[governance] Innovation
Kieren McCarthy
kierenmccarthy at gmail.com
Mon Nov 26 21:42:23 EST 2007
> please stop dismissing peoples' posts for their "semantics" and
> "tone" every time you disagree with them.
Hi Judith
It's not a matter of disagreement.
It's a matter of trying to hold a conversation.
It is impossible for me to reply to this post without taking issue with huge
chunks of what's in it.
Just as a quick example. These two sentences, stated as facts: "The ALAC's
failure is obvious. Internet users have shunned it in droves."
This simply isn't true. But what's more problematic is that it has very
little to do with the issue of voting.
Either people want a conversation or they want to shout at one another. You
simply can't have both.
Kieren
-----Original Message-----
From: Judith Oppenheimer [mailto:joppenheimer at icbtollfree.com]
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 6:21 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Kieren McCarthy
Subject: Re: [governance] Innovation
Kieren, please stop dismissing peoples' posts for their "semantics" and
"tone" every time you disagree with them. Its disruptive. I think Karl
knows a great deal about this and I'd like to hear more.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
-----Original Message-----
From: Kieren McCarthy <kierenmccarthy at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:52
To:governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: RE: [governance] Innovation
Karl,
I know you feel very passionately about this, but I was hoping that this
list might be able to have a calm and reasoned discussion about the voting
issue and so make some progress.
Unfortunately, your response makes that nigh on impossible. The wording and
the tone of your post mean it is not possible to respond except to have an
argument or to join in on criticising ICANN.
If people don't want to discuss this issue, that's fine, but it was my
understanding that they did. My email was not an effort to outline the
answer, or the problems, or give an official history, or even give an ICANN
line. It was no more than an effort to start off and encourage discussion.
I hope we can find a way to have that discussion without loading responses
with extremely negative language.
Kieren
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Auerbach [mailto:karl at cavebear.com]
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 12:31 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Innovation
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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