Re: [kent@songbird.com: draft application]

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 09:30:46PM -0500, Michael Sondow wrote:
>> Am I reading this correctly - Names Council members are elected by the
>> entire DNSO membership, rather than by the consituencies they represent?  If
>> one or two constituencies constitute a majority of DNSO members, they could
>> determine the entire NC membership.
> 
> You're quite right. It doesn't make much sense the way it's written.

Clarification: He is right about the DNSO electing NC members.  His
second statement is, however, incorrect.  Concretely, imagine the At
Large had 95% of the DNSO members.  According to his second
statement, they could determine the entire NC membership.  But of 
course, they don't get to nominate candidates in the other 
constituencies, so their choices are limited.

In practice one would expect the At Large to be the largest 
constituency.

> The
> simplest way of doing it would be for each constitutency to elect its
> own members of the Names Council directly. However, even this won't
> prevent the problem you address because entities can be members of more
> than one constitutency.

Concrete example: Imagine IBM -- it buys a registry and a registrar,
so it can have membership in all the constituencies except the At 
Large.  It pays 10000 employess an extra $200 a month to be At Large 
members. So IBM now has 10004 votes, and can nominate 3 reps from 
the At Large, and 1 rep from each of the other constituencies, and 
probably get them elected.

I am reminded of a Lampoon photo, many years ago, of a well-known
rich person (imagine Ross Perot) running for governor.  The picture
showed him with a gun to the head of some guy that was tied up with
ropes.  The text said something to the effect that "I'm Ross Perot,
the next governor of this state.  I have so much money that I can do
absolutely anything I want.  To prove it I will shoot this person,
and nobody will be able to do anything about it.  Furthermore, I am
going to pay each person who votes for me $100."

Anyway, while it is true that there is a theoretical possibility of
what you describe happening, in practice it seems rather unlikely,
and would require obvious contortions.  Remember that the DNSO also
has a requirement from ICANN to maintain fair processes -- a really
egregious example of vote buying would be grounds for
disenfranchisement of the SO, or something like that.  But there are
more contrived examples that will handle this case, as well --
imagine that the Mafia is employed to threaten the families of all
the Board members if they don't go along with the whole scheme... 

There is no perfect solution -- given enough money and evil, any
system will fail.  Democracy only works if there are more good 
people than bad people.

> It seems that this whole NC membership question
> needs more work. It's not the only thing.

Make suggestions.  

Take a look at INTA's "one-person, one-vote" model.

-- 
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair				"Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com				lonesome." -- Mark Twain