community participation

This page looks at community participation in ICANN.

It covers -

• introduction
• elections and representation
• participation and legitimacy issues
• civil society organisations
• ICANN-fatigue?

     introduction

Questions about participation are significant because of perceptions that ICANN is the 'choke point' for governance of the internet as a whole, concerns about the stability of the net, unhappiness with the organisation's performance and the ambitions of particular individuals, businesses and advocacy groups.

As noted earlier in this profile, ICANN's Board and executive is not appointed by the United Nations or individual national governments and thus does not enjoy the arm's length community participation - a very long arm - or legitimacy of bodies such as the ITU. It is not driven by online plebiscites (eg of the "online community") or by national delegations. It has grappled with the challenge of accommodating the needs - and, more painfully, the often inappropriate expectations - of particular interest groups, discussed in Dan Hunter's cogent 2003 ICANN & the Concept of Democratic Deficit (PDF).

Initially appointed for two years, the 18 Director ICANN Board is now elected. Nine Directors are elected by private, self-regulatory bodies such as domain name supporting organisations (DNSO), address supporting organisations (ASO), and protocol supporting organizations (PSO). The other Directors are elected by internet users - the 'at large' members.

     elections and representation

In 2000 ICANN sought membership from the community through an ICANN At-Large organisation - principals of Caslon Analytics are members - as the basis for elections to its board. Community involvement was also described as a basis for communication and decision-making.  

The election process has been criticised as undemocratic, susceptible to board capture and unlikely to safeguard ICANN's narrow mission. Other critics, such as Damien Cave in a 26 September 2000 New Republic article on Freaked Geeks: Why Netizens Can't Learn To Stop Worrying & Love ICANN, characterised it as an example of the paranoia about the new "cosmocrats".

The ICANN At-Large Election, a study by US public interest groups the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and Common Cause, notes that 

In a basic sense, ICANN faces an age-old question that people face when trying to build a governing process for everything from a nation to a small organization: How can the benefits and energies of democracy be balanced with the need for reasoned and deliberative decision-making? ICANN carries a narrow technical mandate to ensure the reliable and efficient functioning of the DNS, and there is general consensus in the ICANN community that the At-Large elections should produce board directors who are technically knowledgeable and dedicated to preventing ICANN from moving beyond its technical mission into wider regulatory matters (e.g. imposing content restrictions or taxes on domain name holders).  At the same time, ICANN's legitimacy as an international Internet oversight body rests on providing those affected by its policies with a fair opportunity to participate .... 

Many in the ICANN community, however, are concerned that opening up the prospect of representation to the great masses of Internet users worldwide could be more dangerous than beneficial.

Participation in the election varied considerably. At a global level several thousand people registered but far fewer voted. US critics noted that a few hundred people in the African region elected as many directors as those from the home of the net. And there were more votes from Japan and Germany.

A report from the CPSR's Civil Society Project highlighted potential problems with institutional 'capture', with queries whether our region was affected by a "top-down mobilization by the business constituency". There have been similar suggestions about voting in Germany.

Critics such as CPSR questioned whether the At Large Study (ALS) would result in a significant winding-back of past commitments to user participation in ICANN, characterising ICANN's emphasis on "consensus" and on a "narrow" interpretation of its charter as selective. 

Community participation was explored by ICANN's At-Large Membership Study Committee. The Committee was "formed to forge a consensus on the best method for representing the world's Internet users as individuals ('At-Large Members') within ICANN" but criticised as leading to an ICANN "company union".

Participation was also explored by the independent NGO & Academic ICANN Study (NAIS), which issued a report in August 2001 on ICANN, Legitimacy, and the Public Voice: Making Global Participation and Representation Work.

     participation and legitimacy issues

As Jonathan Weinberg notes in an insightful article on ICANN & the Problem of Legitimacy

the task of representation is hardly straightforward. There may be no way to craft an elective mechanism that ensures that the immensely heterogeneous Internet community is represented, in any real sense, within ICANN's structure. Although elections can broaden the set of communities given a voice within ICANN's halls, they cannot render ICANN into a reflection of the Internet community. They can improve ICANN's decisionmaking, but they cannot reliably aggregate the preferences of the Internet world at large, and thus tell ICANN whether to adopt a disputed policy. ...

ICANN has invoked the techniques of consensus: it has asserted that its structure and rules ensure that it can only act in ways that reflect the consensus of the Internet community. But this is illusory. ICANN does not have procedures that would enable it to recognize consensus, or the lack of consensus, surrounding any given issue. It has commonly taken actions with no clear showing of consensus in the community at large, and its methods of determining that a particular action is supported by consensus have often seemed opaque. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the issues over which ICANN seeks to exercise authority are ones around which any genuine consensus can be formed.

Rebecca Nesson's paper .Biz, .Web and ICANN's 'Open' Process: Does the alternative root debate threaten the public's engagement in ICANN's decision-making? asks whether ICANN should allow alternative root advocates proportionately less time in public forums if they represent a relatively small proportion of the internet community.

She comments that

A frequent complaint aired among participants at ICANN's meetings is that the level of engagement with the issues at hand does not deepen over time. The participants charge that identical arguments regarding many of the same issues—including the validity of ICANN's top-level domain name selection process—are ventured at each meeting. In addition, say the participants, the arguments are often lodged by the same groups of stakeholders.

Meaningful discussion of issues isn't aided by the grandstanding of some observers. Influential pundit Cory Doctorow for example contributed to debate about ICANN's relationship with VeriSign by announcing that

ICANN's tongue slithers further up Verisign's foetid backside

The lickspittles of ICANN have granted a Verisign proposal to allow people to place standing orders for domains, in order to snarf them up the minute they expire.

     civil society organisations

The first major global attempt to create a "united users voice" was arguably the Civil Society Internet Forum (CSIF), launched at ICANN's 2000 meeting in Yokohama.

It articulated a global 'Civil Society Platform', endorsed by most elected At Large Directors that year but subsequently declined, arguably because in the words of one critic it diffused its energies "on all global issues ... As its focus expanded to issues like privacy law in various countries, its attention to ICANN declined".

ICANNmembers.org, under the auspices of an Interim Coordinating Committee (ICC) featuring many of the leading candidates from the At- Large elections, was launched at the ICANN Annual Meeting in Marina del Rey in October 2000. It failed to build a mass membership, losing momentum amid disagreement among leading members and the emergence of the NAIS initiative noted above.

Several participants in the At Large Study Committee ('Bildt Committee') founded ICANNatlarge.org in early 2002 to "provide a framework for continued user participation in ICANN policy making". The organisation emerged from ICANNatlarge.com, criticised as an inappropriately compliant and "top-down effort".

The new organisation has around 1,000 members from over 72 countries, mailing lists and an elected governing panel. It has been promoted as "an authentic bottom-up organization" that is "global, participatory, and transparent". The extent of participation - only a mouse-click is required to join the club - is uncertain.

ICANNatlarge.org proponents argue that

it demonstrates that a global user community really exists, and it gives that community a vehicle by which to express its views and its interests. It facilitates the difficult tasks of creating a general forum, aggregating interests for users from around the world, and developing a collective voice. With members, the organization possesses a legitimacy that a closed, top-down organization cannot.

     ICANN-fatigue?

At the end of 2003 one might be forgiven for asking whether many observers are suffering from ICANN-fatigue, the DNS version of compassion fatigue, reflecting the prevalence of polemic (and vilification) in comment about the organisation and disagreement about what might/should be achieved regarding representation.

John Palfrey's 2003 The End of the Experiment (PDF), building on a Harvard study of Public Participation in ICANN, concluded that

1. ICANN's experimentation in new modes of corporate governance has broadly failed in terms of attracting and incorporating "representative" input from the global Internet user community, at least with respect to the public online forums. This failure underscores the need for an overhaul of ICANN's governance structure away from its semidemocratic past. Online message boards and public e-mail lists have proven extremely limited for ICANN as a means of engaging the global Internet user community in the decision-making process.

2. Regardless of the new structure adopted, ICANN should clarify the way(s) in which users can involve themselves in the decision-making process for managing the domain name system, at a minimum by indicating plainly the relative weight given to Supporting Organization input as compared to other forms of direct public input.

3. To the extent that we seek new means of governing the technical architecture of the Internet, we ought to look beyond ICANN, which may never have been the right place for such experimentation given its limited technical mandate.

The Virtues of Deliberative Policymaking: A Response to "Public Participation in ICANN", a response by scholar and former ICANN executive Andrew McLaughlin, commented that

The study's presentation and analysis of data contain much of interest, and much that could assist ICANN (and other policy-making bodies) in improving its use and management of online public forums. But the study's value is diminished by two rather fundamental shortcomings: (1) its misapprehension of both the theory and the practice of ICANN's policy-development process, and (2) the sizeable gap between the broad scope of the study's conclusions and the very narrow - indeed, myopic - focus of the analysis from which they are derived. Simply put, the study scrutinizes a small and misleading corner of ICANN (namely, its online public comment forums) and leaps to a sweeping (and, in my view, unwarranted) conclusion.

   next page  (the UDRP)