Re: [members-meeting] Re: [icann-eu] Second draft for comments on Study Committee

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>]

On 2000-11-23 17:55:49 +0100, Vittorio Bertola wrote:

> In the end, the Study will produce a document with suggestions to
> the Board. I think that there should then be an online vote in
> which every member says "Yes, I agree" or "No, I don't agree".
> Simple, cheap and clear :-) The result from this vote should
> *not* limit in any way the decisions of the Board, but could be
> taken as a measure of consensus among the members, and on our
> side could help us in making it very difficult to take any
> deliberation which is provenly impopular among the Membership.

So you are proposing that kind of vote as part of a
consensus-building and -verification process.  I understand your
point now, but I'm still not convinced that this would actually
work.

>>should produce a consensus.  A situation you describe can't
>>seriously be termed "consensus", and I'm quite certain that
>>ICANN staff doesn't want to get the kind of publicity a
>>one-sided consensus on this issue would produce.

> It seems to me that you cannot assume that all the current Board
> members act in good faith; some of them seem to be quite biased
> towards shifting power from the community and the membership to
> the industry and the SOs. 

You may be right about this.  However we can safely assume that the
members of the board aren't stupid.

> I don't think that, in such a situation, they would care much
> about "publicity", if it doesn't get to the point where it
> endangers the power they get from DoC and registries (which is
> also something we should try to exploit).

My point is that a blantant misrepresentation of community consensus
with the effect that the at large seats are removed would have
precisely that kind of side-effect.  Remember the Burr quotes
Wolfgang Kleinwächter has pulled out of the record.  And remember
the fact that, in Cairo, there was sufficient public pressure to get
them to agree upon a direct election.  (I am quite well aware that
the ICANN folks were more clever than their critics from a tactical
point of view, by slipping that study into the bylaws (!) as part of
the "compromise".)

> I don't mind whether this is realistic, because it is reasonable.

By what definition of "reasonable", if it's not even realistic?

> After all, it is something that was expected and planned up to a
> few weeks ago - and I don't know how it is in other countries,
> but most Italian online press is now referring to the deferral of
> 2001 elections as an illegitimate robbery by the current Board.
> So we should not accept it passively.

May I remind you of the fact that we are talking about the "Cairo
Compromise"?  The "eternal four" may not have been selected before
early November, but the bylaw changes had been made earlier in time.

-- 
Thomas Roessler                         <roessler@does-not-exist.org>