Once again, I am baffled at the assumption that the Internet should be run for the benefit of us vanity domain registrants rather than for the benefit of its users.
Unfortunately the Internet is being run and has been run for many years for the benefit of service providers (not just access providers) and its shareholders, user's interests are at the bottom and rarely get to higher levels in the bottom-up process, particularly at ICANN.
I concur with the sentiment that the Internet should be run for the benefit of its users. But since about 99.99% of those users haven't registered a domain and never will, why does anyone thing that the interests of the .01% with domains is more important than the interests of everyone else?
May be we have to blame you for writing the book, now the Internet is full of Dummies and they are taking over :-). Just kidding. I'd argue that probably the percentage is higher than 0.01%, but yes you are right, the majority of Internet users interests are not represented or are miss-represented. OK, lets talk a little bit about representation and how much the average Internet user knows about ICANN ... Over the past few days while jogging, shopping at the supermarket, picking up the kids from school, talking with the neighbors, etc., I did the following exercise, randomly and without previous notice I asked people (around 80 total) the following two questions: (just for completeness I did this in the north area of San Antonio, Texas) 1- Do you use the Internet frequently ? 2- Do you know what is ICANN ? - Only one guy answered NO to 1, and he said that he does not use the Internet because he believes it's a plot of the CIA and an alien race to suck up all the information from our brains. I should have noticed the JD smell on his breath before asking :-S - Five, said, of course "Yes we can", Go Obama ???? - One said, "Ohhh those guys that committed fraud on the presidential primaries", they were talking about "Acorn" I believe - Another one said "I think I made some photocopies there", I believe she was talking about "Ikon" - Two said "Yess we love him and are big fans of Clay Aiken" ... duhhhh - The rest didn't have a clue besides one guy that said "Ahhh those dudes from AOL that give you the email address", at least this one was several hundred miles away but pointing in the right direction Besides the first guy that was ready to go for another drink, I took the time to explain to them what ICANN is and gave them ICANN's URL for additional information. Probably it would be a good idea to make the Home Page more "Joe the Plumber" friendly for people that are not already part of the ICANN community. I really liked the video production about IDNs, perhaps ICANN can produce something similar to introduce the general public about what ICANN is and does. Talking about percentages, and assuming that At-Large (as it is claimed) is the natural and largest constituency representing individual users I took the time to go through the current list of "certified/accredited" ALSs posted at http://www.atlarge.icann.org/en/applications?tid_1=All&tid_2=791 and reviewed the associated documents, and put together a spreadsheet with some info, numbers, URLs, etc. First observation. While all ALSs use the same or very similar template, there is no uniformity or "standard" in the way the information is provided, for example, it's almost impossible to ascertain how many actual/active members some ALSs have, some consider members just their "clients", others the subscribers to a magazine or mailing list, some intentionally or not, don't provide much information about how many members they have, some have a large number of members but it's not clear how many are active and engaged. Anyway, from the 113 I took a look at, I assumed that if no reasonable number of members was reported it was ok to assume that just the person presenting the application or the people listed as directors or other type of organizational role can be counted as members. Then lets says that being members of the ALSs makes you an "Internet user", plus that AFAIK some RALOs also accept individual members at a bare minimum I came up to a 60,734 number of members/users. What's the guesstimate of Internet users today, lets say around 1.6 billion ? That's not bad, that makes At-Large about 0.0038% representative of individual Internet users. Another observation, you would guess that being part of the major entity coordinating common resources and infrastructure of the Internet almost all of the ALSs use the Internet/Web as the primary way to reach out and communicate to its members. Not so fast. For a representative sample I invite you to pay a visit to the following sites: http://www.nexti.eti.br/ http://www.ofokngo.org/ http://www.internautavenezuela.ve/ http://www.isocindiachennai.in/ http://www.cdnua.org.cn/ http://www.macsis.ma/ http://www.densi.com.br/ http://www.cpvi.groupe-jeremie.org/ http://www.emergingfutures.net/ http://afcn.org/ http://www.itps.org/ http://www.uwi.edu/ http://www.amio.maori.nz/ http://privaterra.org/ http://www.hiip.org/ http://www.iunet.org/ http://americaatlarge.org/ http://americaatlarge.com/ http://AmericaAtLarge.net/ http://americaatlarge.us/ http://americaalarge.com/ http://americaalarge.net/ http://americaalarge.org/ http://americaalarge.us/ http://www.al-china.org.cn/ http://www.hess-cr.com/~acdi/ I didn't spend too much time on each website, but on top of that if you get to visit some of the sites listed on each application, you will find that on some of them the latests news or events are from 2007, 2008, even 2005 !! Another thing that always amused me, even when in most parts of the world nobility titles have been abolished, how fast some folks become "chair of this", "president of that", etc. Then talking about accountability and bad actors, shouldn't we start cleaning up at home ? Does anybody at ICANN perform regular audits ? and isn't the ALS certification process way too lax .... ? Hope you all have a wonderful Holiday Season and great start on 2010, perhaps the new year will bring a substantial reduction in BS and better hopes for an organization that still needs a lot of improvement. Warmest Regards Jorge PS. If you like a copy of the spreadsheet is available for a nominal fee of one gTLD.