Re: [wg-review] Clarifications requested from BoD, Staff, NC, TC,Chair prior to co-Chair elections

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 05:05:31PM +0100, Robin Miller wrote:
> 
> 
> Kent Crispin wrote:
> 
> > However, this brings up an important point concerning the basic
> > structural nature of ICANN/DNSO.  Clearly, the absolutely overwhelming
> > majority of the 35 million members of the ICC simply don't have time or
> > interest to devote to participating in ICANN.  To *almost everyone*,
> > domain names are in fact a microscopic specialized policy concern, and
> > they would much rather leave it to some organization to represent them.
> 
> right... the overwhelming majority of Americans do not vote... so therefore
> voting is a microscopic specialised policy concern, and its much better to
> leave it up to a dictatorship to represent them...

You are letting rhetoric get in the way of thinking.  If you start with
a false premise, you can conclude anything you want, of course, and you
have several false premises, both implicit and explicit. 

One of the real concerns here is that you explicitly don't want to
create a constituency that consists of a small group people who care
deeply about some issue, because that is intrinsically unbalanced.  An
organization with 35 million members is certainly going to give a more
balanced view of things than an organization with 200 members all of
whom are very concerned about some single set of issues.

To put it in a blunt, concrete example, the ICC is going to give a far,
far more representative and balanced view of the interests of small
business than a constituency composed entirely of individuals who lost a
UDRP action, domain speculators and cybersquatters, and alternate root
afficianodos. 

One of the major concerns of those opposed to an individuals
constituency, in any form, is that it would be a magnet for angry
individuals with "axes to grind".  The vast majority of people don't
have axes to grind, and don't have time participate, so the angry ones
will take over the constituency.  But angry individuals with axes to
grind are not representative of individuals in general. 

This is not just theory, of course -- to date this has been observed in
every single attempt to organize an individuals constituency.  I think
it is this phenomenon, incidentally, which led to the board's cooling
toward Joop's IDNO -- initially there was support on the board, but that
evaporated when it became clear that the IDNO was a code name for the
"anti-ICANN" constituency.

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