more manageable than national/federal  
elections. But it almost stops here. e.g. in the European Union, we  
have in each country direct elections of Members of European  
Parliament. We do know that the European Parliament matters a lot -  
although it has less power than the European Council, i.e. the  
governments representatives and less actual power than the European  
Commission. We do also know that most part of our national  
legislations derives from European legislation. Still, we do have a  
much higher level of abstention at these elections. And there is  
almost no accountability, specially compared to members of national  
Parliaments. They're too far from us directly, they're too far from  
us through the media (specially mainstream media), etc. From time to  
time, some news gets through the citizens, but that's so complex to  
explain and to understand. You need a high level of background of how  
it works, etc. before even getting to understand the issue.

(NB. this is only an example to show the problem, I'm NOT advocating  
a decentralization mapped on (or only on) political organization  
based on nation state model. Actually, it's interesting that at-large  
elections have been designed by geographic regions, i.e. rather UN- 
inspired division).

Could you simply imagine how these problems scale when dealing with  
an organization like ICANN? The election process at ICANN has been  
quite extensively documented. In particular, there are statistics  
that showed the extreme diversity of participation rates among  
countries and regions. This is not only due to disparity of the  
number of Internet users - notwithstanding the fact that even non  
current Internet users should have their say -, but also due to lack  
of information on what is at stake, not to mention the simple fact  
that such elections were running. It has been shown that in countries  
where the mainstream media informed about the process, the  
participation rate was higher by far than in other countries in same  
region with comparable rate of Internet users.

> 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.

Exactly.

Meryem

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