Arguments for having a Constituency of Individuals

submitted by

The Association for Computing Machinery

(ACM) is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. ACM is an international organization with over 80,000 computing professional members in more than 100 countries.

III. The Special Case of Individuals.

Because ICANN has not clarified where individual domain name
holders belong in the DNSO, and because individuals are clearly
not represented in any other constituency, it appears that
individuals are being sent to the Non-Commercial Constituency.
Although we accept this as a short-term expedient, in the long
run, ACM-IGC believes that the Non-Commercial Constituency is a
poor representative of individuals.

First, individuals are registering domain names in large
numbers. Although individuals are often categorized as
“consumers” in the passive role of browsers (to sites such as
e-commerce sites), ACM-IGC finds that these stereotypes are
inaccurate. Individuals in the millions are registering domain
name for use with personal speech, family web sites, community
organizations, and their own small businesses. While Network
Solutions, Inc., does not keep figures on the breakdown of
domain names registered to individuals, the large and growing
number of domain names issued to individuals in the gTLDs
probably make this group the largest class of domain name
holders.

Second, the activities of individuals on the Internet make them
a unique category because their work covers the gamut from
non-commercial to commercial activity. Further, unlike any
existing constituency in the DNSO, individuals’ use of domain
names often changes over time as a personal web site evolves
from showing the non-commercial interests of the domain name
holder to promoting the commercial businesses, writings or
services of the individual. Individuals have a task unlike any
other constituency – to preserve the rights of individuals to
obtain domain names and to ensure that domain names can continue
to be used for the variety of commercial and non-commercial
purposes available today.

It is the strong opinion of ACM-IGC that individuals need their own constituency within the DNSO to represent their unique experiences and needs.

While the interests and voices ofindividuals may occasionally overlap with the interests and voices of large non-commercial organizations and educational institutions, most often they will not.

Further, ACM-IGC submits that the relationship between individuals and the
Non-Commercial Constituency is much farther apart than that of
the Business Constituency and the Trademark Constituency.
ACM-IGC proposes that ICANN immediately create for individuals
their own constituency with the full standing of the other
constituencies. In the meantime, in order to avoid
disenfranchising individuals, we propose to temporarily
incorporate them into the noncommercial constituency.