[governance] Re: SELF - Authority

[Paul Lehto]

On 10/11/09, Cosmin L. Neagu <cosmin.neagu at rohost.com> wrote:
> I never said that the "other people" are basically immoral or bad. I just
> said that a government for billions of people based on "one person one vote"
> tends to be inefficient.

"Efficiency" is at best a secondary value for democracy. I previously
quoted US President Harry Truman: "If you want efficiency, you'll get
a dictatorship." Indeed, things like redundant checks and balances
have opposed powers working against each other from time to time -
that's hardly "efficient." Political campaigns to educate, for better
or worse, an electorate can be seen as sunk or wasted costs - in a
dictatorship all such sums spend on campaigns could be "efficiently"
eliminated.

My discussion of one person one vote was and is at the level of a
minimum principle sounding in fundamental equality.  If there's NOT
one person one vote, then we have an elite more powerful class or
classes.

One can build on top of the equality of one person one vote, and
that's most welcome.  This is where I see this post by Cosmin to be
at, and where it's headed.  Again, my discussions have been entirely
at the level of showing how ICANN's structure and especially its
restructuring falls well below many principles enshrined in the law of
democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' minimum
guarantees related to political legitimacy.  While I by no means am
opposed to a discussion of what might be built on top of the equality
of one person one vote, for my personal purposes at the present time
an affirmative proposal that goes beyond minimum guarantees would
invite distraction in the form of critiques related to the merits of
the affirmative proposal, which would undermine my role of bringing
attention to the immediate situation.

> Also, such a voting process at this scale would be quite the nightmare for
> all kind of reasons.
>
> I am not advocating the abolition of all kinds of government and I'm not
> advocating for ICANN. I'm only saying that we don't need it for everything
> and that having a vote on the matter is just an illusion of control.
> We have all kind of standards developed outside of government. We can just
> as well have a standard for collaborating in the DNS field without the need
> trust ICANN.
>
> We can have more control bypassing ICANN altogether.
> Again, I'm only talking about the particular ICANN/DNS situation ... we can
> develop a system to bypass ICANN control and leave all the power in the
> hands of the people.
> In this situation you don't need to vote so that somebody might do the right
> thing ... we already have the power and just have to use it.

As someone else suggested, this idea merits being fleshed out, since I
too am not sure what is meant by this bypass.  But the prospect sounds
good, if it can work.  one caveat is that the bypass should work for
everyone, and not leave some or many still subject to ICANN while a
privileged few, for reasons of smarts or perhaps financial
wherewithal, are able to bypass ICANN.

Paul Lehto, Juris Doctor


-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026
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