Izumi Aizu-
Thank you for your frank response to my posting yesterday on the MAC
recommendations. After reading it, and because of your obvious
forthrightness and sincerity, I have no doubt that you, at least,
have none but the best motivations behind the decisions of the
committee that you supported.
Nevertheless, and in the face of your cogent reasoning for not
requiring dues of members, I must remind you that the payment of
dues is one of the things that determines the relationship of an
individual to an organization. That is, a member of an organization
has certain rights in that organization because he or she has given
money to it, however little, and received from it a written
statement of acceptance as a member. This is a legal relationship
that gives both parties - the private one (the individual) and the
public one (the organization) - both rights and responsibilities. It
is seen as such by the laws of the United States and perhaps other
countries as well. (I will be posting later an analysis of the
possible consequences of an undefined membership that pays no dues.)
Richard Sexton, in a posting yesterday to the IFWP list, asked very
simply why there was such a fuss, since the dues could be defined
as, say, five times the price of a coca cola in the country of
residence of the applicant. Do you think that a person unwilling to
invest that modest sum, even if it meant depriving him- or herself
of five coca-colas during a year, could nevertheless be a sincere
applicant for membership and a valuable adjunct to ICANN? I doubt
it.
As to your suggestion that it is time to try something, regardless
of what it is, and then modify it later if it doesn't work, I'm
sorry to have to say that this process has left no naive optimism
that things can be easily modified simply because they are not
working out, or because they only benefit a few. It's better to get
things right from the beginning, don't you think?, than to spend
years trying in vain to convince people to change them, often the
very people who benefit most from the unfairness of the thing that,
in your opinion, needs changing. If your theory of attacking a
problem first and settling on the rules for it later where viable,
why is it then that we are confronted with a multi-page Registrar
Accreditation Policy and Agreement, containing even many specific
regulations for the obligations of registrants, that must be signed
and notarized before anyone can give a domain name to anyone else?
I'm sure that you and the MAC spent a lot of time over the At-large
membership questions. But the results weren't worth it, if they
merely say "ask nothing, do nothing". I personally have no interest
in "belonging" to an organization that requires nothing of me. I
couldn't trust it to respond when the d time came for me to ask
something of it. And legally, just as I do not accept something I
haven't paid for, having always taken to heart the admonishion to
"beware of Greeks bearing gifts", I do not expect to join an
organization that will not accept my dues as a member, however token
they be.
No definition of who are members and who are not? No exchange of
dues for a certificate, even if only a card, giving me the rights of
a member? No defined process for electing representatives of the
membership to the organization's management? No, my friend. I don't
play those games.
