Re: [ga] Consensus on consensus?

[eric <eric@hi-tek.com>]

Karl,

I wonder about too much influence.  If everyone follows the rules then we should
not cry too much influence.
That is why the US just now is changing there contribution rules.

This is like the Verisign contracts.  You cannot make them so that they will not
be breached.  But you can damn sure put in some penalties if there is a breach.

Eric

Karl Auerbach wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Mar 2002 DannyYounger@cs.com wrote:
>
> > This begs the question... is it time to replace the consensus process?  If
> > so, how do we avoid establishing a structural model that relegates certain
> > groups automatically to minority status?
>
> Let's break that down into a bit more detail.
>
> I'd being by suggesting that the presence of minorities is not a bad thing
> in and of itself.
>
> What is bad are systems in which one is assigned by some external metric
> or authority into a given voting bloc.  That is what I find troublesome
> with ICANN's notion of "stakeholders" - it is a simpleminded assignment of
> people/entities to a voting bloc (or to observer status) based on one
> external attribute.
>
> To my mind, a better approach is to designate some "atomic unit" of voting
> - I generally use the single individual as this atomic unit - and let
> those units chose for themselves which other units they wish to be
> associated on any particular issue.  In other words, I suggest that there
> be no concept of "stakeholder" and instead there be simply the fluid and
> free association (and dis-association) of people with one another based on
> how each perceives his or her interests.
>
> Thus someone may be in a minority on issue A and be in the majority on
> issue B.  (For instance, despite my reputation as a dissident, I have been
> in the majority on many, perhaps most, of the ICANN Board of Director
> votes in which I have participated. ;-)
>
> Fluid association is a system that encourages compromise - albeit perhaps
> by its less felicitious name, politiking.
>
> There are those who will object to what I am proposing.  They will assert
> that there entities, such as ISP's or DNS registries that have a greater
> "stake" in the decisions.
>
> I don't agree with the assertion of "greater stake".  I do agree that
> there are those with a more direct economic relationship - an ICANN
> decision may have a very direct relationship with the income that a
> registry receives.  But I don't see that as necessarily any greater
> "stake" than the cumulative "stake" as measured by the indirect charges
> that fall on those who use and pay for domain name services or even as
> measured by the perceived "stability" of things like e-commerce by those
> who merely use the Internet.
>
> In addition we can look to our experience here in the United States, a
> country in which the voters in most of our public elections are people and
> not corporations or other collective entities.  Here in the US, despite
> the fact that the actual votes are in the hands of individual people,
> there is still no doubt that collective entities make their desires known.
> Indeed the problem is not that these collective entities are ignorred but,
> rather, that they have too much influence even though they do not
> themselves possess a vote.
>
>                 --karl--
>
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