[governance] Reinstate the Vote

[joppenheimer at icbtollfree.com]

I am taking the liberty of reposting something that Dan posted here last week.  It is extremely compelling, appropriate to this recurring "us versus them" theme, and well worth reading again.  And again.  IMHO.

Judith

From: Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com>

Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:52:01
To:governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Reinstate the Vote


I hope everyone in the US had a Happy Thanksgiving holiday -- I certainly
did: I didn't go online for a moment.  And what a state this list is in as
I return...

One comment, certainly not intended to be ad hominem:


At 12:23 PM -0500 11/23/07, Veni Markovski wrote:


For some of the Americans the issues about the Internet are related to
something, which some of them believe, is related to power. For the other
Netizens - we care about the price at which we get our Internet
connection, about the freedom of access, freedom of speech, etc.
But some of the Americans, who take so many things for granted, just
because they happen to be born in the USA, we need to just try to educate
them about "the other world".



I would wonder how "freedom of access" and "freedom of expression" (both of
which I personally feel quite passionate about protecting), are not
fundamentally issues of power.  IMHO these rights are not merely "related
to power" but are in fact *direct manifestations of power* -- if you have
political power, then you have these freedoms, and if you do not have
political power, generally you do not these freedoms in meaningful terms
(though those in power may try to convince you that you do have them --
that makes it easier to control you, if you don't believe you have anything
to fight for).

Certainly my experience is dominated by the US environment, and in this
politically highly divided country these freedoms are among the most
important power issues we are fighting about.  All of our freedoms are in
direct danger, because in this country we are facing a systematic erosion
of the rule of law in favor of the rule of humans.

A lot of people outside the US criticize the US (actually, the US
government) because of its supremely arrogant attitudes toward the rest of
the world.  What they may not realize is that *very many* people inside the
US (I would include myself) criticize the current US administration for
precisely those reasons, and that those imperial behaviors are aimed
domestically as well as overseas.  What the current US administration has
done is systematically erode the checks and balances in our own
Constitution in rather dangerous ways, with the strategic help of corporate
mass media (and increasingly the telcos and cable companies are getting
into it), and we are genuinely alarmed and trying our level best to fight
back against what we see as steps to take our own country away from
democratic standards of governance and toward a more authoritarian model
that involves strong control over information.

(In short, Orwell's dystopia can be arrived at either through
over-centralization of public government or by wild deregulation of the
private sector.  In both extreme cases, the public and private sectors
ultimately merge in a monopoly of elite power over and against the general
public.  Personally I view the "socialism versus free market" debate as a
patently false dichotomy.  I can go into further detail elsewhere if you
like, but for the purposes of this particular discussion, I merely wish to
set the conceptual context, which is that the US is currently facing the
most serious threat to civil liberties in several generations.)

So, in my personal case, it is not about "taking [anything] for granted"
anywhere else in the world, but rather about seeing a frightening potential
on the horizon at home that may not yet have propagated to all other areas
of the world, but which needs to be opposed here and now and also at the
international level regardless of whether it has arrived fully formed in
all other regions.

So, please understand that in the US the "privatization" trend in the sense
of "outsourcing public governance" has some *very* nefarious overtones, and
US domestic civil society has grown a hair-trigger sensitivity to such
dynamics when they seem to be designed to undermine accountability of
public governance to the general public in favor of giving power to wealthy
private sector entities, and to growing closer bonds between private
(economic) and public (political) power.  (In the public policy world this
is expressed by the jargon term "industry capture" [of government] and is
often driven by "iron triangles" between industry lobbyists, agency
regulators, and legislators.)

So, this is the political context within which some of us see dynamics of
Internet governance (the very word "governance" is about the institutional
structures determining who has political *power* to control others), and it
fits into this larger context in a fairly direct and disturbing manner.
This is the "governance" list, after all, and the "G" in IGC and IGF and
IGP is all about political power.

So, with due respect, I present this description as a way to inform "the
other world" as to what is going on inside the US, how it fits in with what
you might see of explicit US foreign relations (which are tangibly
frightening to many "USians"), the role towards which US civil society has
gravitated in the last 7 years, how trends surrounding control of access
and expression on the Internet fit into a disturbing pattern of strategic
power shifts, and why we might see commonalities between the general
problems of power battles in the US and the specific case of Internet
governance, especially in cases where IG has a foot in the US legal and
political jurisdiction.

In short, the US is living through a recap of the "gilded age" of the
previous century, once again moving systematically toward plutocracy, and
creating a new generation of "robber barons" who strive to control the
general public at home and have imperial designs abroad.  US civil society
(and many in academia) are aligned against this dangerous trend both
domestically and with regard to international affairs.  And, the
information infrastructure is front and center in these power battles,
because in the Information Age (or the "Information Society" if you
prefer), control over information is perhaps the most important currency of
political power itself.

If we are throwing around traditional mottos, the one I prefer for our age
is "knowledge is power" and the confluence of money and information-control
is the "nuclear-powered" version of political power in the emerging
information society, and the Internet (the most "disruptive" technology of
our lifetimes, so far, even more than nuclear technology) is at the core of
*all* of this.

I would suggest that this is the framework within which you would best
understand our positions and recommendations.  There is no separation
between freedom of access and freedom of expression and "power to the
people" -- in my framework they are all part of the same thing, and the
Internet is inextricably woven throughout the entire cloth.

Bottom line: The Internet is *all* about power of information (and control
over information), and that is becoming the most important form of power in
our world as time progresses.

Dan


On Nov 26, 2007, at 1:58 PM, Jacqueline A. Morris wrote:

Hi Milton
How about changing the statement of the problem:

Rather than:
" one side feels that they cannot trust a democratic Board election system
and prefer something more manageable and controllable; the other side wants
to empower a global public"

How about:
one side feels that they cannot subscribe to an election system that has no
safeguards to ensure a true "global" reach and thinks that elections in this
situation will give an advantage to economically empowered users in the
North, and prefer a system that is less ostensibly representative but gives
weight to less-developed regions globally; the other side wants to run a
one-user one-vote election that might essentially be a US-ian and European
election, as few users in the South will be informed or able to vote, and
are against a system that focuses on education and empowerment of
less-informed and less-developed users.

The two statements will provoke very different discussions... Of course
there's a neutral way to state the discussion and neither of the above is
it.

Jacqueline

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu]
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 11:30
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Craig Simon; Kieren McCarthy
Subject: RE: [governance] Reinstate the Vote

Craig:
Thanks for your constructive intervention. I've reviewed the site and it's
interesting. Of course from political science I am familiar with different
techniques of voting and yes, one can design systems that are much better at
aggregating preferences than what ICANN did in 2000, or for that matter one
could improve the voting systems used by any organization.

The problem is that we are not engaged on a debate about the proper voting
technique; we are debating whether there should be voting _at all_. It is an
essentially political debate in which one side feels that they cannot trust
a democratic Board election system and prefer something more manageable and
controllable; the other side wants to empower a global public. Until there
is broader political consensus on this question, the question of the
specific technique used to implement democracy is secondary.

--MM

-----Original Message-----
From: Craig Simon [mailto:cls at rkey.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 9:05 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Kieren McCarthy
Subject: Re: [governance] Reinstate the Vote

Is it better to reinstate the vote, or to push for something better?

Many of the old-timers on this list will remember me from the early
ICANN period, when I was researching a Ph.D. that focused on DNS
politics (Thanks again to those who graciously put up with my
pestering). Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how a practical venue
for online democracy might work. Earlier this year I decided to apply
myself to implementing and refining some of those ideas.

I call my project an experiment in collaborative expression of
converging and diverging opinion. It’s ultimately about creating a
massively scalable mechanism for structured argument and consensus
building.

What's been achieved so far is largely inspired by the preferential
voting system used in ICANN's 2000 election. It showcases an interactive
ranked choice ballot and highly granular visualizations of Instant
Runoff Vote (IRV) elections, displayed round by round. See an
operational example (for the ongoing US Democratic Party presidential
primary) at http://www.choiceranker.com/election.php?eid=157. Thus far
I’ve been promoting the system to political bloggers, to pollsters, and
also to various advocates of IRV and online democracy in the US.

My long-term take on IRV goes far beyond a preferential ballot system.
I’ve put groundwork in place at my site to allow for what I call “panel
voting.” It’s a way of filtering and reaggregating results to show the
behaviors within slices of the voting population.

Panel voting would permit display of collective preferences among
pre-designated and self-designated groups of individuals. Those groups
could be aggregated by geopolitical/regional origins, credentialed
qualifications, professed loyalties, etc. That filtering feature is also
intended to provide a way for new coalitions to become “conscious” of
themselves, as potential coalition members come to recognize their
shared preferences.

The most ambitious aspect of the project is providing a way for new
ideas to be offered, vetted, refined, and embraced within online
communities. My approach, still mostly on paper, would combine an open
nomination process with dynamically convened panels whose members would
serve as vetting juries.

I agree with Kieren about the legitimating virtue of venues in which
power (in the form of respected candidates for leadership) can “bubble
up” within a structured chain.

The challenge is to provide an online mechanism by which candidates for
decision – not just people seeking office, but position papers, policy
statements, formal agreements, and so on – can be nominated and bubbled
up through and across various constellations of panels, seeking final
ratification by the group as a whole.

Achieving an effective level of large-scale online democracy requires
far better leverage of web technology than what’s been demonstrated so
far. In my view, mailing lists, blogs, and traditional online fora are
generally too linear and too noisy to help sort out the problems of
widely diverse and rapidly growing communities. Yet they are also too
prone to becoming echo chambers suited best for preaching to the choir.
Wikis, though excellent at expressing the results of consensus-oriented
processes, are poorly set up for venting the give and take of an
underlying debate.

The purpose of constitutional politics is to channel conflict and
competition. What’s needed for an Internet-based decision-making venue
is a widely accessible, democratically open consensus-forging mechanism
that can simultaneously open up new channels for fresh and useful input
while also allowing friendly refinements that fortify existing
contributions.

ICANN’s 2000 election struck me as a squandered opportunity. Though so
many thousands of people registered and voted, there was no followup
attempt to reconnect them and nurture what might have emerged as a
viable online community

I’m not writing to lament the past, however, but to offer thoughts about
how to structure a useful and enduring medium for online democracy...
something that would be worthy of such a large community.

Does my project sound the like the right direction toward a solution set
that would satisfy the ICANN community?

Craig Simon


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