[governance] SELF - Authority

[Cosmin L. Neagu]

I started this as a reply to a comment of Paul Lehto saying that the
only way to "guard against the guardians" is to dilute the ultimate
power as much as possible (one person one vote) and hope that in the
end it will all be OK or at least as good as could be expected.
It might be good enough for governing a few millions but as the
governing body "serves" more and more people it tends to develop ways
of insulating itself against it's subjects.
Even if it remains accountable it tends to be slow and inefficient
especially when it comes to conflict resolutions.

I say that this is not good enough, at least not when it comes to
governing the Internet of billions of people. I say we can do better,
at least regarding the ICANN / DNS issue.
The "one person one vote" assumes that everybody willing to delegate
his authority to the central body (let's say ICANN) using their vote.
The ones that do not vote have to accept the majority decision.
This is flawed in several ways:
- it produces potentially billions of people of "minority" while the
majority gets to make arbitrary decisions
- it assumes that the people that don't vote are OK with whatever result
- the process of election is expensive (time, money, fraud, manipulation, ...)

The alternative I proposed was to design a system that would not
delegate the power of the user to ICANN.
Every person could create for himself a asymmetrical key pair (PGP,
public/private encryption key) that he will need in order to make
decisions regarding his domains, his email, ...
ICANN would need to create and maintain the standard of a distributed
software (something similar to the current DNS software) and make sure
it's being run properly.
In short, a system like this would allow ICANN to make sure the
current principles of the Internet are not perverted and it would
allow the users to keep their authority to themselves (not to trust
ICANN or anybody else with their vote).

Even though the technical part might seem confusing it is quite strait
forward. I don't think that conventional methods will do.

Even more, I believe that a system that does not delegate the
authority of the user will eventually emerge... it doesn't actually
need permission from anybody. It only needs critical mass.
ICANN or IGF patronage might just make it happen better and quicker
but I cannot see a future without this happening at all.
It becomes easier and and easier and after all ... these days it only
takes a few good tweets to reach critical mass.


Cosmin
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