Hello All, I have given the topic of membership some thought over the last 6 months. As has already been noted, the Articles of Incorporation does contemplate that one day ICANN may have members. Member organisations are quite common structures for ccTLD managers (e.g the manager of .au - auDA has about 150 members) , RIR structures (APNIC has 4,500 members) , and other I* bodies like the Internet Society (65,000 members) and World Wide Web Consortium (404 members). ICANN owes a fiduciary duty to the Internet community as a whole. For ICANN to move to a membership model I think it needs a membership structure that more broadly reflects the size and diversity of that "Internet community". The Structure of the SOs and ACs is an attempt to at least have a structure that "could" involve a large proportion of the Internet community. Using the GNSO as an example, it has as part of its structure: - gTLD registries, gTLD registrars, business users, intellectual property interests, internet service and connectivity providers, non-commercial users, and not-for-profit operational concerns interests.
From my perspective ICANN would be ready to move to a membership model when each of the parts of the Internet community has a statistically relevant participation in ICANN. The gTLD registrars stakeholder group for example have 89 members of about 1000 registrars, and those registrars represent a majority of the domain name registrations. I am less clear on whether the representation is appropriately in proportion across the 5 geographic regions. When I look at other areas though - I see limited participation from different parts of the world, and a limited proportion of the business, non-commercial entities and individuals involved in any way.
The current ICANN model was established to reduce capture from any particular segment - e.g. just commercial gTLD registry or registrar interests, or predominately US based intellectual property interests etc. Each SO appoints two directors, ALAC appoints one director, the technical community has three liaisons (IETF, SSAC, RSSAC) and the public sector has one liaison (GAC). Other than that we formed a nominating committee comprising all of the above to find 8 directors that provide some cultural and geographic diversity to the Board. The nominating committee operates using consensus amongst all the representations from the SOs and ACs. This model attempts to balance people on the Board with specific technical names and numbers expertise, with people that bring a broad range of experience from different cultural and geographic backgrounds. This voting model was established over 16 years with a few changes along the way to substitute for the broader membership based body that many would like to see. I interpreted the NTIA announcement that it was ready to transition its stewardship as support for this governance model. So I don't think ICANN has sufficient participation to move to a full membership mode such that each of the parts of the Internet community has a statistically relevant participation in ICANN. Regards, Bruce Tonkin