Re: [ga] The Real World

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 04:05:14PM +0000, Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> Kent Crispin wrote:
> 
> >
> >*Any* representation scheme that gave equal weight to the various users
> >of the domain name system would end up with business getting an
> >overwhelming majority of the votes.
> >
> 
> I am not so sure, because I confess that I don't have hard facts in 
> support/denial of either position, but may I note few simple things.
> 
> a. Having the majority of the votes is one thing, not allowing an important 
> stateholder to have any vote is a different one. The fact is that the 
> non-commercial individual users not only do not threat the consistent 
> majority of the business, but are even precluded from having a constituency 
> and a vote.

You are mixing two things: the idea of representation of the interest of
individuals, and the idea of an individuals constituency as a practical
construct.  There is very wide support for the former, in ICANN, and in
the constituencies. 

However, there is much less support for the latter, and for good reason
-- the various activities in that area have been essentially incoherent,
and dominated, not by the actual interests of individuals as they
pertain to the domain name system, but rather by the interests of
zealots and would-be demagogues, advocates of generalized internet
democracy, speculators, alt-root proponents, kooks, and other vocal special
interests that are in fact a vanishingly small proportion of the real
individual users of the Interenet/DNS.

That is, those who oppose such a constituency oppose it because all
*practical* experience indicates that not only would such a constituency
fail to represent the interests it proports to represent, but it
would be essentially be an insane playground for kooks.  This is in
almost all cases a good-faith concern about a very real problem.  It is 
one thing to have kooks yelling at you; it is a totally different thing 
to put them in the cockpit and let them fly the plane.

But, indeed there are hundreds of thousands of individual domain name
registrants, and millions of individual users of the DNS.  To date there
has not been a creditable effort to form a constituency that really
supports these interests, and there are fundamental economic/social
forces that work very strongly against the formation of such a
constituency.  These same forces work against the formation of a small
business constituency, or indeed any constituency intended to represent
a large number of entities each with a very small interest --
fundamentally, it simply isn't cost effective for a rational potential
member of such a constituency to participate.  

For example, many restaraunts in my area have web sites; they spend far
more on their water and phone bills than they do on their
domain name, and as a general rule they simply don't concern themselves 
with the governance of the water or phone systems, much less their 
domain name.


> b. The same logic should be applied for large vs. small business. If the 
> vast majority of the (business) users of the DNS are small businesses,
> family businesses, or even individuals that Kent claims (probably
> rightfully so) are using the DNS for business, is the current BC really
> representative of the business interests?

Yes.  Organizations like the International Chamber of Commerce do
represent the interests of small businesses -- local chambers of
commerce typically have lots and lots of small businesses.  The
registrar and registry constituencies have singnificant portions of the
total class as members; the ISPC has members that are associations of
ISPs; the IPC has members that are associations of intellectual property
professionals.  By far the least representative of its class as a
constituency is the NCC -- it has a very small number of specific
non-profit organizations, and a large portion of them are concerned with
a restricted set of "civil society" issues.  And the non-constituency 
members of the GA are even less representative of any particular class. 

> To be clear, I don't have any complaint to the 
> current BC, I am strictly an individual, non-commercial user (the kind of 
> people that are not supposed to talk to the driver), and for me BC can do 
> what it wants, but I don't understand why the reasonment is applied in two 
> different ways when the ratio analysed is business vs. non-business, and 
> when the ratio is large vs. small/family/individual.

I'm sorry, I can't figure out your point here.  The BC is open to small
businesses; if they joined in any number they would be the majority of
the members (and maybe big business would be complaining that they don't
have sufficient representation).  But, for the reasons I outlined above,
they don't bother to join.  If we had a separate small business
constituency they still wouldn't join.  If we had an individuals
constituency I predict that it would have mainly familiar faces
as members.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                          lonesome."  -- Mark Twain

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