Ellen Rony wrote:
>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.
>
This was also the concept of my model for NewCo membership.
I agree with Ellen, that there is much merit in the idea of limiting ICANN
membership to the assigned name and number stakeholders.
I suspect this idea will find sympathy in Joe Sims ear too. <g>
--Joop Teernstra LL.M.-- , bootstrap of
the Cyberspace Association,
the constituency for Individual Domain Name Owners
http://www.idno.org
