[governance] Innovation

[Karl Auerbach]

Kieren McCarthy wrote:

> So as an interesting historical review, the concern with the voting last
> time was the fact that anyone could get an email address and so it was open
> to manipulation. 

This boggyman argument that the election could be "manipulated" is an 
argument that is being used not to find the errors and fix them but 
rather to prevent any attempt to hold elections at all.

Every election process can be manipulated - I work in the area of open 
voting for really high stakes political elections and I never ceased to 
be amazed at all the methods that can be used to coerce voters or affect 
results.

In other words, ICANN is using the demand for perfection in voting as an 
enemy of any adequate system.

It is odd that ICANN has substituted the ALAC, a system that is far more 
manipulable, indeed it comes pre-manipulated.

> The idea was anyone who was a domain name holder could vote. But then people
> felt this was power in the hand of landowners.

You have to get your history right.  There was a 100% distinct and 
separate move to form a "constituency" (just like those for intellectual 
property, registries, registrars, etc) within ICANN for those who own 
domain names, the IDNO.  The petition can be seen at: 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/idno/petition.htm

ICANN did, as ICANN does, simply ignored this rather valid petition to 
form a new constituency.

This constituency was open to everyone who could demonstrate ownership 
of a domain name - even ibm.com or att.com could serve as the foundation 
for ownership if an individual person could be ascertained who had 
enough vested in himself/herself that it constituted ownership.

The IDNO did use an election system.  But the IDNO should not be at all 
confused with the ICANN election system.

> What's interesting of course is that now if you based votes on domain names,
> you would get possibly an even worse bias because of the recent arrival of
> the domainer market. With some companies owning tens of thousands of domains
> - and possessing the technology to use each one individually, an election
> could be entirely dominated by which way one or two individuals heading
> these domainer companies decided to vote.

Well, since we are continuing to go down the road blazed by the IDNO, 
take a look at our system as described at 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/idno/petition.htm - We allowed only one 
vote per person no matter how many domain names were owned.

There is a very nice property about using domain name ownership as a 
foundation for *constituency* membership - and that property is that 
domain names tend to be purchased using credit mechanisms, thus there is 
an identity forged by a banking relationship that is a) paid for by the 
banks and b) tends to be of longer term or at least more trustable than 
a mere e-mail identity.  That helped to solve the "on the internet 
nobody knows you are a dog" problem that seems send many of ICANN's 
anti-election people into convulsions.

> It strikes me that this inability to pin down an individual to a single vote
> is not something that is going to go away. There has to be some kind of
> real-world verification so that multiple votes require people to physically
> do something. 

Yes, as was demonstrated by the ICANN person registering and voting 
twice.  That was the only known instance of such behaviour in the year 
2000 election.

ICANN spent a chunk of money (not nearly as much money as it has pumped 
into the ALAC life support system) to validate somewhere between 100,000 
and 200,000 for the year 2000 election.

In its headlong panic to prevent any further elections ICANN simply 
abandoned that investment.  One ICANNnite even went so far as to encrypt 
the data and kept the key to himself (and he is no longer with ICANN) so 
that it could not be opened for any subsequent use, including a 
subsequent round of elections.  (Such a commitment to privacy is 
admirable - too bad it is not equally found in the context of "whois".)

Had ICANN built upon that investment we would today have had three more 
rounds of elections, each one would have built a better identified and 
more robust electorate and user-built information/conversation systems.

Instead we have ICANN funded playpens.  And are these immune to capture. 
  No.  In fact they are even more easily captured than elections.  For 
example, as soon as the intellectual property industry feels a need to 
do so, the ALAC will become filled and run by intellectual property 
lawyers, paralegals, and clients who are cajoled into joining.  The 
reason that the IP has not done this is that they can see that the ALAC 
is a poor vehicle for exerting any pressure on ICANN's decisions and 
that they already have a much better vehicle, a polished Rolls-Royce 
formal constituency deep within ICANN as compared to the broken down 
bicycle that is the ALAC.


> But to get back to the ALAC/RALO/ALS system. I'm surprised that Wolfgang is
> so damning of it as a "stupid superstructure". I know the history is torrid,
> but as I explained in another email, I see the structure itself as a pretty
> good construct (Vittorio had some interesting real-world observations about
> it).

It is a good construct.  That is if the purpose is to create isolation 
between the community of internet users and ICANN.

As I have mentioned previously, the ALAC system bears an uncanny 
resemblance to the hierarchy of soviet committees that formed the 
"democratic" system of the old USSR.

Isolation of ICANN-central from internet users is but one of the two 
foundation stones of the ALAC.  The other is a very paternalistic view 
that internet users are mere children who are incapable of organizing 
themselves or informing themselves.  So ICANN provides, and even funds, 
safe warm places, well supplied with milk and cookies, so that internet 
users can play with toy steering wheels that provide no real control, no 
  means of holding ICANN's inner circle accountable.

The ALAC's failure is obvious.

Internet users have shunned it in droves.

Internet users recognize the futility of accepting a powerless position 
in a contrived and paternalistic system.

Even after years of ICANN money pumped directly into its veins and ICANN 
hired cheerleaders waving their pom poms to create excitement, the ALAC 
doesn't even rate a faint shadow of the vitality that was achieved by 
internet users in just a few months in year 2000.

> I have a serious question about this. Is there anything in the structure
> that actually prevents or restricts ideas from the wider community from
> going through review and ending up as firm statements or policies?

In nearly every deliberative body a well known technique for killing a 
proposal is to send it through a sequence of committees.

So to answer your question, yes there is "a chance", but practical 
experience with deliberative systems has demonstrated time and time 
again that the ALAC method, a hierarchy of committees, is an effective 
means of reducing that chance.


> [As an aside - is this the right list/forum for this sort of discussion? I
> am more than happy to set up a forum on ICANN's public participation site if
> people would prefer this conversation taken off this list.]

This is a good place for this because it is important that no new body 
of internet governance repeat ICANN's mistakes.

ICANN has defined itself to be a regulator of domain name business 
practices for the protection of a few incumbent TLD registries and the 
intellectual property business.

We can thank the internet gods that ICANN has abandoned its intended job 
of making sure that the actual knobs and levers of DNS are operated so 
that DNS query packets are efficiently turned into DNS reply packets 
without bias against any query source or query subject.

That job is open and we will have to form another body of internet 
governance to do that job - it is an important job that is presently 
being untended.

And that body, along with bodies to help deal with the provision of 
adequate end-to-end service levels and the like, are yet to be formed.

In the interest of learning and improving, ICANN provides a bright red 
sign that says "Proceed at your own risk: This way has been tried and 
found wanting."

> I also think there is an important and interesting discussion to be had
> over: what is the role and what should be the role of the individual within
> ICANN's processes?

The individual is the atomic unit of internet governance.

We should not stray from principle that governance arises from the 
collective opinion and consent of the people.

The question should not be "what role for individuals" - the answer to 
that is obvious.  Rather the question should be "what role for legal 
fictions such as corporations and governments?"

See my note "Stakeholderism - The Wrong Road for Internet Governance" at 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/igf-democracy-in-internet-governance.pdf

		--karl--
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