Dear Wolfgang,

thank you for your follow-up. Please find my comments inline:

On 18/11/2019 22:05, Wolfgang Kleinwächter wrote:

Bildt proposed that At Large membership should be open to "individual domain name holders". The idea was to form six regional At Large Councils (with five members) and a global At Large Council (with 12 members/two from each of the six regions). Recognized At Large members would have a right to vote for the five members of their regional council and also vote for the regional Board director. The plan was to have a balance in the ICANN board among "developers" (technical community), providers (business) and users (civil society) of services, with governments in an advisory capacity.

A significant mistake was made by the Bildt Committee and that's to propose restricting membership to "individual domain name holders". The DNS is used by all users, not only by domain name holders. In fact, there is a designation for individuals that hold a large number of domain names and that's "domainer". So in fact Bildt was proposing ICANN to close itself into its microcosm of domain name businesses and domainers, quite the contrary from the openness that was displayed when ICANN first started.

This was a significant step back for end users and I understand how some supporters of ICANN Version 1 were irritated enough to leave the process altogether. They felt betrayed. As someone who had been actively involved in supporting the "other" proposal, the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC - https://icannwiki.org/IAHC ), resulting in a gTLD MoU ( https://icannwiki.org/GTLD-MoU ) the debate became political very quickly, with concerns by US politicians that the Root and its resources would leave the USA. Upon hindsight, perhaps the IAHC's proposal was not end-user friendly, but I remember that one of the significant points made in the presentation of ICANN, along with the Green and White papers, was that it had a very strong end user component, through its election process. I think that a lot of people, reading this, myself included, shifted our view from supporting a gTLD MoU future to an ICANN future when this end user component was promoted. What happened during the re-organisation of ICANN was, in my view, nothing short of capture, and it took me until 2008 to accept it. BTW the DNSO mailing list discussions were toxic.
Kindest regards,

Olivier