And then came Politics: Governance of the Internet
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Candidates Challenge ICANN Dominance
By Juliana Gruenwald, Inter@ctive Week
September 18, 2000 4:01 AM PT
URL: zdnet.com
The Internet's first global election is shaping up as an opposition referendum, with critics of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers hoping to change the controversial administrative organization from the inside by gaining seats on its board.
A total of 27 candidates are running for the first five open seats on the ICANN board.
An official ICANN committee selected 18 of the candidates. The remaining nine were nominated during the past month by the membership of the organization - Internet users around the world.
One member will be chosen from each of five geographic regions during an online election Oct. 1 to Oct. 10. More than 76,000 people are eligible to vote.
And if the member-nominated candidates are any measure, there is still widespread unease and dissatisfaction with ICANN and the processes it uses to administer the Internet's Domain Name System.
"We have two classes of candidates: those nominated and approved of by the nomination committee, and those who have nominated themselves," said Jeanette Hoffman, a European candidate who was nominated by the membership. "Because of this, self-nomination has turned into an act of opposition."
The member-nominated candidates from North America and Europe have expressed concern about ICANN's commitment to its original mission and to representing a broad range of Internet users. ICANN (www.icann.org) was tapped in 1998 by the U.S. government to take over the Internet's Domain Name System and the technical functions of the global network.
The first 10 board members of the nonprofit group were appointed. Nine others were elected by specific business constituencies. But October's elections mark the first time individual Internet users will have a voice in the ICANN process.
"I think the member nomination process should be a pretty serious wake-up call to the ICANN staff and the ICANN board," said Milton Mueller, telecommunications and network management professor at Syracuse University. "The people with the most support are vehement critics" of ICANN.
Among those endorsed by the membership in North America is Karl Auerbach, a researcher at Cisco Systems, who said he is "tired of watching this runaway train stepping on people's rights."
Complaints that the group has favored big business and trademark holders in setting policies and rules for registering domain names have plagued the Internet naming organization since its inception. ICANN, however, insists its actions are driven by consensus from the Internet community.
Candidates selected by the nominating committee are generally supportive of ICANN.
"If voters are looking for a candidate who will try to destroy ICANN . . . then don't vote for me," said Harris Miller, a North American candidate and president of the Information Technology Association of America, a Washington trade association.
Auerbach and others have complained that the nominating committee left little room for member-nominated candidates by setting a cap of seven per region.
Those not chosen by the ICANN committee had to obtain endorsements from 2 percent of the group's members in their regions and from at least two different countries in order to make the ballot. This left only two spots in Europe for the four candidates with the required endorsements. The two with the most support made the ballot.
With less than a month until voting starts, the challenge for candidates is to get their messages to the voters.
A group of intellectual property lawyers and others has sponsored a candidate forum set for the end of September. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Harvard University Law School have scheduled a debate for Oct. 2, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is coordinating a similar event at Stanford University to be held the same week. The Center for Democracy and Technology said it plans to distribute a candidate questionnaire.
ICANN gave candidates Web pages, and said it will allow members to pose questions to the candidates. ICANN also said it will send e-mail reminders to all members, urging them to visit the candidate Web pages.
But Auerbach and others complained that ICANN has served to restrict the candidates' ability to reach the voters by refusing to release the list of at-large members. ICANN said it is trying to protect members' privacy and shield them from unsolicited e-mail.
"It was a balance between access to them, and their individual privacy," said Esther Dyson, chairwoman at ICANN. However, she said, "If I were to do it again, at least I'd make sure we had some kind of opt-in for the" at-large members.
Even some ICANN critics said the candidate issue cuts both ways. Jonathan Weinberg, a professor of law at Wayne State University, said while privacy and spam are important concerns, "it's awfully hard to conduct a campaign if you have no real way to do outreach. There might have been ways for ICANN to find common ground." |
