[ga] ISPs and the ALM

[DannyYounger@cs.com]

An idea is being floated in the ALSC public forum to involve ISPs in support 
of the At-Large membership.  As we have not witnessed any participation by 
our ISP representatives in that Forum to date, I am sure that they would 
welcome the opportunity to discuss their views...

excerpts are cited below:

I am not sure how or why ICANN has slowly shifted the question from "how to 
implement an at-large organization?" to "is there interest in an at-large 
organization and will users pay for it?"  I belong to the camp that will not 
pay a "membership fee".  I would (cautiously) support an at-large fee 
PROVIDED it applied to ALL Internet users (this would be similar to the 
"property tax" idea) and provided that voting rights were meaningful.  
Perhaps there should be a fee of a penny per IP address which the ISPs would 
pay - and they would pass this charge along to their users.  This would not 
be difficult for the ISPs - mine seems to have no trouble at all regularly 
increasing the fees for vague regulatory reasons. A similar idea was already 
floated, but aimed at charging an extra penny per domain name. I personally 
think that the charge ought to be collected via ISPs rather than domain 
registrars because those who use the Internet (at-large members) all must 
have Internet access (! provided by their ISP), but not all must have a 
domain name. Furthermore, domain name holders are already represented by the 
DNSO, while at-large users are not.

Ideally, when you sign up for Internet Service, you would also get 
information about how to vote for at-large reps for ICANN.  The "how-to" 
should be along the lines of "Go to this website, enter your password (or 
click on the faces, whatever)" and ta-da, here are links to the 
representatives pages, here's information on ICANN and here's where you can 
vote.  The representatives would be responsible for their own material (no 
charge to ICANN or the users). ICANN would be responsible for keeping a list 
of rep pages (ought to be trivial), posting material about what they are up 
to in all applicable languages (they ought to do this regardless of whether 
there is an at-large or not!) and the voting capability.

The real question is how to authenticate users - and I think that the mail 
solution is unsustainable.  Again, I think that the easiest solution lies 
through the ISPs.  Most (if not all?) already provide their users with a 
username and password.  I would ideally like to link to ICANN At-Large 
through the website I get to when I log in this with username and password. 
ICANN would not need to authenticate the users - they would already be 
authenticated through the ISP. Then the main issue would be to ensure that 
users can't bypass this process. This would require a little more persuasion 
for the ISPs, because they would need to add the link from the site, but if 
ICANN has any authority at all they should be able to pull it off.
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