All-in-all, I think it's the end-users that At-Large is all about. However, at the current time it is very difficult to expect that 'the individual user' could care less about ICANN or its policies. Since most policy decisions ultimately effect the registrant, it is sufficient to say that they are currently the end-user of ICANN. When talking to people, most people in the industry are still unaware of ICANN, let alone the individual Internet user with an email address. This is where the 'educating' comes into play. I'm not sure if there ever will be a time when the 'Internet user with an email address' will ever have a concern about ICANN. However, the individual registrant is greatly effected by anything that ICANN does or says. Time will tell. Randy Glass A@L On 7/26/07, John L <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
I have always found a major lack of agreement about who the at-large is supposed to be.
One group believes it is the domain registrants who are not part of other constituencies, which more or less means individuals (like me) who register personal vanity domains.
The other group believes that it's all the Internet users who are not parts of other consitutencies, all the people who have never registered a domain and never will, but use domains every day when they use the Internet.
In a lot of areas, the interests of these two groups are the same, e.g., we all would prefer that our registrars were competent and honest. But in a lot of other areas, they aren't, with WHOIS being the most obvious place.
Am I the only one who thinks that non-registrants count, or is ALAC a club for vanity registrants?
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
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