[ICANN-EU] Re: [icann-candidates] Update to my ICANN Profile and Platform forElection

[Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com>]

> Not really, Karl. If you read carefully, I said, "the role of ICANN and other 
> entities development, monitoring and support of the Internet"
>  
> Which I define later as in the my mail as: "ISPs, registrars, large sites, 
> companies and organizations ..., government agencies, standards setting and 
> technical sources such as InterNIC, IANA, IETF, W3C, et al. and indirectly 
> labor, consultants, lawyers, and accountants through their employers or 
> clients."

Well I certainly would hesitate to consider InterNIC (whatever is left
anymore), IANA, and the IETF as entirely distinct from today's ICANN. ;-)

As you know, when I co-founded the Boston Working Group and when we
presented our alternative proposals regarding the formation of ICANN to
NTIA we made it a foundation element that there be a powerful at-large
organization within ICANN.  (And Ira Magaziner said that it was the BWG
that gave the Dept of Commerce the leverage to coerce the Joe Sims' ICANN
- the ICANN we have today - into having any sort of membership body at
all.)

What tends to be overlooked is that we also wanted to reduce the notion of
"supporting organization" to that of "advisory body" and that such
advisory bodies could come and go, coalesce and vanish, depending on the
issues of the day.

Personally, I have great reservations about an ICANN or ICANN-clone
that gives any formal voting power to corporations or entites.

To my mind, individual people are the atomic unit of "interest" and ought
to be the atomic unit of decisionmaking in ICANN and its progeny.

Few, if any, nations give the voting franchise to corporate businesses.  
I don't see any reason that ICANN should break new ground in this regard.
Personally, I feel that business, particularly supra-national business,
already has sufficient power and needs no help getting its point across.


As for promoting technical organizations to some sort of governance role -
I personally don't find the IETF or W3C or IEEE or ... to be particularly
better equipped to guide policies of Internet governance than any other
groups.  Yes there is some technical knowledge there, but many of the
judgements of ICANN and its sucessors are going to be non-technical.  
Indeed the ICANN of today has not made any significant decisons on the
basis of technical input.

(And if you look at the recent IAB/IESG "recommendation" to the RIRs about
IPv6 allocation policies, you'll see that the IETF has no lack of means to
create powerful policies without any help from an ICANN-like institution.)

		--karl--