Re: [wg-review] Resumption of Review.

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 06:19:39AM -0800, Eric Dierker wrote:
[...]
> Assuming we want the extreme of  Internet Democracy. This requires two factors,
> educated populace and great leaders. The degree of quality required of either is
> in direct proportion to that lacking in the other.
> 
> Assuming we want Internet Monopoly. This requires two factors, content populace
> and great leaders. The degree of quality of either is in direct proportion to
> that lacking in the other.  Under any system I am most content when not so
> ignorant that I cannot accomplish my goals.

Under the current circumstances, in the domain of interest, we currently
have a populace that is undeniably

    1) very uneducated (as a percentage of the internet user community,
    those who are knowledgable about the matters of concern to ICANN are
    an extremely tiny minority). 

    2) mostly content.

Democracy advocates, in their passion, often overlook the fact that pure
democracy is not perfect, by any means, and *always* has to be modified
to protect the rights of minorities: "democracy is two wolves and a
sheep deciding what to eat for dinner".  Much of the early discussion of
the DNSO revolved around how to protect the rights of minorities,
especially since some of the minorities (eg registries) have a very
large stake in the possible policy results.

Three other serious problems are quite salient in our current context:  

1) an undeducated populace is a playground for demagogues and monied interests;

2) the infrastructure to support a world-wide democracy simply does not 
exist (the translation issues alone are massive, but there are also enormous 
problems with secure identification of the voters, coordination, publicity)

3) a worldwide democracy would be extremely expensive, relative to the 
mission of ICANN -- in the 10s of millions of dollars, at least.

Bear in mind that the goal of all this is just policy concerning
internet names and numbers, an area that is genuinely obscure.  This
leads to a couple of simple questions: 1) does the mission of ICANN
merit all the expense and infrastructure that a world wide interent
democracy would require? and 2) are there other approaches that are
effective but cheaper?

Obviously, I believe that the answer to the first question is an
emphatic "no!".  In the initial stages ICANN must define it's role, and
that definition phase will invole establishment of policies and
procedures.  Once that role is well-defined, ICANN should fade into the
background.  If it doesn't fade into the background, then IT WILL HAVE
FAILED.  In the long term ICANN should be mostly invisible and very
boring, and it simply won't merit the attention it currently gets.  Bear
in mind that the cost of ICANN will ultimately be born by domain name
registrants and other direct users.  How much time and energy can the
average person expect to spend on something that costs $6/year,
wholesale?

The answer to the second is "of course!" There are already
well-established government agencies that deal with organizations in a
position of potential monopoly: anti-trust agencies.  They operate with
all authority and mechanism of real governments, and ICANN will be under
their scrutiny.  It is not necessary to build elaborate oversight of
ICANN, because the mechanism already exists, and we don't have to pay 
the cost of duplicating it.

> accomplish this we must educate the populace. The leaders are great and therefor
> realize that the must educate their populace in order to be a successful Internet
> Nation.
>
> The same is true for ICANN.  Education is the only chance it has of accomplishing
> it's goals. With Postal, we could slide by with an undereducated populace. Now
> with the legitimacy of our leadership constantly questioned, it is far more
> important to have a highly educated populace.

Sorry this is just silly.  It would cost literally hundreds of millions
of dollars to "educate the populace" about the intricacies of domain
name issues, and it simply isn't worth it.  There are literally
thousands of areas of specialization that the populace knows almost
nothing about -- the population isn't educated about any kind of
professional licensing activity, for example.  In the US the Federal
Aviation Administration sets policies for licensing airline pilots; the
populace isn't educated about that; the populace isn't educated about
telecommunication policy; it isn't educated about policy concerning
licensing of barbers, beauticians, and cosmetologists, for pete's sake. 

Despite this widespread ignorance things really do work. 

[...]
> 
> I count no less than 15 sites with direct informational content related to ICANN.
> The corporate site is loaded with information. Yesterday I found 24 news sites
> with reports of ICANN activity. Conclusion: Information is not education.

Right.  Because NO ONE CARES.  They will never care, because domain name
policy is an obscure technical niche that simply doesn't matter to 99%
of the human race.  Not only does it not matter now, it will *never*
matter.  People only have so much free time and energy, and there are 
thosands of obscure things that compete for that free time and energy.  
As far as the population at large is concerned all of this is 
B-O-R-I-N-G, the kind of things that make your friends eyes glaze over 
when you talk about it.

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