Notes

1. See U.S. Department of Commerce Statement of Policy (the White Paper), http://www.icann.org/general/white-paper-05jun98.htm.

2. For more information about the Internet Society (ISOC), see "A Brief History of the Internet" (http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.html) and "History of the IETF/ISOC Relationship" (http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/ietfhis.html).

3. Article II of ICANN's bylaws deals with At-Large Membership and elections, and has seen multiple changes, most recently at the Board's July 2000 meetings in Yokohama, Japan.

4. Prior to ICANN's creation, many of the functions now under its administration were performed on an ad hoc basis by a wide variety of individuals and organizations - many of whose participation was supported by research grants from the American government.

5. The U.S. government maintains policy authority over the A-root server that is the nexus of the DNS root system. As a result, USG has played a significant role in negotiations regarding the fate of the DNS, and, by extension, other centralized Internet resources.

6. Especially notable was the Internet Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC), a group of concerned volunteers who in 1997 proposed that an international non-profit body be established in Geneva to deal with the Internet's centralized naming/addressing/protocol issues.

7. It should be noted that the Initial Board was originally known as the Interim Board, and that they were generally expected to act only as placeholders for a later, more legitimate set of Directors.

8. The Boston Working Group (BWG) is an informal coalition that has participated in some of the deliberations and discussion surrounding Commerce's call for the creation of an entity like ICANN. It has taken, and continues to take, a position in favor of strong representation for the broad user community in ICANN.

9. As an agency of the American government, the Department of Commerce is directly answerable to the President (then Bill Clinton), but also to the Congress, which maintains control over the budget available to Commerce and to all federal agencies.

10. This is a matter of theory, rather than practice. In practice, none of the Supporting Organizations nor their independent constituencies has achieved target levels of efficiency, activity, and openness simultaneously.

11. There have been a number of attempts at such self-organization of the At-Large Membership as it was constructed for the 2000 election, but their activities have been complicated by the lack of certainty about the ALM's future role and form.

12. In regions with extremely small electorates, such as Africa, candidates were required to show support from at least twenty At-Large Members in order to be nominated to the ballot.

13. Africa, Asia/Australia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, and North America.

14. United Nations Statistics Division, "Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions and component geographical regions." 16 February 2000. Available at http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/methods/m49regin.htm.

15. This consensus-based relationship presently exists only in the theoretical sense. As is discussed below, it has not yet matured nor been adequately codified. Strong evidence of dysfunction in ICANN suggests the need to better define this relationship, or to find a new one.

16. Resolutions Approved by the Board, 00.32.

17. Putative fairness notwithstanding, the preferential voting system was unfamiliar to many voters, and the documents describing it were lengthy and complicated. Many Internet users from non-English language groups, and those with limited bandwidth, have announced their frustration in downloading and deciphering the often-complicated list of Frequently Asked Questions.

18. Some ICANN participants, particularly those from developing parts of the world, have expressed additional concerns that ICANN's Web-only approach may have disenfranchised low-bandwidth users whose Internet access is limited to e-mail and other text-based media.

19. English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

20. Resolutions Approved by the Board, 99.144. "[The task force will] generate and implement strategies for outreach and recruitment of a broad and numerous membership that is global representative of the Internet user community; design effective membership authentication and online election procedures; and undertakeŠ other membership implementation responsibilities." For many, this seemed to establish the MITF as the successor to the Membership Advisory Committee (MAC), on whose suggestions for election administration ICANN had relied heavily. This the MITF proved not to be.

21. The MITF had nearly eighty members, divided into eleven "task groups."

22. Minutes from the Special Meeting of the Board, 9 December 1999.

23. Incorporating initial Africa Regional Report Prepared by Professor Clement Dzidonu, International Institute for Information Technology (INIIT), Accra, Ghana. Finalized by Alan Levin and Mark Neville, Future Perfect Corporation, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2001 Interviews and references were obtained from:Geoff Hainebach - Chairman Cape IT Initiative, Peter Frampton - CEO Cape IT Initiative, Calvin Browne - Self-nominated ALM candidate and various other survey respondents.

24. This report reviews the ICANN At-Large Election from an Asian and Pacific perspective. It combines the report by Professor MyungKoo Kang from Korea and the report by Izumi Aizu, Asia Network Research, Tokyo, Japan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Adam Peake, Center for Global Communications, Tokyo, Japan.

25. Ministry of Information, Korea, http:/www.mic.go.kr/

26. Mobile Media Japan (MMJ), April 30, 2001 http://www.mobilemediajapan.com/.

27. Internet Domain Survey, January 2001, Internet Software Consortium (Produced by Network Wizards) http://www.isc.org/ds/.

28. The World Factbook, CIA, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

29. The Asia-Pacific Network Information Center.

30. http://www.jca.apc.org/index-en.html

31. The simple 2% of 38,246 is 764.92, thus making 765 endorsements seemed to be passing this mark. It is not clear why the minimum was set as 768, not 765 and thus Prof Kuo-Wei Wu was not accepted as member-nominated candidate.

32. By Jeanette Hofmann, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin/NEXUS, Germany; Christian Ahlert, Universität Giessen, Germany; and Stefaan Verhulst, University of Oxford, UK.

33. For a full and detailed overview see for instance the results of the European Survey of the Information Society available at http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/esis/default.htm

34. http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=FS&cat_id=18

35. See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Update/2000-11/internet291100.shtml

36. See http://www.adie-culture.com/en/news/1204.htm

37. The term "voter turnout" may not be entirely appropriate for the At-Large election - variant election models, such as that of shareholder votes in publicly-traded companies, may provide a more productive analogue.

38. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft. Information about the icann-europe list is available at http://www.fitug.de/icann-europe/index.html

39. See http://members.icann.org/news.htm#results

40. See http://icannchannel.de

41. See http://members.icann.org/activestats.html

42. By Raúl Echeberría - Latin American Network Forum, Uruguay, Carlos Afonso - RITS, Brasil.

43. Prepared by Alan Davidson and Rob Courtney of the Center for Democracy & Technology (USA) and Don Simon, Andy Draheim, and Scott Albert Johnson of Common Cause (USA).

44. Source: Nua Internet Surveys, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html.

45. While the U.S. presidential election utilizes the Electoral College in a form of indirect voting technically-speaking, the college serves a mostly vestigial role. In most American states, members of the electoral college are no longer allowed to apply their own judgment in casting their votes in a presidential election. Their votes are instead dictated by state law and, in those states where no law exists, by a long-standing tradition of casting electoral votes only for the candidate victorious in a state's public election. As a result, the electoral college has not diluted Americans' reverence for direct democracy.

46. Most of these materials are still online as of May 2001, at http://members.icann.org/.

47. These groups included: The Center for Democracy & Technology and Common Cause (members of the NAIS project) along with the Bertelsmann Foundation, the American Library Association, the Internet Democracy, the Civil Society Internet Forum, and the Association for Progressive Communications.

48. Some of those interviewed expressed skepticism about whether it was possible for the entire eligible electorate to be truly well-informed.

49. Auerbach, Chapin, Lessig, Miller, Simons, and Tiller.

50. The Berkman Center has played a major role in ICANN's development and modern history. Berkman staff typically provides the lion's share of ICANN's substantial technical requirements at its in-person meetings, as well as organizational assistance between meetings.

51. Available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/candidateforum/.

52. In a web of trust, an individual in a community has his or her identity verified by other members of the community who vouch that the user is a real person, and is, in fact, who he or she claims to be. The degree to which an individual's online persona is "trusted" depends entirely on the number of other people willing to vouch for him or her.

53. Coordinating technical parameters to ensure universality, coordinating the IP address space, coordinating the DNS, and overseeing the operation of the root server system.