participation

This page looks at participation in ICANN. It is significant because of perceptions that ICANN is the 'choke point' for governance of the internet as a whole.

Initially appointed for two years, the 18 Director ICANN Board is now elected. Nine Directors are elected by private, self-regulatory bodies such as domain name supporting organisations (DNSO), address supporting organisations (ASO), and protocol supporting organizations (PSO). The other Directors are elected by internet users - the 'at large' members.

     the election

In 2000 ICANN sought membership from the community through an ICANN At-Large organisation - principals of Caslon Analytics are members - as the basis for elections to its board. Community involvement was also described as a basis for communication and decision-making.  

The election process has been criticised as undemocratic, susceptible to board capture and unlikely to safeguard ICANN's narrow mission. Other critics, such as Damien Cave in a 26 September 2000 New Republic article on Freaked Geeks: Why Netizens Can't Learn To Stop Worrying & Love ICANN, characterised it as an example of the paranoia about the new "cosmocrats".

The ICANN At-Large Election, a study by US public interest groups the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and Common Cause notes that 

In a basic sense, ICANN faces an age-old question that people face when trying to build a governing process for everything from a nation to a small organization: How can the benefits and energies of democracy be balanced with the need for reasoned and deliberative decision-making? ICANN carries a narrow technical mandate to ensure the reliable and efficient functioning of the DNS, and there is general consensus in the ICANN community that the At-Large elections should produce board directors who are technically knowledgeable and dedicated to preventing ICANN from moving beyond its technical mission into wider regulatory matters (e.g. imposing content restrictions or taxes on domain name holders).  At the same time, ICANN's legitimacy as an international Internet oversight body rests on providing those affected by its policies with a fair opportunity to participate .... 

Many in the ICANN community, however, are concerned that opening up the prospect of representation to the great masses of Internet users worldwide could be more dangerous than beneficial.

Participation in the election varied considerably. At a global level several thousand people registered but far fewer voted. US critics noted that a few hundred people in the African region elected as many directors as those from the home of the net. And there were more votes from Japan and Germany.

A report from the CPSR's Civil Society Project highlighted potential problems with institutional 'capture', with queries whether our region was affected by a "top-down mobilization by the business constituency". There have been similar suggestions about voting in Germany.

Critics such as CPSR have questioned whether the At Large Study (ALS) will result in a significant winding-back of past commitments to user participation in ICANN, characterising ICANN's emphasis on "consensus" and on a "narrow" interpretation of its charter as selective. 

Community participation is being explored by ICANN's At-Large Membership Study Committee ("formed to forge a consensus on the best method for representing the world's Internet users as individuals ('At-Large Members') within ICANN) and the independent NGO & Academic ICANN Study (NAIS).

As Jonathan Weinberg notes in an insightful article on ICANN & the Problem of Legitimacy

the task of representation is hardly straightforward. There may be no way to craft an elective mechanism that ensures that the immensely heterogeneous Internet community is represented, in any real sense, within ICANN's structure. Although elections can broaden the set of communities given a voice within ICANN's halls, they cannot render ICANN into a reflection of the Internet community. They can improve ICANN's decisionmaking, but they cannot reliably aggregate the preferences of the Internet world at large, and thus tell ICANN whether to adopt a disputed policy. ...

ICANN has invoked the techniques of consensus: it has asserted that its structure and rules ensure that it can only act in ways that reflect the consensus of the Internet community. But this is illusory. ICANN does not have procedures that would enable it to recognize consensus, or the lack of consensus, surrounding any given issue. It has commonly taken actions with no clear showing of consensus in the community at large, and its methods of determining that a particular action is supported by consensus have often seemed opaque. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the issues over which ICANN seeks to exercise authority are ones around which any genuine consensus can be formed.

Rebecca Nesson's paper .Biz, .Web and ICANN's 'Open' Process: Does the alternative root debate threaten the public's engagement in ICANN's decision-making? asks whether ICANN should allow alternative root advocates proportionately less time in public forums if they represent a relatively small proportion of the internet community. She comments that

A frequent complaint aired among participants at ICANN's meetings is that the level of engagement with the issues at hand does not deepen over time. The participants charge that identical arguments regarding many of the same issues—including the validity of ICANN's top-level domain name selection process—are ventured at each meeting. In addition, say the participants, the arguments are often lodged by the same groups of stakeholders.

We'll be providing more information shortly.




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