Diane Cabell wrote:
>
>There is no refusal to hold elections, Jay. Mr. Sims was responding to Eric
>Weisberg's suggestion that ICANN hire outside professionals to run the
>election. Mr. Sims points out that there are no ICANN funds to pay a
>professional organization to do this. As your own figures indicate, ICANN
>is in serious debt.
Then one has to look at the reason ICANN is in debt. Could it be that
paying ICANN's president more than the U.S. President receives annually
contributed to that debt? Prudence would have dictated a smaller salary
for an interim president and would have placed priority on
membership/voting issues over public relations consultancy, IMHO. An
unfunded non-profit corporation can outline any sort of
pie-in-the-sky-budget, but new corportations don't begin from the gitgo
spending as though they have established solid fiscal footing.
>It may be that membership dues will have to be charged after all (whether the
>election is electronic or postal) and, if so, I expect that some accomodation
>will be made for those economies that cannot easily afford such a luxury
Economies don't vote. Individuals do.
MAC presented ICANN with an unworkable solution--a membership too grand and
vague to be authenticated without great cost.
ICANN is tasked to administer names and addresses. Its stakeholders are
those who have names and addresses or provide infrastructure and services
related to same. In order to have an IP address or register a domain name,
one must have access to computer hardware and connectivity. Those who can
afford such access most likely can afford a nominal membership fee. Those
who cannot, probably likewise do not care about these complex, convoluted
technical issues.
Membership dues, however minimal, provide a form of accountability for
voting purposes. That's a reasonable quid pro quo for participating in the
vote.
I understand that one problem with collecting a membership fee is that it
will cost more to administer this than will be collected if the fee is low.
OTOH, no membership fee means higher costs of authentication for voting.
By collecting a membership fee, some authentication is built into the
processing of the registration.
I suggest that MAC reconvene, go back to the virtual drawing boards, focus
on who are the stakeholders of this corporation, not on some great
humanitarian outreach for all mankind, and develop a proposal that ties
voter authentication through membership fees, even if they are nominal or
on a sliding scale. Otherwise, the current membership recommendations are
as pie-in-the-sky as ICANN's $5.9 million budget.
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