[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Meryem Marzouki [21/11/07 19:28 +0100]:
> 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 

This wont unfortunately work .. there's enough of a gap between global
operational concerns and local concerns .. with 90%++ of local concerns
being caused by reasons that just can't be laid at ICANN's door.

For example, on a mailing list just like this one, before the Athens IGF
(run by APDIP out of bangkok and largely focused on asiapac IG issues), 

Several members from Bangladesh raised the issue of the .bd ccTLD - that
was managed by the local government owned incumbent telco, with oversight
from their local ministry of posts and telecommunications. 

suresh at frodo 16:40:33 <~> $ dnsqr ns bd
2 bd:
84 bytes, 1+3+0+0 records, response, noerror
query: 2 bd
answer: bd 86299 NS dns.bd
answer: bd 86299 NS slave.bttb.net
answer: bd 86299 NS dns.bttb.net

Basically - one, dns.bd, on their link from teleglobe (which seems routed
through asia, though it is an ARIN allocated netblock) and the other two on
what looks like a satellite link as the traceroute goes through Israeli
satellite provider Bezeq - bezeq.pos6-3.ar03.ldn01.pccwbtn.net  etc

Now, that's not exactly an ideal setup and it meant the .bd ccTLD was
frequently not quite reachable for most of the world (and sometimes even
less for bangladesh internet users).

Laying their travails at ICANN's door instead of their monopoly telco's
would hardly be useful or appropriate would it?

Similarly, right around then, there was a fairly acrimonious battle for the
.id ccTLD, with the local ISP association trying (successfully, later) to
take control of the .id ccTLD from its previous owner, who was civil
society (runs the indonesian cert, early ISOC member etc etc). Again,
entirely local and not really something you can blame on ICANN, I guess?

> 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 

So, how many voters do you think are going to be actually there who fit
that profile and who arent already icann regulars (like most on the list)
or on the fringes of ICANN as observers (like me, my focus is largely on
antispam and cybersecurity events, I'm not doing igov fulltime possibly
with a tenured post to research igov like some here) :)

I saw several civil society groups concerned with women's rights, egov,
generalized ICT etc take a lot of interest in igov, and demand a stake in
ICANN and igov as a matter of right, when I was at Athens. 

Sadly, not very many of them had the vaguest knowledge of the issues that
were being debated, and/or at the most were seeing one small section of the
problem through the prism of their existing work, not the big picture. This
resulted in their being uninformed, and such groups would need a lot of
capacity building, or at least an *unbiased* overview of a broad range of
igov issues, ICANN history / current affairs etc (and possibly a peek into
the politics that follow ICANN around) before they can participate
meaningfully. 

Or else, they merely become pawns in the hands of one group or the other
that claims to represent public / civil society interests but has its own
agenda, which may not be very congruent to these interests at all. 

Somewhat like moveon.org pulling the same dirty tricks that their opposite
numbers on the republican side (and right wing commentators like Coulter,
Hannity etc) have been pulling for quite some time besides their usual
tactic of grassroots campaigns with heavily slanted views of a political
situation and encourage people reading it to astroturf public policy
comment processes.  [side note - http://hserus.livejournal.com/15144.html
on my reaction to Moveon's disgusting "General Betray Us" ad]

> 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 

Oh, there's switzerland too, where the citizens of every canton have the
right to vote on matters all the way from where to build a new public
toilet to much more significant matters. But the problem there is that
local government models just do not scale to something that is globally
scoped. Not easily at least.

> Could you simply imagine how these problems scale when dealing with an 
> organization like ICANN? The election process at ICANN has been quite 

Fully agree here but we are not going to fix this by changing the voting
process. Or by anything else other than UNBIASEDLY educating civil society
groups that believe they have a stake in the ICANN process, and encouraging
them to participate in it, even remotely - they dont need to spend $5000+
per person to attend every ICANN meeting (plane ticket, hotel etc), but
they can definitely participate remotely, get civil society groups they
work with who are closer to the region where ICANN is meeting to come over
etc etc.

[again because as this IGF's videocasts showed, remote participation in a
meeting may not be as easy or feasible, can go wrong and is in the wrong
timezone for a lot of people anyway ...].

	srs
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