I believe that this discourse and a review of the past decade of user involvement in the process reflect a strange but often repeated truth. Call them what you will - stakeholders, dotcommoners, users, individuals, netizens, holders, owners, members and more. We seem to continually get to a point where representatives of this class are chosen based upon well hashed out mandates, then with rather rare exception those representatives are cast into the sea and abyss of the existing hierarchy and become merely one more brick in the wall against representation.
Organizations and structures exist but leadership of the masses seems to be illusive.
It is possible that the masses are complacent because they are receiving all they need and see no need for change in this statue quo.
"J-F C. (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
At 08:30 22/01/04, Karl Auerbach wrote:
>On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> > This statement has just been released by the ALAC. Comments or questions
> > are welcome.
>
>I'm sorry that I can't support the statement as it is not in accord with
>my strongly held belief that the fundamental unit of sovreignty is not the
>"private sector" but the individual human being.
Amen. "private sector" is here only a way to name "stakeholders" when
faking the civil society.
I would only add that human beeings are entitled to human e-rights that
should be defined first. These e-rights includes naming and teaching,
electonic presence and surety, right to send and broadcast, right to
receive and to not receive, right to own and to associate. This is to
result into supporting network systems arch!
itectures
and into their
concerted adequate management.
Today IAB has not been able to propose such an architecture nor ICANN to
animate such a management. The result is the progressive mental saturation
of the users (spam, worms) and of the governance structure (denial of
thinking by value removed complexity).
There are many diferent interests to support this strategy by the network
dominance : their common target is to prevent evolutions in the proper
directions. This is named status quo and is said to be stability and
security. Statbility by lock of innovation, security for the stakeholders.
The WSIS propositions have been worked and voted to express a wish for
international equal Government authority, to protect the rights of their
citizens and individual end users and obtain transparency.
However this may be a devil trap.
The ITU is both the solution and the danger. It is a solution for 136 years
for the
Governments to reach their target from telex to telephone. It is a
trap because today the only availble welcome structure there is the ITU-T.
Precisely the home of the "stakeholders".
The urgency is therefore to use the WSIS momentum to initiate an ITU-I.
Where "I" stands for Inteligence, Internet and - why not - ICANN. The mere
fact that ICANN is not the leading party in the http://i-sector.org effort
(or other similar ones) shows that ICANN (and unfortunately its affiliate
structures such the mislead, non representative yet talented ALAC) is not
able today to free itself from the control of the "stakeholders".
But we all know for years that mission creep is a smoke screen for power grab.
I would love to work with ICANN, but ICANN does not want to protect me. So...
jfc
>To the extent that national governments are ordained and established by
>the people those governments are worthy of far more respect a!
s the
voice
>of those people than are arbitrarily defined groups of "stakeholders".
>
>Few, if any, truly democratic governments have ever dared to place as many
>layers of insulation between their seats of authority and their citizenry
>as ICANN has placed between itself and the community of internet users.
>We should not delude outselves into a belief that the mechanisms that
>ICANN has created for public participation are in any way adequate.
>
>(I note in passing that the the ALAC statement asserts that ICANN's role
>be "limited to technical matters". Given that ICANN has engaged almost
>exclusively in the regulation of business processes, the ALAC statement is
>suggesting that the ICANN that is desired is nearly the opposite of that
>which exists. That is an opinion with which I quite agree.)
>
> --karl--