Re: [ga] RE: DNSO Constituency Structure

[Sandy Harris <sandy@storm.ca>]

Jeff Williams wrote:

An aside: can people please try trimming messages? This had, top to bottom:
	Jeff, coomenting on Marc
	Marc, commenting on Chuck
	Chuck, in a message that could have been a new thread but quoted me
	me, replying to Roeland
I'm the only one who'd done any trimming. The thing had three copies of the
list footer at the bottom.

> marc and all assembly members,
> 
>   Yes I cought the oxymoran in Chucks comment (See below)
> also...  Seems others have not however...
> 
>   So I suppose the onely question reamaining is do we try to fix
> ICANN or do we seek to replace it and start all over again?

Do we have that choice? And who are the "we" in that sentence?

What groups might have the power to dismantle, or otherwise fundamentally
change ICANN? 

Governments almost certainly could, but they seem generally to accept the
compromises that have been reached. I can imagine (and hope to see)
various national gov'ts backing the claims for independence of their
ccTLD managers, but I don't expect gov'ts to want to start over. If
they did, I'd worry about what might be on their agendas.

The Internet and telecommunications industries? They appear to be the
main beneficiaries of the current structure. I don't see them as agents
for change here, other than further power grabs like the current attempt 
to reduce At large director positions.

The IETF and various implementers of the hardware and software that run
the whole thing? Perhaps there's some remote hope there; technical changes
might introduce other naming or indexing schemes that change the role of 
DNS and therefore of ICANN. I do not, however, expect any such event soon.

The users? Most of them seem neither to know much about these issues nor
to be remarkably eager to learn. 

For any that do, there are language barriers. Even for native English
speakers, some of the more technical parts of various discussions are
likely incomprehensible. That doesn't always matter -- sometimes the
technical stuuf is irrelevant to the policy issues anyway -- but there
are times when it does.

Apart from language barriers, organising users into an effective force
here is far from a simple problem.

So my take on it is that there's no credible hope of replacing ICANN.
We'll just have to fix it. 

Step one is getting nine openly elected board members seated.
 
> Marc Schneiders wrote:
> 
> > Thank you. I am glad that one of the major stakeholders, if not THE major,
> > recognizes that all this ICANN community talk is fake.
> >
> > --
> > Marc@Schneiders.ORG
> >
> > On Sat, 24 Nov 2001, at 10:14 [=GMT-0500], Gomes, Chuck wrote:
> >
> > > I don't disagree with any of the arguments about the failure of the
> > > consensus system within ICANN but I attribute that to the fact that no valid
> > > consensus development process has ever been put into place.  I also
> > > recognize that such a task would be very challenging.
> > >
> > > Chuck
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