Re: [Membership] The People's Republic of ICANN?

[Daniel Kaplan <dkaplan@terra-nova.fr>]

A 13:57 11/02/99 -0800, Karl Auerbach a écrit :
>>(Daniel Kaplan):
>> - Only people as members. I disagree. Most end-users of domain names and IP
>> address (at least for now) are corporations, associations, public-service
>> agencies, etc.
>If we allow organzations to be members they are going to say, and they
>have said, "we are bigger members than those little individual people, so
>we deserve a bigger vote."

They might. We might say no. I tend to say no: in France, we have a concept
called "moral persons" which designates all organizations. I'd give one
vote to every moral or physical person that joins.

>(limiting membership to physical persons)
>works very well in practice -- political parties, the NRA (the
>National Rifle Association), the AARP (the American Assocation of Retired
>People), etc.
>And in most political systems we don't allow corporations or organizations
>the vote.

Here is the core of our difference in opinions. I see ICANN as an
organization wih a finite goal, which is primarily (although not only)
accountable to its users, ie, the people who get domain names and IP
addresses from it.
Political parties and associations such as the ones you mention have no
"users", and no power as such (they have influence, of course, and can get
people elected where power is exerted, but this is something else). ICANN
is not the same kind of organizations.
Governments deal with almost everything (some people think, too much of
everything). Therefore everyone is by birth a citizen and a "user" of its
services. ICANN has some powers a government has (had?), but it is a very,
very small subset. And its decisions have an enormously different impact
depending on wether you are a DN/IPA holder (or would-be holder, I admit)
or not. Therefore, without limiting membership to DN/IPA holders, I do
argue for a bias towards ICANN's primary "users". And these primary users
are organizations.

Why not let them join through their individual members. First, many of them
will do that as well. But an organization has a specific personality which
is not just the sum of its members'. I can be an employee of my firm and
either disagree with its policy, or just be unaware of it in some fields. A
firm has a specific voice, specific interests. ICANN's decisions have a
direct impact on the firm as such. They have to be able to express
themselves as organizations.

>So voting on the basis of individuals is quite consistent with day-to-day
>practices.  And it does not pour concrete around some arbitrary allocation
>of power to organizations and their management.

I suggest "persons" (moral and physical) instead of individuals. And I
agree any allocation of several votes to an organization would be arbitrary
and unjustifiable, so every person should have one vote, period.

>I don't know whether you saw the huge fight here in the US over
>"motor-voter", -- i.e. allowing people to register to vote when they come
>into the Dep't of Motor Vehicles -- it turns out that doing so tends to
>"bias" or "correct" the electorate because such a mechanism tends to bring
>in voters who would not otherwise have registered.  Whether one likes it
>or not depends on whose ox would be gored by those additional voters.

Right. Again, I tend to support a bias toward ICANN's primary users, so
this effect does not bother me here. I does when we're dealing with my
country's electorate, but this is not what we're talking about here.

Daniel
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