[governance] ICANN ads for "general public" (new subject header)

[Kieren McCarthy]

> The ad that he provided as an example appears to be 
> incoherent when one evaluates...


Dan,

Since you have been so generous with your advice, would you accept some?

If you wish to have your views properly considered, then reaching for the
strongest negative word each time while also making it clear your mind is
made up, is the least effective way of doing it.

We are not negotiating a treaty here. ICANN is in a complex, challenging and
changing world and its systems have evolved to favour those that are willing
to work with others to reach a consensus view. 

If you relax the rhetoric and talk to people you will find a significant
number of them are working hard at fixing the issues you have identified.

I will do a post on the ICANN blog this week in an effort to stir up some
reasoned debate over there as this mailing list has a lot of stuff to get
through in the next few months to prepare for the IGF, and the issue of
ICANN, as always, tends to make discussion and agreement on other topics
harder.


What I would personally like to see discussed is how exactly civil society
can make access a major feature of the Rio IGF.

If it wasn't for Nitin Desai's nimble chairmanship, access and capacity
building would probably never make it on the agenda at all. And yet this is
arguably the most important issue with the Internet as it is in 2007.

My argument would be that if high-quality, well-written, concise and
interesting documentation covering the access issue was produced (in a range
of languages) and if a number of lively and carefully produced workshops and
presentations were put together, then people would gravitate toward the
issue.

I also think time invested in high-quality recording of workshops, which are
then quickly posted online (YouTube, Google video and Dotsub) would pay back
ten-fold.

Off the top of my head: a table of countries and the per-person cost of
Internet connections in that country, both by actual dollar value and
comparative dollar value, would cause people to do what people always do -
find out where their country comes, plus compare it to the top countries,
the bottom countries and their neighbours.

Then all you have to do is flag up what the patterns are in low-price and
high-price countries (most obvious ones being deregulation/monopoly;
geographic location/landlocked), and you have people thinking about the
issue straight away.

Plus, such a table is a pre-formed story and would be lapped up by every
journalist from every country (so long as their country is on the list).


An interactive map of the table is also easily produced if the data is put
into XML. This is what we use to produce the ICANN maps. One example here:
http://www.icann.org/maps/root-servers.htm


Just one idea.


I have to say I am also amazed that there are not sessions where governments
share knowledge of the different laws they have brought in re: Internet
issues and their effectiveness - or have I just missed them?




Kieren


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