FYI -- FOR THOSE WHO STILL BELIEVE IN TRUE NETWORK DEMOCRACY -- KEN - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Curtis Sahakian writes: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - For those of you who followed the exchange of letters between Esther Dyson, myself and several others. You may have seen columnist Brian Livingston's name bandied about as a credible outside observer who had researched and supported ICANN's actions. 1. Brian Livingston. I don't know what Brian has had to say about ICANN in the past, but he has written the best article to date on ICANN's dysfunctional behavior. With great clarity and economy of words, he delivers a hard hitting inventory of pretty much all of ICANN's outrageous behavior. He explains it in a way that you don't have to be an Internet wonk to get it. I could find only two things he missed. (a) The first is that their voting process is tricked up to dilute the vote of minority interest groups (something that would be invalidated as unconstitutional if it were used to dilute the vote of a minority in a US election). (b) The second is that the fives seats up for election by the pretend ICANN members can be terminated by the other 10 board members (who are selected by the real ICANN members). I encourage you to visit the link to this article and read it. We need to give Brian some positive feedback on his journalism. You can do that simply by visiting his site. All he (and his employer) want is for you to read it. Please let other people now about this and give this article your patronage. See 2 below for the link to the article. 2. How to Vote Against ICANN in This Week's Election, Even If You Weren't Able to Register. I don't know about you, but I was eventually able to register to vote... but I have not yet been notified how to participate in this weeks election, or even that it was occurring. Here is how to vote against ICANN. You can vote against ICANN just by visiting the URL containing Brian's article. This will be your vote against ICANN and its behavior. Let's give this InfoWorld page our traffic. Each visit will represent a vote against ICANN. This email is going out to a relatively small list of people. But many of you have your own contact and mailing lists. Please redistribute this with a request that your friends and supporters go to Brian's article and read it. Let's see if we can get more visits to this article than ICANN can get votes. http://infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/02/001002oplivingston.xml If we do, perhaps Brian will publish that in another article. Vote with your browser and get your friends to do the same. Please... take the time to engage in some participatory political behavior. If we don't do it now, we will get the kind of internet government we deserve... and that Brian so articulately describes in this article: http://infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/02/001002oplivingston.xml Take some action... please. Internet democracy is in your hands. Here is what I'm asking you to do. If you are reading this, you are at your keyboard. Go visit the link, (a) email your friends with a message telling them it's a good article (you can copy this email to them), (b) tell them by visiting this link, they can protest the ICANN vote, (c) ask them to visit the link, (d) then ask them to follow the same process with their friends. http://infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/02/001002oplivingston.xml 3. You may also want to send Brian a note of thanks. You can send it here [EMAIL PROTECTED] (but please put "thank you" in the title to make it easy to direct them into a single directory) We need to let Brian know that he does have a constituency on this subject, that we are listening to him and that he has our support. With enough interest he will hopefully continue to expose ICANN in future columns. 4. Here is a collection of resources for anyone who wants to learn more about ICANN vs. Internet Democracy. http://infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/02/001002oplivingston.xml (by [EMAIL PROTECTED]) - In my opinion, the best article to date on ICANN's dysfunctional behavior... http://www.media-visions.com/icann.htm (Analyzing ICANN - a page with a very good set of links to pages containing well researched and reasoned critical analysis of ICANN) http://www.ADOR-DOC.ORG/wipoletter.html (you can't understand how outrageous has been ICANN's behavior with respect to favoring large corporations in domain disputes... unless you read this) http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Column/0,176,459,00.html (article by by Brian Livingston of cnet about ICANN bias in domain name arbitration) http://www.Icannwatch.org (regularly updated website monitoring ICANN activities) http://dailynews.yahoo.com/full_coverage/tech/domain_names_and_registration/ (10 0s of articles written by reporters who've been covering these issues) http://www.flywheel.com/ircw/overview.html (an overview of the domain names controversy - starting pre-ICANN with an extensive and thorough set of related links) http://www.icann.org (ICANN's Web Site) http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/gao-icann/DNS-Proposal.txt http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/ (background on the development of the Internet and the role of the government) http://www.domainhandbook.com/toc.html http://www.iciiu.org/ (International Congress of Independent Internet Users) http://www.domainnotes.com/ http://www.eff.org/ (electronic Frontier Foundation (the ACLU of the Internet) http://www.media-visions.com/newdom2b.html (links to government and industry leaders) http://www.media-visions.com/icann-involved.htm (steps you can take to help this problem) 5. Please pass this email along to anyone who might want to be added to the distribution list. Curtis Sahakian 1-847-676-2774
