By Nick Patience
Esther Dyson’s verdict on last week’s quarterly public meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is that it was friendlier in general than previous meetings and was attended by people doing real work, rather than people debating the validity of ICANN itself. Dyson is the interim chair of ICANN’s board, which held its first meeting in public views last week in Santiago, Chile. The meeting was also webcast live for those not able to attend. This was the fourth public meeting of ICANN and Dyson feels they’ve got progressively more productive.
On the question of membership, Dyson believes around $100,000 of funding will be needed to provide enough outreach to the internet community to establish both an election mechanism and to get enough people to stand for a place on the 18-member at-large council. She intends to approach some of the non-profit policy advocacy bodies, including the Markle Foundation for possible funding and assistance. The plan to is to get a membership of at least 5,000, who will not pay to start with, but a membership fee will be levied in the long term in order to fund elections and other ICANN activities.
The at-large council is a layer inserted between the members and the actual board and it is the council, not the members themselves that will choose the occupants of the nine seats on the 19-member board that will run ICANN. The reason for doing this, says Dyson, is so ICANN can avoid being sued using our own resources, which is known as a derivative action under Californian law. Such actions are obviously much less expensive than the plaintiff funding the suit him or herself. However, Andrew McLaughlin, the ICANN staff member that presented the proposal to the public meeting on Wednesday last week, the day before the board meeting, said that this move would not preclude anybody from bringing suit against ICANN. However, presumably, such action would require money and a Californian lawyer.
Despite the fact that all the resolutions put before the board were passed unanimously, which has led to suspicious minds suggesting that the real work was being done behind the scenes, she says it was a fairly normal board meeting and the resolutions were discussed fully before votes were taken. That way, any disagreements tended to get smoothed out before the vote, hence the unanimity. There certainly were some disagreements, especially on the issue of membership and differences were not necessarily settled before the unanimous votes, as far as we could tell. Meanwhile, Dyson also noted – as most observers did – that the meeting of the names council of the domain name supporting organization (DNSO) held after the board meeting was less constructive or well organized than it could have been.
