As Michael Sondow spake:
> 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.)
Yet another legalism, straight from business law (IANAL). No contract, whatever it
says, is binding with out an exchange of value. In short, a member isn't a member
unless they give something for it. Conversely, an organization has no legal hold on a
member without a binding agreement. The pseudo-member can simply tell the organization
to PUAR and the organization has no recourse. Frankly, from a business perspective, I
don't see ICANN's value proposition.
> 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.
So do I. However, even the most wealthy would not part with that princely sum without
a reason to do so.
> 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?
You have almost hit the nail. You need a larger hammer. The REAL issue is why should I
sign such a retarded beast when I could perform the function, albeit a bit more
awkwardly, now, without signing it (many ISP's do it all the time, Simple Matter of
Programming)? The SRS system is a kludge, what's the value-add?
> And legally, just as I do not accept something I
> haven't paid for, having always taken to heart the admonition 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.
I see that you are taking things to heart.
> 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.
Games is exactly what they are, because the membership would have no legal power.
