Re: [wg-review] Constituencies

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2001 at 02:32:34AM -0800, Roeland Meyer wrote:
> Actually, this idea was a part of the original DNSO proposal.

No, it wasn't.  The original DNSO proposal had constituencies from the
start.  The proposal you are referring came months later, outside the
mainstream DNSO development (which is fairly well chronicled at
http://www.dnso.org/history/www.dnso.org/index.html).

The original DNSO proposal is at
http://www.dnso.org/history/www.dnso.org/docs/draft1.htm

If you take a look at it you will find the following constituencies 
proposed: 

A. Registries in gTLDs [xx] members 
B. Registries in ccTLDs [xx members] 
C. Registrars [xx members] 
D. Operators and service providers [xx members] 
E. Business organizations other than operators and service providers 
    [xx members] 
F. Organizations primarily concerned with the interests of trademark owners 
    [xx members] 
G. Consumers [xx members] 
H. At large members distributed geographically: 
   1. Americas [xx members]  
   2. Europe, Africa and the Middle East [xx members] 
   3. Asia-Pacific [xx members]

The "xx members" refers to the number of members on the "governing 
committee" that each constituency was to get -- the numbers were left 
open for discussion purposes.

This proposal was designed to follow the requirements for the DNSO
defined in the then-current ICANN bylaws.  There were constituencies in the
proposal simply because the bylaws specified that "stakeholder groups"
would be represented.  There was a major misunderstanding about what was
meant by the term "names council" in those bylaws.  Later, the term
"governing committee" was replaced by the term "names council".  Also,
the 5 current ICANN geographical regions weren't known then -- that's
why only three were specified. 

Later the "consumers" were merged into the "at large" -- there wasn't
any clear way to distinguish them.  The geographical distribution
specification was dropped because the requirement was made general for
all constituencies. 

Later still the at-large constituency was dropped altogether -- there
was only one person really fighting for it, and that was me (you will
see references to my lonely struggle in the notes -- I was the scribe for 
the first two meetings, so I made sure it was recorded ;-)).  The primary 
opponents to the idea at that time were the ccTLDs, incidentally, who 
were diligently trying to take control of the DNSO.

The "fluid constituencies" model was discarded as unworkable.  It's one
of those things that sounds good at a shallow level, but when you got to
the details no one could figure out a way for it to work.  It sounds
good, but in fact it changes the voting structure, which means it
changes the decision mechanism, which means that the decision process is
in relatively constant flux, which means ultimately that you need
someone to oversee the constituency changes, but who would that be? The
ICANN board was frequently cited as the ultimate oversight body for
constituency changes, but the ICANN board simply didn't want to be
involved in overseeing a constantly changing structure. 
 
-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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