Hope springs eternal - Re: [governance] Innovation

[Karl Auerbach]

Adam Peake wrote:
> Pretty much agree with Bret and Avri. It's taken along time to get all 
> the ALAC structures in place, now's time to see if they work.

They have had 4 years already.  And yet, with massive infusions of ICANN 
money and staff it is a cripple that can garner barely enough interest 
to fill a very small meeting room.  That compares badly with the nearly 
200,000 who tried, in a period of times measured in months, not years, 
to participate when there was something at stake.

The ALAC, even after these 4+ years and mountains of money shows no real 
signs that it is rousing.

Yes there are some significant worthies - Roberto and Vittorio come to 
mind - yet the best that the ALAC does is to occasionally express mild 
thoughts in mild phrases and without the power to compel the real 
decision makers to pay attention, much less to consider, what has been said.

Any body of internet governance that builds on such a soft and weak 
foundation will find that eventually the public recedes and that when 
something really causes the public to itch that they will find that, 
because there is no real institutional means of recourse, that because 
in that body accountability is merely a word without substance, that the 
only recourse is not to repair the body but, rather to replace it.


> The elections did not work.

I rather beg to differ.  (Reserving opinion on my own role) I'd assert 
that the directors who were elected were generally better qualified, 
worked harder, and were a richer source of ideas than those who came 
before.  And that was even with active attempts by certain parts of 
ICANN that attempted to interfere with the work of those directors (such 
as suddenly changing the rules about putting things onto the agenda so 
that Andy MM could not put a motion onto the table.)

> North America was OK (if we ignore the massive imbalance in voting pool. 
> Likely permanent US seat, Canada and a few other disenfranchised.)

Your conclusion does not follow.  The vote was rather close and the 
outcome could have been swayed a group in any of the countries.

Moreover, the NA region is the one and only region is dominated by one 
country - 300,000,000 out of the total of about 330,000,000 at that 
time.  In no other region does any one country have a population whose 
numbers so greatly dominate the combined weight of the other regions.

One might naturally expect that the candidates and results might tend to 
follow that population distribution.  But from that you are jumping to a 
conclusion that people voted by nationality.  My own indication was that 
people voted based on the arguments made by the candidates.

And to follow your logic - if one country can dominate others, then 
perhaps the elections ought to be for representatives selected on a 
country by country basis?

And since there are regions within countries that might then be 
unequally distributed - For example California has a population that is 
  75x times larger than the smallest state - so by your logic we should 
then adopt regional or state wide elections.

But then within individual states or regions do not some cities dominate 
and thus we need to go to even smaller divisions in order to remove the 
danger that you perceive that some area might dominate?

Of course this logic, if followed to its conclusion, ends up right where 
I'd like to start: with the individual human being as the atomic unit of 
decision making, the ultimate "stakeholder" in internet governance.

And in what why do we measure the voices of all of these ultimate 
stakeholders?  An election in which each gets a vote seems like the 
obvious answer.

> Asia Pacific was a a nationalistic mess.

I disagree - in any election process the result tends to go to those who 
are best organized.  That's why the intellectual property tends to 
dominate ICANN - because they are so well organized.

The answer is, of course, for those who have different points of view to 
organize themselves.

In addition, if the idea that a nationalistic point of view is so bad, 
then one must dismiss many of the voices on this list who argue for an 
ALAC based structure because it promises to increase nationalist and 
regional voices and to do so solely and exclusively on geography and 
borders.

As it turned out the AP director was far from jingoistic and was, 
instead, synoptic, reflective, creative, and intelligent.  His presence 
honored the entire AP region and his work has been, and continues to be, 
of value to the internet as a whole.

> Latin America dominated by a national campaign in the country with the 
> largest population (significantly largest population). Others didn't 
> stand a chance.

Again you are making an assertion that is not based on any statistical 
evidence.  (And by-the-way, the director who was elected was very good 
at articulating a regional, not a Brazilian, point of view.  He served 
his entire region very well.)

> Europe, the person elected seems to have been strongly supported by a 
> special interest campaign.

Yes, those who campaign tend to have backers.  That's the nature of an 
election.

Moreover that "special interest" group was internet users who have a 
strong technical understanding of the net, not unlike the IETF.

(By the way the IETF gets a rather strong built-in voice in ICANN 
because it does have that kind of strong understanding - so it seems 
somewhat odd to disparage a similar constituency that is able to win in 
an election.)

> Africa, the voting pool was so small as to make the election almost 
> irrelevant.

Then, given that the ALAC is on same order of size, I guess that it 
should be discounted and dismissed for the same reason?

As it came out, Nii Q. was an extremely fine director who was an 
effective voice for the needs of many people in his part of the world.


> Karl, you were a Director, but you had no constituency and you didn't 
> make any attempt to communicate with the "at large".

Really?

I maintained massive contact with the community of internet users - 
everything from several hundred emails per week (the total number is in 
excess of 7,000 emails that I sent discussing ICANN matters with the 
community), to being the only director who had a published platform and 
explained his choices - see 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/platform.htm and 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/diary/index.htm

I also traveled and discussed issues at universities (Berkeley, UCLA, 
Northwestern, Loyola, CalTech, Univ of Texas, Harvard, Stanford, Boston 
University among others), intellectual property interests (don't forget 
that I am a member of the intellectual property section of the 
California state bar), businesses, and the US Congress.  And, of course, 
to the degree that ICANN's board actually engaged in "discussion" of 
issues during that period I was the most active board member.

And I maintained channels of discussion that were often quite active 
with at least 4 of the 6 other candidates in the election.

And perhaps it is easy to forget but I was often the only board member 
who asked questions of the people in attendance (physically and over the 
net) during ICANN board meetings.

These were hardly one-way exchanges.

Please don't try to say that I did not make any attempt to communicate 
with the community of internet users.  I made a far greater effort to do 
so than any person in ICANN, before or since.

Moreover, all of this was done while ICANN was engaged in unlawful 
activity designed to prevent me from doing anything.

All in all, I find your idea that I did not maintain contact with the 
internet users of North America to be an idea that is fully contradicted 
by the facts.

> ALAC might do better, *might*.

Yes, *might" deserves to be highlighted as the conditional, hopeful 
conditional, that it is.

And here is where the "hope springs eternal" comes in - Many of us think 
of ICANN and the ALAC as a kind of "process" to make choices.

That's one way to look at it.

But there is a more important way to look at it: Power.

The issue is that of raw power - the power of governance - the power to 
say "no" to activities that are otherwise lawful.

We have seen how ICANN has leveraged that power into a siphon that pulls 
over half a billion dollars every year out of the pockets of internet 
users and splits that money between itself and the registries.

Because we are engaged in allocating governmental kinds of power the 
ALAC must be judged as a political structure, not as an organizational 
structure.

And it is for that reason why the idea of building an isolated, 
channeled, prim and proper ALAC fails.  The ALAC is founded on a hope 
that through some process that ICANN will become a hall of philosopher 
kings.

Yet history has taught us that philosopher kings are transient and that 
structures that do not contain real means for the community to hold a 
structure to account are structures that either become repressive or are 
dismantled.

The flaws of the ALAC are many.

The primary one is that it puts far too much distance between internet 
users and point of decision.  This creates an opacity that makes it 
difficult, indeed impossible, for internet users to know who is making 
what choices and, more importantly, why.  But the greater and more 
damaging result of that distance is the loss of accountability - 
internet users not only can not really perceive how choices are being 
made but they also do not have an effective means of signaling their 
displeasure and forcing a change.

The ALAC is built of reeds that reflect a political naiveté - a kind of 
Panglossian hope that the internet is the best of all possible worlds 
and that everything will be right and good, that everyone plays fair, 
and that everything will turn out happily.

On the other hand, elections are built of stones that reflect the hard 
political reality of the power of governance.  Governance is venal and 
often quite ugly.  The phrase "throw the bums out" is heard more often 
from the community than is heard words of admiration.

ICANN has become a regulatory body that has been captured by commercial 
interests - you should go to an meeting of intellectual property lawyers 
and hear them laugh at how easy ICANN has made it for them to exert 
massive, even unfair, leverage on domain name owners.

The ALAC is acceptable to those commercial interests because the ALAC is 
emasculated and powerless and is structured so that it will remain so.

Had ICANN had a real system of elections ICANN may still have been 
captured.  However, with elections there would be at least an avenue for 
remediation through action by the community expressed through votes. 
With the ALAC the chances of community outrage ever having any effect is 
about the same chance as you or I have of winning the state lottery.


> Shame this discussion's not happening on the ALAC mailing list, subscribe:
> 
> <http://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/alac_atlarge-lists.icann.org>

During the last quarter a mere 63 people made an average 10 comments 
each on that list and most of the notes were on ALAC procedural matters. 
  That's not a sign of a lot of vibrancy or engagement with issues.

		--karl--
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