Re: [wg-review] Names Council & Constituencies (cont'd comments on Mr. Weinberg's analysis)

[Michael Sondow <msondow@iciiu.org>]

This is a follow-up to my criticism regarding Jonathan Weinberg's
anaysis of the DNSO at 
http://www.law.wayne.edu/weinberg/dnso_review.htm, which in most
other respects is excellent.

However, in addition to the somewhat erroneous, or incomplete,
portrayal it contains of the historical process leading to a skewing
of interests in the NC, commented on in my previous post, it
contains an inaccurate analysis of the struggle for representation
of individual name holders and users. 

Mr. Weinberg says: "individual domain name holders, each of whom has 
only diffuse interests in Internet governance, have little incentive
to 
join or organize a constituency-in-formation, and therefore group 
proponents have not succeeded in organizing individual domain name
holders into any broad-based and representative group onto which the
mantle of a constituency could fall". This is incorrect in two
important instances. 

First, Joop Teernsra had already, by the time of the Board's
selection of a DNSO formation proposal, grouped around his IDNO a
sufficient number of independent domain name holders for that group
to be considered a representative constituency. Few of the other
constituencies had any greater justification for laying claim to
represent its own special interests than did the people organized by
Joop Teernstra. Indeed, the persons claiming to represent ISPs and
connectivity providers, on the one hand, and commercial and business
entities, on the other, are in no way representative of even a
sizable minority of the community they claim to speak for in the
DNSO, yet they were granted consitutencies and a place on the Names
Council.

The same is true for users as for individual domain name holders.
The ICIIU had grouped together numerous organizations of
non-commercial and non-profit Internet users, some of them large and
international in membership, and hoped to build a constituency on
this base. That was not in the interests of the Board and their
chosen DNSO colleagues, so we were not permitted to form a
constituency, which was instead given to ISOC, a so-called
"non-profit corporation" which, however, receives most of its
funding from large corporations, hardly the sort of organization
that should form the base of a non-commercial constituency. What is
more, the membership base of ISOC is almost entirely composed of
Internet infrastructure persons and entities, all of whom, or almost
all of whom, are represented adequately in other constituencies. 

Thus, non-commercial end-users, like individual domain name holders,
do not "have little incentive to join or organize a
constituency-in-formation", as Mr. Weinberg says, we do not have
"only diffuse interests in Internet governance", and we have not
"not succeeded in organizing"... "into any broad-based and
representative group onto which the mantle of a constituency could
fall". We did accomplish what was necessary for forming
constituencies, certainly as much as other groups that were granted
them by the Board. We were simply denied our rightful constituencies
by a Board acting on favoritism, and a DNSO that was defined by that
Board.

This correction of the erroneous impression given by Mr. Weinberg's
analysis is necessary because his revision of the historical facts
is a justification for ICANN's process, which has been anything but
fair and natural. His erroneous analysis regarding end-user and
individual name holder organization and representation is also an
argument for permitting the present unjust distribution of power in
the DNSO, which should not be allowed to continue.

Michael Sondow
ICIIU