[At-Large] ICANN Board Nomination

Karl Auerbach karl at cavebear.com
Mon Aug 30 22:18:00 UTC 2010


On 08/30/2010 02:25 PM, Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond wrote:

> Le 30/08/2010 22:54, Karl Auerbach a écrit :
>> Put the promised 50%+ of ICANN's board seats up for public election from
>> slates of candidates who need pass no insider nomination process and I
>> guarantee you that the public participation in ICANN would go up by many
>> orders of decimal magnitude.
>>
>
> Over 50% of the  Board seats are selected by NOMCOM. Anyone can apply.
> Add the At Large Director seat, and whilst it's not a direct public
> election either, it looks to me like a process that cannot be captured
> as easily as direct elections (which is what led to the reform in the
> first place).

The "nominating committee" - It ought to have its name corrected because 
it "appoints" rather than "nominates".

That body, although it has made nice selections (and I use the word 
"nice" with all of its English ambiguous nuance), that committee has 
essentially been like one of those barrels that one uses to polish 
stones - neither stone nor person comes out with any edge or sharpness.

Like most such committees the choices are compromises made by people who 
obtained their seats on the committee largely because they are 
status-quo oriented in the first place - thus a tendency for like to 
"nominate" like.

The community of internet users, like most bodies of natural people, 
ought to have the power to chose who it wishes, even if those people are 
of the nature that would cause a nominating committee to choke.

ICANN's system - including the nominating committee - was designed with 
the specific intent of keeping out the noisy riff-raff who might 
question the status quo - people like me.

And, going back the the prior point - the reason why people are staying 
out of ICANN and the ALAC in droves is precisely because of the 
isolation between those people and ICANN that results from the 
intervention of the "nominating" committee and the ALAC+RALO+ALS system.

Sleeping Beauty's prince had a better chance to get through that thicket 
of thorns than internet users have to exercise their will through the 
multilayer armor of ICANN's ALAC+RALO+ALS.

Give the community of internet users a "stake" and power to have effect 
within ICANN comparable to that of Verisign or PIR or the trademark 
community and people would participate just as they did in the hundreds 
of thousands in year 2000.

ICANN's has legal existence explicitly to serve the public interest.  It 
is sad that such a thick firewall has been erected by ICANN against that 
public from having any but a highly filtered and derivative role.

Many, perhaps most, people will not step off the sidewalk to pick up a 
penny in the gutter - they perceive the value to be too small to be 
worth getting their hands and clothes dirty.  The same equation - too 
little value to justify even a small risk - that is what is keeping 
internet users out of ICANN.

	--karl--



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