12 MR. ZITTRAIN: We will turn to the
13 first of the three substantive sessions we're to
14 have today, this one on accountability and
15 representation, possible membership structures.
16 It's probably important to say that we'd like to
17 try to run this differently than the way the last
18 session went; not because the last session went
19 poorly, just because we want to get as many people
20 in as possible, have everybody give their ideas,
21 if possible, try to minimize sort of speechifying
22 and keep it as dynamic so it can actually get into
23 an exchange of ideas instead of this sort of a
24 rat-tat-tat of fire, some ducking behavior and
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1 then coming up over the rampart and firing back.
2 So we'll try to do that, and that will entail
3 going to mic or perhaps being called upon. We'll
4 try to keep it, again, as smooth as we can.
5 We'll also have our scribe in a
6 somewhat different role. We're basically going to
7 try to keep a growing outline of what we're doing
8 in order to keep a thread going for a while before
9 we move to the next thread -- my mic just died.
10 Should I just bellow, or can you -- ahh, but the
11 mic is back on, so problem -- we just waited and a
12 problem went away. So we're going to try to build
13 an outline collectively as we go. Obviously this
14 entails some sense of collective spirit on the
15 part of the audience. There, indeed, are people
16 we know here and ideas floating around that have
17 to do with legitimacy, with all sorts of other
18 ideas that don't have to do specifically with
19 membership structures, representation, that kind
20 of thing. I ask you not to speak to those issues,
21 again without trying to denigrate them, not to
22 speak to them during this time so that we may
23 actually collectively again make progress in this
24 area. And again, don't be offended if I somehow
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1 urge you at a moment or two to do just that.
2 So with that, we want to get started by
3 letting -- Greg Crew, I think, a member of the
4 Board, has offered to start with some views that
5 have come to the Board so far on membership and
6 then have an opportunity for people to speak and
7 to again get quite interactive. So, please, Greg.
8 MR. CREW: Thanks, Jonathan. Am I on
9 the air?
10 MR. ZITTRAIN: You're on the air, as
11 far as I can tell, yes.
12 MR. CREW: The interim Board agree with
13 the very widely-expressed view that ICANN should
14 have a membership, which is the best way, it is
15 believed, to provide for both representation and
16 accountability of the Board. And we note that
17 there have been a number of very clearly-expressed
18 suggestions as to how such a membership structure
19 might be organized from the Boston Working Group
20 as well as others. This morning, what we'd like
21 to do is capture from this audience ideas on how a
22 membership structure might work within ICANN,
23 given the nature of what we're trying to do.
24 And I would like to get your input
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1 under three categories. The underlying principles
2 that should be embodied in a membership structure,
3 drawing on Einar Stefferud's suggestion that we
4 should look at principals, that it's principals,
5 not people. Out of principals might come issues
6 that relate to how one would put into practice a
7 particular principal and lead to solutions.
8 As an example, for example, and drawing
9 on Harold Feld's comments earlier, one principal
10 might be that any individual or any individual
11 organization should be able to become a member of
12 ICANN. An issue arising out of that might be that
13 it represents a difficult process, given the
14 worldwide nature and the diverse interests
15 encompassed by the Internet community. And
16 arising from that, a possible solution might be
17 that we encourage the formation of associations of
18 industries to become members of ICANN. That's
19 just a starting suggestion as to the way we might
20 proceed. And with the help of Jonathan, we would
21 very much like to have your input and try to list
22 it under these categories. I think that would be
23 of great assistance to the Board and to the
24 membership committee that we are going to
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1 establish to advise us on this very important
2 question.
3 MR. ZITTRAIN: Great. So with that, it
4 looks like we're ready to basically put it open.
5 Why don't I see -- if somebody wants to come to
6 the mic, you want to either talk to the very first
7 issue that was just laid out. If you're going to
8 try to create a different category under this
9 general scheme, let us know, but I think we should
10 try to a thread on this so far. Yes, in the back.
11 And if you can identify who you are and, if you
12 want, what organization you represent or not.
13 MR. SIMPSON: I'm Bill Simpson. I've
14 been known as the Daydreamer on the Net for twenty
15 years. I actually am concerned about how to make
16 the membership work. I don't (inaudible) other
17 supporting organizations, ICANN actually is
18 providing a service to them; that is, registering
19 numbers, handling names, that kind of -- so, the
20 membership, I don't see it actually rendering a
21 service. On the other hand, there is an existing
22 set formation of associations and interest groups
23 called the Internet Society that renders the
24 service of education and outreach on the Internet.
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1 And I would suggest that the best solution to make
2 a membership representation for ICANN would be to
3 build a supporting organization that is the
4 Internet society so that they would handle all of
5 the administrative --
6 MR. ZITTRAIN: By that, by the way, you
7 mean the Internet Society lowercase S or big S?
8 MR. SIMPSON: Being as the Internet
9 Society is the name of an organization --
10 MR. ZITTRAIN: Right.
11 MR. SIMPSON: -- with chapters and
12 members and board members, individual members and,
13 you know, a large amount of interest groups
14 already in place, you could spend the next seven
15 years building a new membership organization or
16 you could use the one that is in process and would
17 have a purpose, that it would provide some service
18 to its members, which ICANN is not likely to do
19 directly. So that I propose that those members of
20 the board at large would come from the Internet
21 Society.
22 MR. ZITTRAIN: Okay, so it's a very
23 specific proposal, let the Internet Society be the
24 at-large kind of supporting organization, not
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1 currently contemplating the by-laws, that would
2 then elect the members of the at-large half of the
3 Board. And before you move up to the front mic,
4 might I encourage -- I know there are a number of
5 people who traveled very long distances to be here
6 and a number of people who took the T in from
7 Harvard Square or elsewhere in Boston. Given
8 limited mic time today, if there's any way to -- I
9 don't know exactly how to manage it, but to
10 recognize the people who have traveled a very
11 great distance to be here, if there's some way
12 they might play a trump at some point, that might
13 be appropriate. But the person at the front mic,
14 is it -- can you speak up?
15 MR. HECKENDORN: Yes. My name is Mark
16 Heckendorn. I'm -- the last eighteen months, I've
17 been chairman of an Internet interest group. My
18 concern really comes out of my background in the
19 telecom industry. I've been in the telecom
20 industry for twenty-two years, most of the time as
21 the non-engineer at the table with the engineers.
22 So I'm usually like the marketing guy who has to
23 go to the standards meetings.
24 And one of the things that I have seen
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1 in the telecom industry which I do not want to see
2 happen in the Internet any more than can be
3 avoided is essentially the co-opting of the
4 consensus process by the large players. And
5 that's done through a lot of ways. If you -- if
6 your membership comes only from the formation of
7 interest groups and you have a proliferation of
8 interest groups, then the people that can afford
9 representation, all the different interest groups
10 (inaudible), end up with the bigger vote. You
11 know, I think there has to be some mechanism that
12 allows the issues that are important to the
13 smaller user to have equal weight at ICANN.
14 And I would dispute the idea that ICANN
15 provides no services for the smaller user. It's
16 essential to have a single place for important
17 policy issues to get a transparent and fair and
18 public hearing, policy issues that affect the
19 Internet. Then the small entities can't be blind-
20 sided. There's at least one place that will
21 guarantee things will bubble up and we can learn
22 about them.
23 MR. ZITTRAIN: So let me just put this
24 out real quick. If you have small members -- I
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1 mean any individual can, say, be a member of the
2 corporation or of the institution. You have some
3 risk of -- I guess you'd call it capture where you
4 have a bunch of people, anybody can be a member,
5 but they're not particularly inspired to vote, to
6 keep up with the issues, and you then have to --
7 MR. HECKENDORN: Yeah, I have a
8 proposal that would limit that a little bit. I
9 would say that to be a member of the general
10 membership, you have to have an assigned domain
11 name. And I would even say that a portion of the
12 assigned domain name fee be put aside for
13 membership activities and that it's part of my
14 responsibility, as somebody with a domain name,
15 with that level involvement on the Internet, to
16 keep up with what's going on.
17 MR. ZITTRAIN: And multiple domain
18 names, however, don't give a person --
19 MR. HECKENDORN: That's right.
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: -- multiple memberships.
21 MR. HECKENDORN: If you've got a domain
22 name, you get one vote in a general membership, is
23 my suggestion.
24 MR. ZITTRAIN: Greg, do you have some
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1 thoughts on that?
2 MR. CREW: I think that's a thought
3 that has been expressed in a number of areas and
4 certainly warrants consideration, but I also think
5 that there is a view that you might say someone in
6 the general community, who might not have a domain
7 name, would have an interest. And certainly the
8 association, the Internet in Australia makes space
9 for consumer groups -- and I'll say groups -- to
10 sit on the Board and take part in the policy
11 formation, and we find that very useful.
12 MR. HECKENDORN: I would just follow up
13 and say that my suggestion of the domain names is
14 sort of just a rough proxy, because since it
15 essentially costs seventy dollars for two years to
16 have a domain name, it's not a high barrier. And
17 if you're going to be involved at a very small
18 level or -- and many individuals have personal
19 domain names -- it becomes a way -- a self-
20 policing way of giving membership --
21 MR. ZITTRAIN: Greg? Greg?
22 MS. DYSON: Can I just interject? I
23 think we should bring back the clock and set it to
24 one minute, because what we really want to do here
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1 is lay out the space that we get to explore.
2 We're going to have to deal not only with
3 membership but, at some point, should and how the
4 members elect the Board and various other issues.
5 And so I'd like to really lay this out quickly and
6 then come back and fill in the bits. And then
7 John can say things like good idea, somebody argue
8 for, somebody argue against what is good or bad
9 (inaudible) individual so that we can get focused
10 on some of these areas.
11 MR. ZITTRAIN: Gotcha. In the back,
12 Jay Hauben.
13 MR. HAUBEN: My name is Jay Hauben.
14 I'm a volunteer (inaudible) Computers, which, for
15 ten years, has represented the (inaudible) of
16 computing in documenting the history and
17 principals that are put into the Internet. My
18 comment on membership is that the Internet is a
19 place where I've found that I don't have to be a
20 member of anything. I post and I'm judged by the
21 value of my ideas. Since nations have citizens
22 and their citizens are -- should be involved in a
23 government, I think that we're trying here to do
24 is replace the wholeness of the public
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1 representation by a smaller subset, and I think
2 that's a negative process. I think we shouldn't
3 have the Board, that we shouldn't have members
4 either. I feel that it's very important to
5 understand that we're at the very beginning of
6 establishing universal communication access
7 everywhere, and we have to spread that process.
8 And when people are communicating (inaudible)
9 process to determine what's going on.
10 So I would be against seeing the
11 subsetting of something to (inaudible) people
12 called members and some other (inaudible) people
13 called the Board from this process (inaudible)
14 makes possible people gaining the access and then
15 being involved in what is happening.
16 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. At the front
17 microphone.
18 MR. AHEARN: Yes. My name is Mitchell
19 Ahearn. I'm chairman of the Association of
20 Internet Professionals, an organization for
21 industry. We ran a survey through our membership
22 just before coming here, trying to address some of
23 these issues. And it's not actually clear that
24 there is a consensus out there to be had. Among
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1 our membership, there is a lot of desire to have
2 individuals be strongly represented, but perhaps
3 also to have levels of membership that reflect
4 other associating organizations.
5 I think the questions that are being
6 asked are possibly, you know, certainly at this
7 stage, too broad and are ignoring some of the
8 underlying questions or glossing over some of the
9 underlying questions. You know, how important is
10 it to have geographic representation, how
11 important are some of these issues that are
12 already assumed to be important in the context of
13 the questions.
14 And the other question that I do have
15 is, what is the mission statement of this
16 organization? Because without knowing that
17 clearly -- and I have not seen it written out
18 clearly -- it's very difficult to respond to
19 questions of membership and affiliation.
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: Indeed. Mr. Zumi.
21 MR. ZUMI: Thank you. I appreciate
22 that Jonathan said to encourage those who come
23 from afar. I spent twenty-nine hours (inaudible)
24 coming here from my home (inaudible). I represent
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1 (inaudible) Association, which is (inaudible).
2 And we appreciate that (inaudible) is trying to
3 accommodate membership structure. However, there
4 is something more than the membership that we
5 need. We need to do more reach-out to the people,
6 organizations, groups in all parts of the world.
7 We (inaudible) the Singapore meeting back in
8 August, we tried really to make it inclusive,
9 encouraging those from the other countries and so
10 forth. Membership is okay if you have money or
11 time to spend to become a member, but there are a
12 lot of people who couldn't do that or can't afford
13 to do so who are using the Net. So I think
14 (inaudible) should really try to find ways how to
15 become more inclusive.
16 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you.
17 MR. ROBERTS: Nigel Roberts again.
18 Inclusivity is the goal, but the organization and
19 whatever membership structure is involved has to
20 be representative. It has to be representative of
21 existing constituencies, existing registrars,
22 because if you're going to take decisions that
23 affect existing registrars, you must expect those
24 people to want to have a say. And it must be
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1 representative of emerging constituencies, people
2 who -- and there are a lot, it appears, who want
3 to run their own domains or do something else
4 different. So -- and there should be a process by
5 which you get to a state where you can fairly
6 transition between the two.
7 MR. ZITTRAIN: Very good. The back
8 microphone?
9 MR. BUSH: Randy Bush. I'm the
10 engineer of Internet supplier (inaudible) yes,
11 we're willing to share our toys if we have to, but
12 I suggest that the large commercial interests who
13 wish to share the toys with us should also
14 remember to share them with the rest of the world.
15 I'm specifically concerned that the demigods of
16 democracy also not create dissent and chaos. The
17 problem with (inaudible) talking about the
18 telephone and newspapers of tomorrow or maybe
19 today, and the problem with membership is
20 tantamount to the problem of membership in the
21 United Nations, and it may not be decided today,
22 so my concern is really very pragmatic.
23 First of all, it is to get the
24 traditional community and the interest
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1 representative (inaudible) on the Board and then
2 how the new Board will be elected is something
3 rationale that has to be created in a time which
4 cannot really create a real membership
5 organization of the scope of the Internet.
6 MR. ZITTRAIN: Right. Front
7 microphone?
8 MR. RODRIGUEZ: Hi. My name is Amadeu
9 Rodriguez, and I represent the (inaudible). I
10 spent seven hours last night (inaudible). The
11 first thing, twenty-four hours or twenty-seven
12 hours (inaudible) the rest of us. Why? Because
13 you are interested in what ICANN will do. And we
14 are here to know what the Board wants to do. You
15 can be (inaudible) what the Board will do.
16 Membership, what's the membership for?
17 Accountability and election of the at-large
18 members, basically. Well, the first thing will be
19 looking at every single idea you have for the next
20 years. You know, no other organization probably
21 (inaudible) government would have so strong
22 control (inaudible). What about membership? I am
23 against a flat membership where we have any
24 structure, because it is only open to control
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1 (inaudible) players. I am the third person today
2 from the floor. On the other side, I don't want a
3 system with a strong membership and a strong board
4 doing (inaudible) and all the people that want to
5 participate go through that channel, basically,
6 and the ICANN Board.
7 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Thank you.
8 Back microphone?
9 MR. CURRAN: Hello? John Curran, GTE
10 Internet Working. I have sort of a question more
11 than an answer. The issue is, for the membership,
12 accountability and representation. We may not
13 want to bundle these together. And what I mean by
14 that is that it's going to be important that
15 there's accountability for ICANN's actions, and a
16 broad-based membership will provide that, but that
17 broad-based membership may not be the direct way
18 to get input on policy formation.
19 We may want to think about the fact
20 that a membership whose role is to make sure that
21 the oversight that the Board needs to provide is
22 there is its principal function, but maybe that
23 same broad-based membership is not the process by
24 which policy formation is made. It's more people
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1 who are interested getting together in various
2 organizations to handle those topics. We couple
3 representation and membership together, and I'm
4 just not sure that they're necessarily the same
5 topic, particularly representation for purpose of
6 policy formation.
7 The second issue I just want to raise
8 is -- two seconds -- is that a lot of people seem
9 to think the Board is the (inaudible) supporting
10 organization. People get up to the microphone and
11 ask the Board about questions about domain name
12 policy, about whether or not people need domain
13 names to be the representation, etcetera. Let's
14 keep in mind that ICANN has many roles, and the
15 naming is only one. To the extent that we can
16 take the decisions and push them down into other
17 organizations, the role of the ICANN Board for
18 oversighting and making sure that there's an open
19 process will be a lot easier.
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: Great, thank you very
21 much.
22 MS. DYSON: Let me just talk one second
23 about a procedural thing or the naming thing or
24 whatever. The -- this session is supposed to be
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1 about one mechanism for accountability and
2 representation. The second section is about
3 representation, specifically technically expertise
4 in these specific areas. And the third session is
5 about other means of accountability. And so
6 that's how those particular titles and sessions
7 got chosen and divided.
8 MR. ZITTRAIN: Great. I think -- are
9 we at the top mic now? Go ahead.
10 MR. KELLY: I am speaking for Edmundo
11 Valendez, who's right here with me. He represents
12 the Latin American Association for the Internet
13 that was formed after the IFWP meeting, and I'm
14 giving a statement because I can read English
15 faster than he can. Latin America has been
16 excluded from the ongoing process (inaudible)
17 IAANA. Our reason, as demonstrated during the
18 IFPW -- IFWP, we have the will to participate in
19 the process as well as the capacity to organize
20 and support this type of initiative. ALCI was
21 formed as a result of the IFWP meeting (inaudible)
22 entities from Latin America who would jointly
23 demand that the above issue be resolved by ICANN.
24 By the way, "demand" in Spanish doesn't
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1 mean the same thing it does in English, so -- on
2 October 20th, (inaudible) called for ICANN to
3 indicate how they would address the concerns of
4 stakeholders who want equitable representation on
5 the Internet community, including the developing
6 regions. It also stated that the organization
7 selected should be -- reflect the geographic
8 diversity of the Internet community. Latin
9 America can contribute knowledge of the Board
10 candidates who are not representatives of
11 particular constituencies. The rest of the
12 statement, we'll provide. Thank you.
13 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. and maybe
14 what we should do is also, let's freeze the lines
15 where they are so that at the end of this basic
16 brainstorming kind of session collectively, we can
17 start working with what we have in the outline.
18 Ronda in the back.
19 MS. HAUBEN: Yes. I'm Ronda Hauben,
20 and I'm co-author of the book "Netizens on the
21 History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet" published
22 by the IEEE Computer Society Press. And what's crucial with
23 regard to the Internet -- and the U.S. Federal
24 District Court in Philadelphia affirmed by the U.S. Supreme
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1 Court -- that it's a unique new development of
2 international communication. And therefore, the
3 things that get created need to build on what the
4 Internet has done, not take old forms, like old
5 membership structures, old interest groups and all
6 those things that are not new and that are not
7 unique to the Internet and pop them on top of the
8 Internet.
9 And what I'm concerned about here is, I
10 don't see any interest in looking at the forms
11 that are developed on the Internet and
12 understanding where and how those forms can be
13 helpful to solve the problems that people claim
14 exist on the Internet. And I don't see where this
15 membership -- it's the old form and it's not
16 looking at what is unique -- what's developed on the
17 Internet is not a membership and not that you have to have a
18 domain there, but if you have a view, you have a
19 chance to say it and to debate it and discuss it.
20 And that's not being provided for in any way.
21 And so I guess I'm raising this
22 question, how can you stop trying to
23 plop the old world on top of the
24 Internet and somehow -- and I think the
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1 significant thing is, if you have a discussion on
2 the issue, you try to figure out the principles --
3 I'm almost finished -- you try to figure out the
4 principles. Out of the principles come the
5 organizational forms. You're doing it backwards;
6 you've got the organizational forms from the old
7 world, and you're trying to plop those on top of
8 something that's very new and important.
9 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you.
10 MR. LINDSEY: My name is Richard
11 Lindsey. I'm from (inaudible) Corporation, which
12 is based in Japan, and we're also a member of
13 (inaudible). The point that no one has brought up
14 so far as of yet is, one of the reasons I think
15 that the current -- some of the problems with
16 membership and many organizations was they are not
17 United States of America citizens. I am an
18 American citizen, but I am working in Japan. I
19 work in Japan and I speak Japanese.
20 The point is that the -- whatever the
21 ICANN does currently, it will have to be a step-
22 one operation. In order to be truly
23 representative, you will not be able to have this
24 kind of meeting right here where everyone speaks
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1 English. The majority of the world does not speak
2 English. There are many wise colleagues that have
3 a very strong interest in domain name issues and
4 numbering issues, but they do not speak English
5 and they cannot come to this meeting and
6 participate, because it wouldn't be possible to
7 have simultaneous translators for Japanese and
8 we'd need Spanish and we'd French and Turkish and
9 Russian. So I think eventually maybe you'll have
10 to have (inaudible). But whatever this -- you
11 know, (inaudible) we have time, this is step one,
12 let's get the ball rolling and see what happens
13 later.
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Carl?
15 MR. AUERBACK: I'm Carl Auerback. I
16 work for Sysco Systems, but I speak for myself. I
17 wanted to take Ronda's point of view, but turn it
18 on its head and say yes, let us pop the past onto
19 the present, let us use the wisdom of the past.
20 And what have we learned from the past?
21 Organizations come and go. The indivisible unit
22 of representation in a any government structure --
23 I'm using the word "government" very deluded
24 here -- is the individual human being, not the
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1 organization. I would submit that this new
2 organization should very strongly give voice to
3 the individual person on a much stronger basis
4 than that of organizations, corporations or what-
5 have-you. Thank you.
6 MS. DYSON: And we'll come back to you
7 on how to do that later.
8 UNIDENTIFIED: Speaking for Harold
9 Feld. I would echo him. Many of the points that
10 have been raised by others and their organizations
11 can be captured by those who have time to go to
12 the meetings (inaudible) accountability and the
13 membership -- and the -- excuse me, and the
14 representation. And third, I would ask the Board
15 to consider an interim membership structure. And
16 you don't have to worry about getting it exactly
17 right the first time so that we can go forward
18 with this process in a way that provides some
19 accountability to the community at large.
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: The gentleman in the
21 back?
22 AUDIENCE: (inaudible) --
23 MR. ZITTRAIN: Can you speak up,
24 please? I'm sorry.
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1 AUDIENCE: -- that we want different
2 people to be represented (inaudible) so we are
3 assured that ICANN does not tend to minority, so
4 ICANN is not captured, which is the key word,
5 captured by the minority. We want accountability
6 to make sure that no decisions have been made for
7 a minority. This means that for membership, we
8 don't need a huge membership, we do not need a
9 very large membership, we just need enough
10 membership so that we can get those two things:
11 We can make sure that (inaudible) and we have
12 enough people. So that's why I think a membership
13 should be done, and we don't have to be -- we
14 don't need individuals (inaudible) representatives
15 of these users, but there should be -- but the
16 goal should be membership.
17 MR. ZITTRAIN: Very good. Tamara, is
18 there something you wanted to add before we move
19 to the next page?
20 TAMARA: (inaudible)
21 MS. DYSON: You need to talk to the
22 mic.
23 TAMARA: I think the comment that was
24 made is very right. First of all, we have to look
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1 at the mission of this corporation. And it seems
2 to me that the white paper does say what the
3 mission is; to maintain the stability of the
4 Internet and facilitate and help develop the
5 Internet further for the benefit of mankind, if
6 you will. So this is a very broad and evolving
7 type of a mission. That's number one.
8 So who are the parties that will help
9 facilitate that mission? And I think there are
10 two kinds of parties, and let's start from that.
11 One party is those who are members of the
12 infrastructure of the Internet, and we know about
13 the professional part, professional organizations
14 and people -- we talk about the registrars, both
15 profit and non-profit, and there's the businesses,
16 those who have a stake and can really suffer if
17 these missions of the organizations are not
18 fulfilled. It's their self-interest that will
19 then promote the mission of the Internet.
20 Now, you may say there aren't -- self-
21 interest doesn't always produce the interest for
22 the whole. And quite frankly, if you had only one
23 self-interest, then that would be correct. Then
24 there must be somebody, and usually it's the
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1 government, that looks for the interest of the
2 whole. But funnily enough, because there are so
3 many varieties and so many various interests in
4 the Internet communities, we may overcome that by
5 mediating. If you do what governments do when you
6 have a policy issue, you will look at all these
7 competing interests, and then add where would some
8 particular interest have to give in order for the
9 whole to benefit. So maybe the way in which you
10 would then evolve a policy decision will entail
11 exactly what is being done here: Listening to
12 everybody and then evolving criteria for making
13 these decisions, these balancing decisions.
14 The Internet was started by the
15 professional organizations, and that's where you
16 have one model of an organization. And then it
17 developed a huge (inaudible), and that was what
18 was said here. However, the Internet will
19 continue to be developed also by business
20 organizations and will have an impact and will be
21 impacted by political organizations. And what you
22 listen to here is everybody coming with old
23 models, that's quite true, with the old models;
24 you have a business model, you have a professional
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1 model and you have the political model. And what
2 we should really look for is, how do you melt it
3 all together? What do you take from each of these
4 models that will flow with the mission of this
5 corporation? I am leaving that as a question,
6 because I think my time will be up very soon.
7 MR. ZITTRAIN: Your time may be up, but
8 please take just a minute and finish what your
9 thought is.
10 TAMARA: And one -- two ideas that --
11 one idea which Harold brought about was to have an
12 interim membership. Along the same line, I had
13 two ideas. It seems to me that although this
14 group is very representative simply because of the
15 investment you've made, that is what gives you
16 legitimacy as well. If maybe we could have one or
17 two focus groups on the Internet, find out from a
18 broader audience what they perceive to be their
19 desires.
20 The other thing is, maybe we could have
21 a dry run, we could have -- first design a system
22 and then try and run it first and see what comes
23 out. What should come out is the kind of
24 representation that will maintain the mission of
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1 the organization, of the -- of ICANN.
2 And I had one final comment, there's no
3 doubt that this Board and any other leadership
4 should earn its stripes. But I have a humble
5 suggestion for those who want to be members. They
6 have to earn the trust too. Membership entails
7 responsibility. It's only when you are completely
8 outside that you say, hey, let's burn the house
9 down unless we go in. You are in, you're in, but
10 now that you are in, there is responsibility that
11 comes with it. And so I hope that all parts of
12 this community will work towards responsible
13 suggestions and responsible contributions. Thank
14 you.
15 MR. ZITTRAIN: Please don't leave,
16 Tamara. Stay right here. Let me suggest, to get
17 us started, that I'm going to pull an Einar
18 Stefferud and say there's a meta issue here. The
19 meta issue is, what sorts of policies can the
20 Board, as it goes over the next year or two and
21 tries to really craft new by-laws reflecting,
22 among other things, membership, what should the
23 policies be, what should it look like, how will it
24 work?
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1 The other issue is, how shall the Board
2 get there? How is it going to answer the question
3 that is the first set of issues I just posed? One
4 possible answer that emerged from just the session
5 that we just had was, you have an interim
6 membership, and the interim membership is somehow
7 assisting the Board in defining the full and later
8 membership. Tamara's suggestion was that you have
9 some on-line focus groups, you have other tools of
10 gathering views, somehow deliberating about them
11 and coming to closure on them in a way that isn't
12 simply the Board thinking hard and then boom, it
13 comes up with an answer, given that it wants to
14 reflect the community as it is. So I just want to
15 sort of bracket that meta issue.
16 Another thing is that we have a
17 question about just what membership does. And I
18 understand several of the comments pointed out
19 that there's a big difference between membership
20 and accountability and representation in a two-way
21 kind of way; that membership is a means, maybe, to
22 the end of accountability and representation, it
23 is maybe necessary for it, and the Board seems to
24 have said recently it seems it's necessary, but it
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1 may not be sufficient. There are other things to
2 talk about as well, and I guess the other two
3 sessions may get at that.
4 And I suggest, then, that one topic
5 around which we might build some thoughts are,
6 just what would the powers of the membership be?
7 Forget who they're going to be, although obviously
8 how you'd like to empower them depends who they
9 are. But what would the powers be? Is it just
10 electing the at-large Board or is it initiating
11 lawsuit, is it initiating recall? What are the
12 specific powers of membership? And then put a
13 referendum on a ballot, and if the members vote
14 it, the Board is bound by it. So I just want to
15 kind of put that out as a topic around which there
16 might be comments.
17 And then the other thing is, all right,
18 who is the membership going to be? Do you do a
19 flat structure? Is it going to be one person, one
20 vote? Do you have some threshold value to show a
21 commitment or a stake in the issue, such as you
22 have to have a domain name before you can be a
23 member? And I suppose ancillary to that is, how
24 do we do an equation between voice and power?
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1 There are people who have the time and effort to
2 give of their voice and to actually vote
3 carefully. Does that entitle them to have what
4 will, by reality, be disproportionate weight to
5 those who might be entitled to be members or who
6 are members, but who don't actually actively
7 engage, and yet might have interests that are at
8 stake? So laying that out, why don't I ask Esther
9 to make a comment.
10 MS. DYSON: Yeah, I'm going to -- I'd
11 like to get a little more concrete, because we
12 really do want advice as well as (inaudible)
13 questions. And so one way I'd like to tease this
14 out is to look at some of those models people
15 mentioned. There's the member as voter or
16 citizen. There's the member as maybe shareholder
17 of some kind. There's the member as something
18 like a director of a corporation. You know, how
19 you do that with a lot of people, I don't know.
20 And so that's kind of the role. There's also,
21 again, individuals versus organizations.
22 My sister was recently ordained as a
23 minister in the Presbyterian church, and in order
24 to be ordained, you have to -- first you have to
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1 be proposed by a specific group of people, a
2 church to go to divinity school, and then when
3 you've gotten your -- whatever, your degree or
4 whatever, then you'd have to be again proposed by
5 a specific group of people to become the pastor of
6 a church. There has to be people who want you.
7 Is this something we could roll up into how
8 members get selected? I don't know. But what I'd
9 like to do now is get a little specific on the
10 pros and cons of each of these, what problems they
11 address and what problems they create. Do they
12 allow for mob rule? Do they allow for money rule?
13 Do they foster geographical and other
14 representation?
15 MR. ZITTRAIN: Great. Are there
16 thoughts specifically on this? Yes?
17 Unfortunately, you will have to go to the mic just
18 so that it gets into the record.
19 MR. HECKENDORN: I'm Mark Heckendorn.
20 I'm in favor of a very broad membership model, and
21 the one I like to use is the English major who
22 (inaudible) the IEEE. The IEEE model, essentially
23 anyone can be a member. There are certain
24 categories of membership, and based on those
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1 categories of membership, it might have some
2 bearing on which types of offices you can hold, if
3 there were offices from the membership. But in
4 general, what I do with my membership depends upon
5 my level of participation. The minimum is -- for
6 me to be a good member is to turn in my ballot
7 every year in electing the Board. And beyond
8 that, I can cooperate in committees, I can work
9 with local chapters, I can do a range of things.
10 But at the individual level, I still have a vote
11 that's equivalent to every other member of the
12 IEEE. You know, I think that's a good model.
13 My suggestion of using domain names is
14 just a quick surrogate, because you have those
15 people's names and addresses, and so you don't
16 have to go through the problem of creating a
17 membership list, and that might be a good interim
18 membership list.
19 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yes, at the back
20 microphone?
21 AUDIENCE: My name is (inaudible). I
22 am vice president of (inaudible). Here I want to
23 raise one question: What is the incentive for the
24 people of the organization to come to be a member?
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1 MR. ZITTRAIN: You mean what's in it
2 for them? Membership has its privileges. What
3 are they?
4 AUDIENCE: For the privilege or the --
5 to get some kind of right or the power over the
6 organization? Another (inaudible) people come to
7 the membership in order to achieve or in order to
8 commit to some kind of responsibility of the
9 organization, to get the power or to commit to the
10 -- some kind of responsibility of the
11 organization. I think this is a very important
12 point. I think the membership -- member must
13 commit in some kind of responsibility of the
14 organization. This question is very important,
15 because we are running the Japan network
16 information center (inaudible) some type of
17 membership organization. The lawyer says once we
18 give some specific privilege to the membership,
19 then he might cause some kind of legal problem
20 (inaudible) antitrust law. That's very important
21 point. So we cannot give big privilege to the
22 members.
23 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah.
24 AUDIENCE: On the other hand, if we don't
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1 give any kind of service or privilege to the
2 members, then they will not pay the membership
3 fee.
4 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yes.
5 AUDIENCE: This is very important
6 problem, so let's be -- I have not good answer to
7 this one, but I would like us, all of you to think
8 of this problem: What is the incentive to come to
9 the membership, to get privileges or to commit to
10 some type of responsibility of the organization?
11 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Another
12 issue it just quickly raise that might be worth
13 bracketing is, do we define membership thanks to a
14 preexisting legal category handed down, say, from
15 the State of California, is membership sort of
16 written into the law there or is membership more a
17 conceptual thing, we can say IEEE does it this way
18 or somebody else does it that way and just imagine
19 fashioning it however we want, whatever the law
20 may say about, when you have a membership, this is
21 its powers, these are its structures. Tamara?
22 MS. DYSON: You still need to get
23 closer to the mic.
24 TAMARA: Oh, okay.
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1 MS. DYSON: Thanks.
2 TAMARA: We need, I think, the type of
3 membership structure that is flexible, because we
4 don't really know, this organization (inaudible).
5 So to carve it in stone right now would require,
6 afterward, chipping at the stone. Now, there is a
7 price for that flexibility, and that's lack of
8 predictability and making inability to -- it's
9 kind of lack of self-control of what will happen
10 next, which may not be desirable. So you have to
11 find something in between. One question is, who
12 are the nominees and how do you nominate the
13 Board? Now --
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: We're going to
15 presuppose that one power of the membership is to
16 nominate the Board.
17 TAMARA: That's right (inaudible)
18 membership now, but this is a very important
19 question. And it seems to me that two -- three,
20 really, or maybe two examples, in a business
21 corporation, the existing board nominates the
22 future board. However, the members can, at a
23 great cost, create -- make their own nominees
24 through (inaudible). That is one possibility.
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1 The other one is what I saw in some of the
2 professional organizations of the Internet, and
3 that is, people (inaudible), but they then have to
4 pass through some qualifications and also to have
5 some support. It's very similar or somewhat
6 similar to a political process.
7 It may well be that we should take that
8 political process, and the reason is that then you
9 will have some nominating board which can then
10 balance and create a balance representation by
11 some general guidelines. The more general the
12 guidelines, obviously the more flexible you will
13 have. And the more general guidelines, the less
14 predictable it would be.
15 But I think that as you go through this
16 process, what this corporation needs is some
17 tradition and some doctrine of behavior, and you
18 can't get to it unless you try to do something.
19 You will get --
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you.
21 TAMARA: -- the reaction, and if the
22 reaction is negative, you have to change it.
23 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Dave Clark,
24 looks like.
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1 MR. CLARK: Dave Clark from MIT. I've
2 been sitting listening to this, and I want to
3 offer --
4 MS. DYSON: Mic, mic.
5 MR. CLARK: Yes, Mike?
6 MS. DYSON: Closer to the mic.
7 MR. CLARK: Okay. I want to offer a
8 hypothesis. I found myself saying members, and I
9 said, well, okay, members of what, and what are we
10 trying to accomplish? I thought about the
11 Internet as a great (inaudible) direct
12 representation. You can play all sorts of
13 experiments with a hundred million dollar -- a
14 hundred million person sort of referendum. And I
15 said no, the actual issues that we're going to
16 speak to here are very complicated and they're
17 complex and, in some cases, technical and policy
18 issues. And I began saying this is a classical
19 example of where I think you want representative
20 election of some sort, I want to elect somebody
21 who's willing to go understand these things.
22 And all of a sudden I realized that the
23 issue of membership cannot be disentangled from
24 the question of who's actually going to make
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1 operation decisions. And if you actually are on
2 the board of directors in the classic example of a
3 company, you don't make operational decisions, you
4 fire the president. And there are other people
5 inside the company who do things, so there's a
6 level (inaudible) there.
7 And I want to understand whether the
8 Board feels it's something we should look at as an
9 institution that exists to fire the president or
10 whether they are actually more like the congress
11 of the United States to do (inaudible) passing
12 laws; that is to say, operational things, in which
13 case I think (inaudible) might make sense. But I
14 want to know whether you're those people. So I
15 don't think you can talk about membership and the
16 role of membership until we understand how that
17 reflects against the structure you people are
18 going to create and which people in your company
19 have responsibilities, are they operational
20 responsibilities, are they fire-the-president
21 responsibilities and how we would like to be able
22 to control that. So I think that it's premature
23 to ask what members should do, because I don't
24 think we understand the structure that you are
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1 going to put in place and how we can play against
2 that.
3 MR. ZITTRAIN: Well, if I may, I think
4 you're making at least two points. One is, and it
5 was made earlier, you have to know what the
6 organization as a whole is doing before you can
7 actually define how the membership would play a
8 role in it. And secondly, more specifically, to
9 the extent that what it's doing is operational and
10 those are the decisions that require
11 accountability, you want to even say is it the
12 Board doing it, is it people appointed by the
13 Board, is it the president or people under --
14 MR. CLARK: Right, I was just stressing
15 the second question, you know, that -- I'm -- the
16 question of how the Board is selected has a lot to
17 do with what -- the role they play versus the
18 subsidiary organizations and so forth and so on.
19 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah.
20 MS. DYSON: Yeah. Well, with -- yeah,
21 not everything is clear, but clearly we are more
22 than -- we will be making policy decisions; Mike
23 Roberts will be -- and his successor, as a more
24 permanent president, will be carrying out the
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1 operational side of the business and making things
2 run and so forth and so on. So it really is a
3 combination. But we're an -- we are an initial
4 Board right now. That's why we're called initial.
5 It wasn't actually interim. And one reason we're
6 an initial Board is because we are initiating a
7 lot of these policies about how we are governed
8 going forward. So especially this initial Board
9 is very much concerned with defining exactly what
10 we're talking about here: Membership,
11 accountability, procedures, the structure of the
12 supporting organizations and so forth.
13 AUDIENCE: Can I just talk briefly?
14 MS. DYSON: Sure.
15 MR. ZITTRAIN: Sure, go ahead, quickly.
16 AUDIENCE: If, in fact, (inaudible)
17 that the members -- well, we have to figure out
18 what the membership organizations are here -- are
19 actually interested in not just their ability to
20 elect the Board, but their ability to elect
21 (inaudible).
22 MR. ZITTRAIN: Right. Then Amadeu at
23 the front mic. And Ben, if you can figure out how
24 to help me take "Num Lock" off, I'd very much
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1 appreciate it.
2 MS. DYSON: That's an operational
3 problem.
4 AMADEU: Just before I worked for the
5 (inaudible). What I mean by that is that I take
6 exception to what Jonathan said before, that for
7 (inaudible) membership. Foundations have no
8 membership (inaudible) but they have mechanism for
9 accountability, mechanism for deciding who's in
10 the board, who could not any longer serve on the
11 board. I think that the accountability issue
12 should be (inaudible) to the membership only. The
13 first step for accountability is transparency, is
14 getting information on what happened, and this
15 should not be limited at all at definition of
16 membership. Anyone on the Internet, anyone
17 interested should be -- should have access to that
18 information. Then mechanism for, you know,
19 applying the accountability mechanism, first,
20 remember that we don't have (inaudible) membership
21 of the Board. We have the supporting
22 organizations.
23 Remember that the idea is an open
24 membership organization. Remember that everyone
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1 buying or needing ID numbers should become members
2 (inaudible) structure, and we are now working
3 (inaudible) supporting organization, and we are
4 also trying to see that everybody who has an
5 interest, (inaudible) or not, will have some kind
6 of participation there. Do we need a special
7 separate participation for that? Perhaps. But
8 especially we need a separate thing for electing
9 the Board, and then, for god's sakes, also
10 initiating (inaudible) the Board members. And
11 here a solution would be (inaudible) diverse
12 geographical and diverse professional and diverse
13 interest representation, we can get a lot of
14 members. (inaudible) providing services for the
15 Internet for any users and customers and thus
16 trying to make geographical diversity.
17 And so (inaudible) about that, but
18 Japan and Australia are closer to the United
19 Kingdom, Netherlands and Spain (inaudible) is to
20 France or Cambodia is to Australia. So in this
21 case, not only geographical, but also, you know,
22 about (inaudible) countries. And then the
23 membership should be (inaudible).
24 MR. ZITTRAIN: Gotcha. All right, we
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1 need the clock back, I'm told, but that by no
2 means reflects on that statement. I mean, what I
3 hear from it is, if you make membership not so
4 privileged, because anybody, whether having a
5 membership card or not, can present credentials
6 just of citizenship of the world and execute
7 certain privileges that just come from the
8 transparency provisions of the corporation, then
9 it doesn't matter so much how you define
10 membership. You say keep it simple, let the
11 membership just sort of do its job of electing and
12 sticks at that. Can we just jump to the back mic?
13 MR. CURRAN: I'm pleased to see the
14 clock. John Curran, GTE. Three very quick
15 points. The first point is that with respect to
16 the membership, is the membership being seen as a
17 revenue stream or cost-offset stream for the
18 organization? Is it possible some of the models
19 that have been proposed, like domain name holders,
20 would have us potentially with a membership that
21 we're not really talking to and (inaudible) costs,
22 actually? Is the membership something that we're
23 willing to take down costs to interact with if
24 they haven't, per se, paid membership fees? So we
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1 need to know the implications either way. Is it a
2 revenue stream or is it a cost to the
3 organization?
4 Second point is very simple. With
5 respect to domain name holders, again I'll remind
6 everyone, ICANN does more than just domain name
7 policy. We have folks out there with RFCs and the
8 idea of community. When you start defining people
9 who are general members, remember that ICANN is
10 more than just a domain name world.
11 And the third one is a simple request,
12 which is that ICANN is going to be forming
13 policies or actually, in some models, ICANN will
14 be approving and adopting policies and doing
15 (inaudible) formation. But in the end, there's
16 going to be policies for identifiers. To the
17 extent that we're having discussion today and
18 we're talking about ICANN's rules or by-laws,
19 those are very distinct from policies. And I'd
20 like to keep people -- when we use the term policy
21 and policy formation, I'd like to keep that focus
22 on the mission of the organization and the
23 administration of the identifiers we're talking
24 about and not use the term policy in other parts
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1 of the ICANN discussion, if possible. Simply a
2 request.
3 MR. ZITTRAIN: Which also may speak to
4 the mission of the interim board as dealing with
5 by-laws and structure of the organization, perhaps
6 less so than policy issues that might face
7 successor boards, I don't know.
8 MS. DYSON: We also will be dealing
9 with policy issues, like it or not, which is one
10 reason we want to get the membership structure and
11 the SO's moving forward quickly, so that we do not
12 do it in a vacuum.
13 MR. ZITTRAIN: At the front microphone.
14 MR. STOLSON: Hi. Ken Stolson from
15 Microtech Systems, although I'm speaking for
16 myself today. I wanted to point out that I think
17 there's some confusion among the audience as to
18 the question of power of an idea versus the
19 question of the power of a member. Usually a
20 board is responsible for the oversight and balance
21 and making sure that a good idea comes to the
22 forefront. And I would suggest that a small
23 person with a big idea, all they need is a
24 communication channel to the Board. We don't
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1 trust this Board yet, necessarily, but assuming
2 that this Board does earn our trust, it's not
3 necessary to set up a membership structure where
4 the very smallest person can cause a big fuss.
5 It's the purpose of the Board to figure out what's
6 a good idea and to give it a high weight. And the
7 reason why we generally have representative
8 democracies is because a true democracy tends to
9 end up in chaos.
10 I would suggest that the purpose of
11 membership should be solely to elect the Board,
12 and we don't want to give more power to the
13 membership than that.
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: I think that's very much
15 echo Amadeu's point. Yes? At the back
16 microphone?
17 MR. GILL: John Gill representing
18 myself. On the point of electing the Board, the
19 Board appears to have sprung as a virgin birth
20 from some undisclosed deity and has been captured
21 by white males, all white males. I would like
22 to -- I would like to go back to New England
23 history, and clearly we would say if there were a
24 hundred people, we'd have a town meeting and we
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1 would all know who came from where, how, and there
2 would be accountability forwards and backwards,
3 which we don't have today, because we don't know
4 where the Board came from. I would like us to
5 imagine that none of the tools we talked about are
6 adequate for a town meeting that potentially
7 involves six billion citizens of the planet. I
8 would like to challenge this audience to invent
9 the tools that would allow us to have persistent
10 structures that were well-mapped. I would like to
11 challenge the audience to create the tools that
12 would show membership as sort of a virtual real-
13 time genealogical process so we could compute
14 trust via connection and relationship.
15 And then if we had such a tool, imagine
16 we had such a tool and that we could use the
17 Internet to its fullest -- that is to say, to deal
18 as effectively as possible in (inaudible), and if
19 we could use the Internet to do, at its fullest,
20 to sponsor dialogue at the edges, not monologue at
21 the center, then I will be hard-pressed to imagine
22 such a (inaudible) process appointing this Board.
23 MR. ZITTRAIN: Great. Thank you very
24 much.
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1 MR. GILL: And I would expect we would
2 look for a much richer representation of the
3 people of the world.
4 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. For a non-
5 monologue from the center in the front.
6 MR. HECKENDORN: Yes. I would like to
7 speak again in favor of a broad-based membership.
8 This idea that it should be representative of
9 organizations already working in the Internet, I
10 think it's flawed. The Internet is an
11 organization -- I mean, there are -- most of the
12 people who are in business in the Internet today
13 weren't in business in the Internet three years
14 ago. And there's a very quick turnover of who are
15 the incumbents, who are the insurgents. I want a
16 mechanism where the people who come up with an
17 idea in the garage have a chance to have their
18 voice heard. And the --
19 MR. ZITTRAIN: But are you thinking
20 that membership -- I mean, the way the Amadeu line
21 of thinking is, if all you need is the voice and
22 if it gets heard through a board --
23 MR. HECKENDORN: It doesn't count,
24 because the core thing is electing the Board. If
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1 the board's elected by, you know, Intel,
2 Microsoft, Apple and a few other players, if those
3 points of view are the only ones represented on
4 the board, then I can have my voice all I want and
5 make submissions and other things, but if I -- if,
6 at an individual level, I don't have the ability
7 to say throw the bums out, then I don't have a
8 true voice. I think --
9 MR. ZITTRAIN: And again, your initial
10 (inaudible) on domain names as --
11 MR. HECKENDORN: Well, that was just --
12 MR. ZITTRAIN: Okay. If it's a
13 reiteration, maybe we should just move on. Yeah,
14 do you have a --
15 MS. DYSON: Yeah, let me just see if
16 this is what some of these comments are driving
17 at. It's one thing to have a vote, which is very
18 important, because you can throw the bums out, you
19 can put your own new bums in representing your
20 particular interest. But separately, one thing
21 that happens in a representative democracy is,
22 before people vote, they come out and they argue
23 and they put forward positions, they try and find
24 policies that will get a lot of votes. Ideally,
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1 rather than just buying the votes, they try and
2 buy them with good ideas. And so it's not simply
3 the voting, but it's the process by which this
4 happens, which is the discussion. And it may not
5 be complete if you have just the votes or if you
6 have just the discussion.
7 MR. HECKENDORN: Right. I mean, what
8 I'm saying is, you want everyone to have access to
9 discussion, but if the people who have the power
10 to elect the board are simply representatives of
11 the Internet society or the Internet engineering
12 task force or whatever, those organizations, it
13 takes a lot of time and effort to have a voice on
14 those organizations. They may be open, but you've
15 still got to go to the meetings, you still have to
16 do all that. And I want at least the broad base
17 for electing the board.
18 MR. ZITTRAIN: Okay, thank you. The
19 back microphone?
20 MR. STEFFERUD: Einar Stefferud.
21 MR. ZITTRAIN: Einar Stefferud.
22 MR. STEFFERUD: Speaking for ORSC and,
23 to some extent, myself. There are a couple of
24 points here, one that on your agenda, you showed
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1 this as being accountability and membership. I
2 would suggest that membership is only a very small
3 piece of accountability, especially if it only
4 lets you deal with throwing the bums out every
5 second year. That makes a long time between the -
6 -
7 MR. ZITTRAIN: And this gets into the
8 what are the powers of membership or what are
9 the --
10 MS. DYSON: In the third session also.
11 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah.
12 MR. STEFFERUD: Okay. The other point
13 I wanted to make is that in divvying up the
14 membership and assigning seats to membership
15 classes and things like that, it's very important
16 to distinguish between control of the Board and a
17 majority of the Board. If fifty percent of the
18 vote is a hundred percent of control, there's a
19 leverage problem. Okay? If the Board can meet
20 with only fifty percent of its members, then
21 twenty-five percent of the Board has control. And
22 we need to really divvy this thing up so that no
23 segment has more than twenty percent of the vote
24 of the Board so that this can't happen.
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1 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Front
2 microphone?
3 MR. ROBERTS: Nigel Roberts again.
4 I've been on the board of a couple of non-profits
5 in Europe and the U.K., in fact, and the model is,
6 you have a -- you are a member of that company and
7 you elect the board and you pay a subscription,
8 whatever that subscription is. It could be five
9 pounds, it could be five hundred. Now, the
10 question is this: What is the financial model on
11 which ICANN is going to operate under and, in
12 fact, currently is operating under? Where does
13 the initial funding come from?
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: And you say this is
15 relevant because if there's not a satisfactory
16 answer to that, you can't answer the question of
17 whether members are going to be a source of
18 revenue.
19 MR. ROBERTS: Exactly.
20 MR. ZITTRAIN: Anybody want to speak to
21 that now or just keep it on the screen as a
22 question that we can have out on the record?
23 MS. DYSON: I think what we want to do
24 is have everybody talk for half a minute and then
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1 have Greg sum up or, you know, ask for a consensus
2 or do whatever you want to do.
3 MR. CREW: Well, I expected this to
4 come up as one of the principals or the issues,
5 and I'm surprised it's taken so long.
6 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah. Okay, at the back
7 microphone, and then it does seem, giving our
8 timing, we should try to keep it down as brief as
9 possible. Go ahead.
10 MR. SNOW: Richard Snow representing
11 myself and (inaudible) Corporation. Simplicity is
12 the key thing here. We have very little time to
13 get very complex (inaudible). But what you need
14 is for everyone to agree that members are going to
15 have a very simple responsibility, which has
16 already been proposed, that's a good thing, and
17 you need to keep the whole thing to the upper or
18 to the minimum in order to for it to work. So
19 keep it simple --
20 MS. DYSON: And short.
21 MR. SNOW: -- and short. And the other
22 thing is, there needs to be -- the core operating
23 capacity has to be stable, however it occurs,
24 whatever you have. If you have a board or you
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1 have congress and you have voting members and all
2 of this stuff, you have to actually allow the
3 board to have some stability. The less common
4 relates to what Mark said, which --
5 MR. ZITTRAIN: If you can make it in
6 ten seconds, that would be great.
7 MR. SNOW: Yeah, which is that it is
8 possible to have -- it's possible to actually have
9 this whole thing reconstitute itself at some time
10 in the future. So consider that to go along.
11 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. At the front
12 microphone? Go ahead.
13 MR. SCHULTZ: Jeff Schultz, Southern
14 New England Telephone, and I'm speaking for
15 myself. I'd just like to suggest that there are
16 many ways, obviously, when you have a membership
17 that people will find both fair and not fair. I'd
18 just simply like to suggest that the Board
19 consider a parallel structure for petitioning the
20 Board for redress so that whether you are a member
21 or whether you are not a member, that there is a
22 process by which a group can force the Board to
23 pay attention.
24 MR. ZITTRAIN: Very good. The back
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1 microphone? Carl.
2 MR. AUERBACK: Yes, Carl Auerback
3 again. However it gets built into the structure
4 of the organization, at least a three-class
5 structure (inaudible) that institutionalizes
6 certain special interests. And I would suggest
7 that if we have a membership organization, let's
8 at least be clear about it and merge the model
9 into one membership structure, one -- if we're
10 going to have any classes, one set of clear
11 classes rather than the structure we have right
12 now.
13 MR. ZITTRAIN: Very good, another keep-
14 it-simple comment. Simpson.
15 MR. SIMPSON: Bill Simpson, Berkman
16 Center. I'm very confused by this meeting today.
17 I came to hear from the Board. I've been hearing
18 from everybody in the audience. Clearly there is
19 something which distinguishes the Board from the
20 audience, because you guys are sitting up there.
21 But I've heard a lot from Jonathan, a little from
22 Esther and practically nothing from the other
23 members. And you are the people making the
24 decisions, and so you're the people I want to be
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1 hearing from. That's all. I'd like to know just
2 what your roles have been.
3 MS. DYSON: We have encouraged all of
4 you to ask us direct questions, but at the same
5 time, we really are here to hear from you.
6 MR. SIMPSON: So this is not -- this is
7 not actually a meeting of the Board, this is a
8 hearing.
9 MS. DYSON: It's -- no, it's a friendly
10 consultation.
11 MR. SIMPSON: It's not even a hearing.
12 MR. ROBERTS: Here's a very important
13 point that needs to be brought up here. You know,
14 we're obliged by the by-laws that we've already
15 adopted to provide notice and comment on the
16 activity to -- essentially on a worldwide basis
17 for anything we do. The reason we're taking input
18 today is because we intend to observe that process
19 and we intend to give full notice of any intended
20 decisions. And we're not at all trying to be less
21 than forthright with you. We're trying to live by
22 the rules that have been urged on us over a whole
23 summer.
24 MR. ZITTRAIN: And hearing need not
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1 mean just procession, if we can try to synthesize.
2 Jay?
3 MR. HAUBEN: Jay Hauben again. I think
4 some question got put on the table whether the --
5 we're talking about a (inaudible) or an
6 electorate. I think that's a very important
7 question. I think what the Internet puts on the
8 table is whether the people of the world can be
9 (inaudible) or electorate. I think if we try
10 being electorate, I think we'll do better than if
11 we attempted to find a mechanism by which its
12 pieces can work together toward progress. I think
13 that that's the role of government. I think the
14 reason we bog down in these questions is because
15 what we're trying to do is replace government.
16 But government, in fact, has taken twenty-eight
17 hundred years to evolve to this form. We're not,
18 this week or next week or this month or in ten
19 years, going to do something better. And I think
20 by disrespecting that long process and by
21 substituting this instead of the processes of
22 government, we're making a mistake. This will be
23 very helpful to the people of the Board.
24 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you, an amazing
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1 forty-five seconds. Please.
2 MR. AHEARN: Mike Ahearn, AIP. I
3 wanted to sort of ask a question and just bring up
4 a point about mission and broad representation. I
5 mean, if the mission of the organization is names
6 and numbers and right now names and numbers are a
7 hot-blooded issue, everyone's interested. But if
8 this organization solves the issues associated
9 with names and numbers, it ceases being a hot-
10 blooded issue, people become disinterested. And
11 there's few things more dangerous than a
12 disinterested electorate. It's very easily co-
13 opted by other sources.
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: Yeah. The back
15 microphone? You'll have to speak up.
16 AUDIENCE: Okay. ICANN is not a whole
17 government, it's a very focused organization with
18 a specific mission (inaudible) the good and bad
19 policy, nothing more. How do you reach good
20 policies? It takes long-term investment, a lot of
21 voluntary people, and this is what (inaudible) of
22 supporting organizations is for. How do you reach
23 these balanced decisions and (inaudible) decisions
24 and accountability? One of the ways is to have
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1 multiple sources for the board, and also we have
2 that kind of balance in the present model. So we
3 have that kind of balance, and we have to find --
4 what we are left with now is to define what
5 membership does and how many people to elect. I
6 think this is basically the operational mission.
7 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Front
8 microphone?
9 JOHN: I'd just like to follow up on
10 that last point in that that second tier
11 (inaudible) shouldn't be domain names, but should
12 be people who are subscribers to (inaudible),
13 individuals, e-mail addresses.
14 MR. ZITTRAIN: Anybody who uses the
15 Net. So at this point, why don't I --
16 AUDIENCE: We've heard from the
17 audience. Can we hear from the Board about
18 (inaudible)?
19 MR. ZITTRAIN: That's what I was just
20 about to do before you asked me to do it. Why
21 don't we put it to the Board and go in whichever
22 direction you want. Maybe this time, Greg, if you
23 want to try to summarize, and then any other Board
24 members that want to react, however it's going to
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1 be, it sounds like people would love to hear from
2 you.
3 MS. DYSON: Go ahead.
4 MR. CREW: Okay. Well, it's been a
5 very interesting and useful input to the Board,
6 but remembering that our task as the initial Board
7 is to work out a process by which at-large
8 (inaudible) and following the widely-expressed
9 user (inaudible) process. I think (inaudible)
10 myself at this point rather than suggest that I've
11 got a Board consensus on this. What I see at
12 ICANN is a company with a job to do, and it's --
13 the job of the Board is to make sure that job,
14 which is the stability and (inaudible) of the
15 Internet is the responsibility of the executives
16 which this Board puts in place on behalf of the
17 Internet community. And the Board is elected as
18 stewards for the community to make sure that that
19 job gets done.
20 Directors have a traditional duty to
21 act in the best interests of all of the members
22 or, I think in the case of ICANN, all of the
23 Internet community, not just majorities. And that
24 is, I believe, part of the responsibility of the
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1 directors of most company boards, finding a way to
2 do that, but they are obliged to do it.
3 I think the idea of a membership
4 process whereby people who wish to have a say in
5 who should sit on the board can do so. They -- I
6 think we need to have a process whereby they
7 register themselves so we know who has put their
8 hand up and said, "I would like to vote." And
9 membership has its obligations as well as its
10 rights. There needs to be some sort of process
11 whereby they register, they undertake certain
12 obligations, maybe identify themselves so we can
13 track who is voting, maybe pay a fee. And that
14 raises all sorts of issues of equity in a world
15 where economic capability is widely divergent.
16 So I think we need to put all this
17 together and come up with a process (inaudible)
18 the Board when we are able to sit down to do that,
19 and we are (inaudible) advisory committee to
20 advise the board, and they will be seeking
21 widespread opinions as we've been doing today.
22 And I believe that we will vote under the
23 recommendations, we will publish and seek final
24 comments on before making a decision to make sure
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1 that that process is as open as possible. But my
2 (inaudible) today's meeting is to have -- you are
3 probably looking for something from the Board, a
4 recommendation, we propose to do this, which you
5 can comment on (inaudible) thank you very much,
6 this is what we do and get on with it.
7 MR. CONRADES: If I could just add to
8 it, Greg, just -- I like this idea of the
9 nominating committee that does ensure balanced
10 representation and does that under some general
11 guidelines. If you see the current -- read the
12 current by-laws, you will see not more than half
13 of the at-large directors come from one geographic
14 region, elected by a majority of votes of the at-
15 large members. Also, there are not more than two
16 supporting organizations to come from one
17 geographic regions. These regions have been
18 defined as Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa,
19 North America. And also the boards with these
20 members would be staggered over these two-year
21 terms. So there are some ways already that have
22 been articulated to try to find some diversity in
23 this process.
24 But underneath that, which is what
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1 we're really trying to deal with today, which is
2 exactly what Greg just said, you know, I believe
3 that if we have some general guidelines and ways
4 for people to be proposed and evaluated and a
5 method for some discussion and debate, that the
6 board then has to do its -- has to carry out its
7 responsibilities, which is to act and to elect,
8 and then we go on. It will never be perfect.
9 MR. TRIANA: (inaudible) the procedure
10 to permit necessary communication (inaudible) and
11 the other related conditions to (inaudible)
12 accused of discrimination, of doing something
13 (inaudible). This is a very difficult point, and
14 how to organize this (inaudible) membership.
15 MR. ZITTRAIN: Thank you. Yeah, Hans?
16 MR. KRAAIJGNBRINK: Thank you. One of
17 the important items, at least for me, is that on
18 the membership issue, we do not create a sort of
19 foggy situation in what the powers of the members
20 are. I believe -- and it was said by several
21 people -- that the most important power of
22 membership will be the election of the board
23 members. And that board will have the task, the
24 difficult task to orchestrate and listen to input
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1 from the Internet community at large. Because if
2 that's the approach, the supporting organizations
3 should be the core of the policy making. And
4 everyone, as you read the by-laws, has a right to
5 ask the board for explanation and redress. So I
6 believe that we should not -- we should
7 concentrate on making sure what do the members do,
8 do they elect the board and see to it that
9 (inaudible) of the Internet community.
10 MR. ZITTRAIN: Anybody else want to say
11 anything?
12 BOARD MEMBER: I'd just like to make
13 one comment, and that is that in most of the
14 representative democracies, we have a betting
15 process, as Esther has referred it to you, where
16 someone reveals their platform and asks for your
17 vote, and then that individual, if elected, joins
18 a body that makes laws and makes policies
19 (inaudible) is responsible for some of its
20 membership actually voting on the policies.
21 If you go back to the original white-
22 paper concept, the notion was that there was going
23 to be a user organization. In fact, I think it
24 was called on in the green paper, and it invited
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1 someone or somebody out there to form a new user
2 organization to be the representative body to the
3 new non-profit corporation. And as you know, that
4 didn't happen over the summer, because -- I won't
5 speculate on that, except that it seemed to be
6 that a lot of people couldn't figure out how to
7 make it work. So I personally will be interested
8 in seeing both any further comments on that as to
9 whether the feeling that -- you know, in a
10 republican form of government, the first thing you
11 do is find out -- you know, you (inaudible) to sit
12 on the body that then participates in the process.
13 MS. DYSON: I think I've said enough
14 and it's time for lunch. But we look forward to
15 getting the specific comments, to working with an
16 advisory committee on this and to try and actually
17 make something real happen.
18 MR. ZITTRAIN: We'll reconvene here at
19 1:30 p.m., and apparently there's food right
20 outside and a food court down the aisle.
21 (Whereupon a lunch recess was
22 held, resuming at 1:48 p.m.)
For additional information, please contact:
Wendy Seltzer, Ben Edelman, Alexander Macgillivray, and Antoun Nabhan.
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School