Karl, "Stakeholderism grew out of the desire to be 'fair'." Agreed it didn't conceivably take the most perfect direction that it could have taken; Agreed that there are imbalances, but your argument is flawed to the extent that Democracy is balanced, that actors in a democracy don't revisit ballot rooms with puppets on their gloves. If in NewCo some actors have two or three votes in place of one, many (actually many, many) "Democracies" don't have a need for glove puppets in ballot rooms, for a great majority of eligible voters take the places of sock puppets as if on strings. And those elected to represent often do not represent, but obey directives to vote for or against any major decision that the heads of parties take. NewCo is new. Very, very new. The powerful actors, despite how the world might perceive them, aren't always, aren't all of them, self-serving. The multistakeholder process, despite all its gaps, does not totally silence your voice. There is a definite sense of purpose and direction combined with a remarkable degree of maturity among many of them which actually inspires many in the process to raise questions, hold them accountable (for more good) in a manner that is both elevated and nuanced, which wouldn't be tolerated or even understood in most democracies that work like how they work today in most geographies (many, many geographies). The way forward is to begin with the suspicion that NewCo is a good company of many good actors and to constructively work to fix the imbalances one after another to help the NewCo achieve what it inherently desires. If you own domain names, trademarks, if you are also an internet techie and own corporations, and if you have a 10x voice, it is still fair to me, as long as your voice isn't always about your own interests. In NewCo there is a greater propensity for these voices, and increasingly more voices, to be in global public interest. Sivasubramanian M On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 1:46 AM Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> wrote:
I'm going to be somewhat diverging from the main topic....
On 7/26/22 8:14 AM, Marita Moll wrote:
And so it is with ICANN. It exists -- a unique multistakeholder governance system. Lots of things wrong with it. But it exists. So, for those who want to, they can keep working at it, keep looking for improvement, keep challenging the system.
I've long been in opposition to the "stakeholder" model of governance. I was horrified when I first saw it just after Jon Postel died, and became more horrified watching Joe Sims of Jones Day ramming it down our collective throats. In the Boston Working Group proposal for "NewCo" we tried to mitigate some of the worst aspects.
See https://cavebear.com/archive/bwg/ for the Boston Working Group proposals.
A lot of our BWG proposals are still quite relevant, for instance, not putting the President/CEO into a seat on the board of directors and moving some ICANN powers into the Articles of Incorporation and requiring exercise of those powers to be approved by more than merely the board (in those days that larger body could have been "the members" but ICANN sank that ship long ago - but it can be, and ought to be, re-floated.)
My most recent piece in opposition to stakeholder based systems may be found here:
Democracy Versus Stakeholderism - https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/stakeholder_sock_puppet/
--karl--
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