[wg-review] Constituency criteria [was: No Cash, No Vote!]

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@terabytz.co.nz>]

At 11:10 27/03/01 -0500, babybows.com wrote:

>
>For those of you that still think that adding new constituencies in this
>manner is the way to solve the issue of representation, think again.  In
>addition to financial barriers, you will next need to abide by Names Council
>"criteria" that evaluates "the need, uniqueness, potential contribution and
>representiveness" of your proposed constituency.
>http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/nc-plan/Arc00/doc00003.doc   Good luck
>crossing that bridge!
>

Danny and all,

First of all: any "criteria" put up by the Names Council are in direct
conflict with the ICANN bylaws on this subject. Only the Board could
promulgate such criteria.

For the Individual Domain Name Owners' constituency though they would be
answered as follows:

Need: Evidenced by the clamor of more than 220 idno'ers who have joined the
constituency formation effort. Individual Domain name Owners are paying for
a large part of the registry-industry's revenues and need to have a say in
ICANN policies that affect them. Their interests are not adequately covered
by the IP, the business (big biz) and the non-commercial (organizations)
constituencies. 
They do have interets in common with  @large members, but not the typical
DN interests. Owning a name or naming a personal Domain has proven to be an
emotional issue that keeps drawing new participants into the ICANN process.

Uniqueness: a tricky requirement, since all the opponents of an IDNH need
to do to give  the NC or the Board an excuse to drag their feet is to split
off a competing organization.

Potential contribution: the contributions and good will of those
individuals that have been active on the mailing lists and in the physical
ICANN meetings are well known and documented.  And this is prior to
recognition!

Representativeness: (a.k.a. the capture argument) this can be made into an
endless bone of contention.  
In the end, only subjective criteria can be applied: If an IDNH would be
captured by , say, 200 IP lawyers or 50 registrars , all with their
individual Domain, it is only from the public positions taken by their
representatives  that any judgement can be made with regards to whether
these people are truly representing the typical interests of Individual
Domain Name Owners. They might, after all.
Only a solid open charter, a  fairly large membership and frequent voting
can offer a protection against capture.

Now, as someone remarked in Melbourne, would the NC apply all the same
criteria to its existing constituencies? :-(




--Joop--
Former bootstrap of the CA/idno
       The Polling Booth 
www.democracy.org.nz/vote1/

--
This message was passed to you via the wg-review@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe wg-review" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html