This report reviews the North American regional election for one of five contested At-Large seats on the ICANN Board of Directors. What follows is an analysis of the campaign leading up to that election, the election itself and its aftermath, and the implications for the broader prospect of public representation within the structure of ICANN.
Common Cause and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) collaborated in an extensive process that sought perspectives on the election from a broad range of sources. Among them:
Of the ICANN-defined geographic regions, North America has the largest number of Internet users. North America's user population dates back to the early days of the Internet's development and it has grown over time. Of an estimated 407.1 million Internet users worldwide in November 2000, 167.12 million of them (41.1%) were in the United States and Canada (see Appendix 1). [ 44 ]
Per-capita Internet penetration is high throughout North America. By January 2001, over 60 percent of the United States population had access to the Internet from either home or work, according to Nielsen/Netratings. Canada, while having far fewer total users than the U.S. (along with a much smaller population), still maintains a high penetration rate at approximately 42 percent (as of 1999; source: Statistics Canada).
Although Internet users' awareness of Internet issues (such as Internet governance, domain name dispute resolution, etc.) in both the United States and Canada continues to increase, it has not necessarily kept pace with the rapid explosion in Internet usage. While the North American community of Internet users has grown at a near-exponential rate over the past several years, many new users are still becoming attuned to issues of Internet administration such as those before ICANN.
Even so, North America has a significant population of technically savvy Internet users with experience and interest in ICANN's activities. This population has its roots in the programming and engineering communities, as well as an emerging broader community of interested companies, policymakers, and consumers.
For those outside this intrinsically interested community, there have been only limited efforts to foster an interest in ICANN.
Both the United States and Canada enjoy well-established democratic traditions. The United States follows a federal form of government, with three branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) that are designed to check and balance each other. The legislative branch has a bicameral structure, with one branch (the House of Representatives) representing the general population on a proportional basis, and the other branch (the Senate) representing the several States on a two-vote-per-state basis.
Canada's system of government combines elements of the American federal structure with the British unitary "Westminster" model. Like the U.S., the Canadian system has an executive, legislative, and judiciary branch; however, some elements of the executive and legislative are combined, in that the majority party in the legislature also controls the executive.
Both the U.S. and Canadian systems rely heavily on direct election to fill most public offices. [ 45 ] Also, the United States electorate is characterized by a fundamental distrust of government, especially as they become removed from the people from whom they ultimately derive their authority. This may be relevant to an understanding of why many in this region pushed for a direct election of At-Large board members; direct elections are generally thought to provide a more tangible and direct form of accountability from the elected to the electorate.
There is a wide divergence of opinion about the true mission of ICANN. In the region, this divergence is often articulated in terms of ICANN's activities. Most will superficially define the organization similarly: as an international body tasked with the technical coordination of certain crucial central functions of the Internet's domain name, numbering and protocol systems.
The problem lies in the different perceptions about just what "technical coordination" truly entails and implies. A "technocrat" view holds that ICANN has a very narrow technical mission, and that this narrowness invalidates diminishes the need for public representation within the organization. To this group, ICANN is seen as a body that is best administered by technical experts, with little or no broad public input.
At the other end of this spectrum are those who argue that ICANN may be a technical management organization, but that the decisions that ICANN makes have policy implications that extend well beyond mere technical considerations. According to this argument, many of ICANN's most conspicuous decisions to date have been nominally technical in nature, but have had enormous policy implications. Recent examples include the decisions to approve new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), as well as the amended agreements between VeriSign, ICANN, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Both of these decisions, according to this view, had impacts that went beyond the scope of ICANN's mission, as established by its founding documents and bylaws.
Because there is no consensus about the true and proper nature of ICANN's mission - and, in fact, there are further variations of opinion that fall between these diametrically opposed views - questions have emerged about ICANN's legitimacy that are difficult to answer. Indeed, even among those who share similar views of ICANN's mission, there are differences of opinion about the role of public representation within that framework. Some people interviewed believed that, by opening up ICANN to the sort of public voice that is typical of government organizations, there is a danger of ICANN "mission creep" - that ICANN's actions would begin to spread beyond its original mandate. Others argue that public representation would actually help constrain ICANN from usurping authority in an inappropriate manner.
So, there is far from a broad consensus about ICANN's proper role, and there is even greater variation of opinion about the best way that public representation can keep ICANN on the right course (or whether there is any role for public representation at all). In fact, many respondents said it is this very lack of clarity that has plagued ICANN and its processes from the start.
A total of 21,596 individuals registered as At-Large Members in North America by the July 31 deadline. Of these, 2,094 were living in Canada and 19,051 in the United States - giving Canada a slightly higher per-capita voter registration rate relative to both population and Internet user base. About half of those who registered ultimately "activated" their membership, shrinking the electorate to about 10,000 voters.
Throughout the registration and activation phases of the election, North Americans encountered many of the same obstacles as their counterparts in other regions. These included persistent technical problems, confusion over the unfamiliar preferential voting system, and the unreliability of the postal return system. All contributed to an overall low turnout for the election, and to the significant drop-off in numbers moving from the registration to activation to voting phases.
ICANN's Membership Implementation Task Force had, at best, a limited role in encouraging North American Internet users to register as At-Large members in the spring and summer of 2000. The largest efforts to register users appear to be those of non-profit and academic organizations with roots in North America that ran voter registration campaigns. These were aimed at making users aware of ICANN's important role on the Internet and of the public's role in the 2000 election. These efforts offered voters background information on the DNS, on ICANN, and on the Internet policy world in general, as well as links to ICANN's member registration pages. Still, the 21,596 individuals registered for the election in North America constitute a tiny fraction of the region's pool of eligible voters. Many of those interviewed noted this low turnout and expressed skepticism about whether it could be substantially increased without a far more concerted and widespread public education campaign.
Data collected by ICANN indicates that the largest fraction of the 10,000 actively registered votes in the electorate - almost half - heard about the election either through online media (web sites) or communications (e-mail), pointing to the effectiveness of third-party organizing efforts. This compares to less than 15% who claimed print media such as newspapers and magazines as their drivers to register.
Also, about a third of eligible voters came from technical fields, while students (9.0%) and government employees (4.1%) made up smaller percentages of the electorate than in other regions. Finally, though the proportion of women registered to vote in North America was the highest of any geographic region, about 13%, it was troublingly low.
ICANN Activated Member Registrations
Source: http://members.icann.org/activestats.html
Nominations from the membership were based on a 2% threshold of active members; that is, each candidate had to be "approved" by at least 2% of the people within each region who had registered and had activated their membership. For the North American region, that translated to 214 approvals (2% of the 10,632 active members).
Many of those interviewed suggested that the presence of these "member-nominated" candidates was evidence of the validity the election rules and tap a voter demand for alternatives to the candidates chosen by the Nominating Committee. Others viewed the victory of a member-nominated candidate as evidence of the importance of alternate paths to the ballot.
After conclusion of the member-nomination process, some non-governmental organizations and academic institutions with roots in North America began to transition their voter registration programs into more ambitious education efforts. These efforts were largely Internet-based. (One notable exception was the Berkman Center for Internet and Society's "Meet the Candidates" night.) As a whole, voter education in North America was at the very least available to those voters who actively sought it out.
ICANN itself prepared a number of online resources for voters to learn about the candidates, including biographical web pages, documentation of the process by which the election rules were devised, and a question and answer forum. This Q&A forum allowed members to ask the candidates specific questions. Candidate response varied between candidates and also waxed and waned as time went by. [ 46 ]
ICANN made little attempt, however, at proactive outreach in North America. ICANN declined to make the registration "rolls" (i.e. e-mail lists) available to the candidates, citing privacy concerns. Many of those interviewed, while not necessarily wholly critical of the logic behind ICANN's reticence, expressed frustration at their inability to directly contact the voters, a notable difference between the ICANN election and most public elections.
Several on-line organizations undertook to solicit and compare candidates' platforms , which included significant North American representation. A number of the voter education groups assembled resources that were highly accessible to, and reasonably well-publicized among North American voters. [ 47 ]
Other organizations, although not purely oriented towards broad voter education, included the well-known news and discussion site Slashdot, ICANNWatch (where commentary and discussions on ICANN policies are hosted on a continuing basis), ICANNVote (a site managed by member-nominated candidate Emerson Tiller with general election discussion and content), or ICANNot (a site protesting ICANN's election outreach) provided discussion space where those with strong opinions were encouraged to share their feelings on candidates' statements positions, and viability.
It is difficult to draw conclusions about the impact that these resources (individually or cumulatively) might have had on the election, except to say that those North American voters inclined to seek candidate information on the Internet had numerous options. In all, North American voters can be considered roughly as well informed as their counterparts in other regions. [ 48 ]
Several organizations attempted to promote self-organization of North American At-Large members along ideological lines, although without much success. A lack of resources and an inability to reach the entire At-Large membership may have contributed to these efforts' difficulties.
Several e-mail lists were set up to serve the North American At-Large community, often in the model of other successful lists such as "ICANN-Europe" (see below) or the Boston Working Group. Populations remained low, however, and what discussion did occur on these lists cannot be reliably correlated with activism in the final election.
Discussion of and among the North American candidates was aided by an in-person meeting in October 2000 of six of the seven candidates [ 49 ] at a forum hosted in Cambridge, Massachusetts and simulcast over the Internet. The meeting's host, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, [ 50 ] also set up an archive page [ 51 ] where voters and other interested individuals could review the meeting's proceedings days or weeks afterwards. Besides providing candidates with an opportunity to engage each other in face-to-face discussion, the event also lent the ICANN election a touch of the gloss traditionally reserved (in North America, at least) for public elections.
Again, firm conclusions about the impact that the Berkman forum might have had on the electorate are difficult. The in-person meeting certainly would have helped voters elucidate the differences and similarities in the candidates before them. At the same time, it may have impressed upon voters a new sense of the importance that those policy distinctions could have on the future of the Internet. In that sense, the in-person meeting may have ultimately assisted those candidates (Auerbach, Simons, Lessig) who voiced their positions forcefully.
Mainstream media have not established a sustained role in promoting public consciousness. Most of the press coverage of the ICANN election was intermittent, or appeared in niche publications geared towards the technical community and not towards generating awareness of the importance of public representation within ICANN.
Major newspapers and television networks did not give large play to the story of the ICANN election, although many did run some stories about it (commonly in the business or lifestyle section). Where major media did cover the election, they generally focused on criticism of ICANN in general, and on ICANN's difficulties in bringing off the election. Very little of the coverage actually focused on the candidates and their platforms; the "hook" for most stories was how election difficulties were a reflection of general problems that ICANN faces on an ongoing basis.
Thoughtful, comprehensive coverage was generally limited to technical and computer-oriented print and web publications; even there, criticism of ICANN's technical management of the election process (and of other ICANN actions) dominated over substantive coverage of candidate positions.
The North American portion of the ICANN At-Large board election was contested between seven candidates and was decided by means of a preferential balloting process. It took six ballots to make Karl Auerbach, an engineer at Cisco Systems who was widely perceived as a "reformer" candidate, the winner over Barbara Simons (also viewed as a "reformer"). Auerbach had been one of the ICANN board's harshest critics and, as part of his platform, actively called for the resignation of ICANN president Mike Roberts and general counsel Louis Touton.
Auerbach and Simons were the last candidates standing from an original field of seven. Of these candidates, four - Lyman Chapin, Donald Langenberg, Lawrence Lessig, and Harris Miller - were nominated by the Board's Nominating Committee. The other three - Auerbach, Simons, and Emerson Tiller - were nominated by the North American At-Large Membership itself.
The North American race proved to be the At-Large election's most hotly contested race. Karl Auerbach emerged as the victor after five automatic runoffs. The election's most popular candidates - Auerbach, Lessig, Tiller, and Simons - were all self-described user advocates.
Turnout, however, was extremely low, even when compared to the already-reduced pool of eligible registered voters. North America's board representative was ultimately chosen by just 3,449 voters. North America is the most "wired" of any of the five regions represented in the ICANN election, yet the pool of actual voters in North America was far lower than either the European (11,309) or Asia-Australia-Pacific regions (17,745).
In North America, as in the other four regions that held elections for At-Large board seats, obstacles to a smooth election process arose. Some of these were common to each region (due to the centralized nature of the election process) and are dealt with above.
The North American board election seems to have been free from inappropriate interference. Prior to the vote for ICANN's At-Large board members, there was widespread concern that vested corporate interests would attempt to use their substantial influence and large employee bases to seize control of one or more At-Large Directors. However, the feared "corporate capture" of the North American board seat does not appear to have occurred. Karl Auerbach assumed his seat on the ICANN Board in November without any public suggestions that his victory was somehow illegitimate.
Indeed, despite early fears by many that the At-Large election would be vulnerable to manipulation, in North America there was no evidence of any concerted attempt on the part of any corporate or governmental interests, entrenched or otherwise, to mobilize voters in ways inconsistent with the election's basic aims. Three of the top four candidates emerged from the membership-nomination process, and their success seems to have been the product of well-organized campaigns in the democratic tradition, rather than of any inappropriately organized attempt to manipulate the election.
Low voter turnout was a defining characteristic of the North American election. While many election observers were dismayed to see such low voter turnout - just over three thousand voting in a potential electorate numbering well over a hundred million - some of those interviewed expressed little hope that future elections could bring turnouts high enough to confer traditional political legitimacy on the ICANN process. The technical (and to a certain extent, arcane) nature of ICANN's mission, combined with a relatively low level of sophistication among North American Internet users regarding ICANN's policy issues, seem to make substantially larger electorates unlikely without dramatically greater public education, and perhaps an altered vision of ICANN itself.
Although ICANN offered some outreach, non-profit organizations and academic institutions played significant roles throughout the election process. ICANN engaged in only very limited proactive outreach, mostly because of its concerns about privacy and a lack of resources. Third-party organizations like NGOs and academic institutions played a significant role in the registration, education, and voting phases of the election. North America's well-established NGO community led to a proliferation of voter education and advocacy resources online, highly accessible to interested members of the North American electorate.
Opinions about the election tended to divide along ideological lines. We found two main points of view regarding the merits of the fall election in particular (and, by extension, the current representation scheme in general). One view claimed that there were structural flaws in the election process. The system may be vulnerable to capture by special interests; a public election could result in unqualified board members; a worldwide online election is prohibitively impractical; what need is there for directly elected board members of a technical management body, anyway? These were the most common objections from those that generally opposed the concept of the At-Large election from the beginning or did not support the eventual winner.
Another view held that the ICANN election was a qualified success, as (they argued) it resulted in real public representation on a board that had previously been lacking in legitimacy. The technical and procedural objections about the election were seen as overblown and, for the most part, easily remedied. For the most part, those who held these views were supportive of one of the "reform" candidates and, more significantly, their user-advocate agenda.
This dichotomy is troubling because it points to the lack of consensus about the purpose of the At-Large Membership -- an important observation about this election as a whole, and a common refrain heard from participants on every side of this debate.
Still, for the most part, even those with different opinions about the election process in general seemed to accept its legitimacy in this instance. While many disagreed about the ultimate merits of the philosophical and practical grounding of the current At-Large structure, most parties seemed surprisingly accepting of the results of this specific election, given the rules of the game as they currently exist. Even critics of the At-Large concept (and of the winning candidate) accepted the result and felt that ICANN was still functioning well despite their misgivings.
Similarly, many of the groups most vocally concerned about the election process (and other aspects of ICANN's operation) took comfort in the ultimate election of an outsider, reformer candidate. This diplomatic tone may have been in part a result of efforts by interviewees to couch comments in objective terms for our benefit, and there may have also been political reasons for not raising major public objections to the election process. Still, taking the general tone of comments at face value, we find room for optimism about the future evolution of the processes that make ICANN run, and for a robust public voice within those processes.
| 2.2.4 Latin America | 2.3. Concluding Comparative Themes |
© 2001 NAISProject.org
Privacy Policy
webmaster@naisproject.org