[Membership] At Large Membership

["David Schutt" <david@speco.com>]

First, it is necessary to correct a few misconceptions about who and what
make up the supporting organizations, and why they were structured the way
they are.

One at a time -

PSO -

The PSO is a means for a small group of engineers, a subset of the network
engineering community at large, to be able to elect members of the Board of
Directors of ICANN. Along with the W3C and ITU these folks may be
representative of some section of the technical community, but none of these
groups are representative organizations, and as such do not provide a means
for the larger technical  community to participate.

The government and industry sponsored research community has up till now run
the name and addressing  system, and it is reasonable for them to want to
continue to do so. However, they have not shown themselves to be
particularly adept at policy development, and the level of influence over
ICANN they have is far out of proportion to what would be reasonable and
necessary.

ASO -

The organizations that will comprise the ASO are bureaucratic organizations,
assigned the task of keeping records about addresses and doling out address
space in an effort to control the growth of autonomous networks directly
connected to the internet. Although technically oriented people may
participate in ARIN, RIPE, and APNIC, the role of these orgs is not
primarily technical in nature. They take their direction from elsewhere,
mostly from the people who make up the PSO.


DNSO -

There is nothing technical about the work of the DNSO. This is pure policy
development that has to do with defining markets, protecting market
positions, and protecting marketing tools. The vast majority of the
participants are lobbyists for one special interest or another, and the idea
that these people are the technical experts that should be making policy
decisions for the good of the Internet borders on the ridiculous.


Taken as a whole, this reserved role for so called 'experts' means that
there is tremendous power vested in a small band of technocrats and special
interest lobbyists.


This concentration of power is -not- balanced by a general membership that
is being denied the tools to enforce accountability, and being denied the
ability to directly participate in policy development. The At-Large
membership as it is currently defined is useless as anything other than a
public relations tool for ICANN.

The thought that this useless membership could be used as an excuse to deny
even the consideration of a legitimate attempt to participate within the
rules extant (the Individual Domain Name Owners) is shocking.


David Schutt
Speco, Inc.
Schiller Park, IL USA