The resolutions of the 24th of August

1. The resolution of the Non-Commercial Domain Name Holders, in support of a separate IDNO constituency

2. The resolution of the General Assembly, asking the ICANN Board to place the IDNO petition on its Agenda.

To: idno-discuss@idno.org

Subject: Letter from Santiago

Santiago 27 August, 1999

Dear IDNO supporters,

Today is my first more quiet day. I worked on emails until 2 a.m. last night.

What a day, yesterday.

The day started with a taxi driver, who tried to take advantage of our handicap of being new to the city. Fortunately we had a map and could stop the scam in it's tracks, but we bailed out in heavy rush hour traffic and missed the first half hour of the Board meeting.
We were not the only ones to miss it. The audio/video server happened to be down too, for 20 minutes.
So the only record we have are the scribe notes at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/santiago/archive/

<Note: the Berkman Centre has now provided the full audio record>

<2nd hand info snipped>

Perhaps the answer was revealed by Board Member Hans Kraaijenbrink, who said at the 2 p.m. press conference that he had felt to be playing part in a staged play.
That was a press conference where I was not supposed to be, but thanks to our good spirit someone had briefly let it slip out at the Markle foundation's meeting, that took place simultaneously and had attracted all potential spoilers.
The "open" press conference was a longish walking distance away.

It was a very full press conference with interesting observers and Ogilvy doing its job.

O yes, when I had asked one of the ICANN senior legal staff, about an hour earlier if there was to be a press conference, he said no. Hmm.

The Markle Foundation is an 80 year old financial endowment, now interested to make sure that there will be public/consumer/non-commercial input in any future cyberspace governance.
I have not yet had the chance to read their material, so I'll report back on that later.
They appeared to be knowledgeable about much of the Domain Name Wars and the background.

The Board meeting that was public with a working video link was boring, with a long string of resolutions passed and again nothing about the Individuals and their petition for recognition, now twice repeated and still meeting with stony silence.
More on that separately.

The DNSO council meeting in the afternoon was a shocking display of raw capture, a united alliance trying to ram through some quick rules of behaviour for the future NC, and for WG-C, by way of orders to WG-D, without any semblance of proper procedure. Attempts by the six independent spirits on the Council to put up some feeble safeguards were crudely and cruelly brought to a quick vote, where the lack of balance of the Council clearly showed.
Dennis Jennings even offered $10.000 dollars from his own registry's funds to finance development of a professional set of behavioral rules for the NC, drafted by an independent firm such as Price Waterhouse.
The proposal was attacked swiftly and professionally by Theresa Swinehart and brought to an immediate vote, where it died.
The astonished left-over of the GA (much of it now Latin American) was watching all this powerlessly barely understanding what went on and wondering why Raul Echeberria and the other elected delegate from Latin America could not do anything to help stopping this or why they never said anything about South America.
They were allowed a minute comment at the end of it, under the pressure that the auditorium now really had to be closed.
They were too stunned to speak.
I had nothing better to add to the audio record than that the council's
balance could have benefited from an additional 3 independent members.
A listless applause from some Latin Americans who understood. Everybody felt dazed.

For many of them this rapid english with no longer the (superb) translations of the previous day available, with the jargon of motions, tabling, seconding, resulting in instant rules appearing on the screen before them, was just another arrogant display of Northern Dominance
especially when Amadeu and Javier became Chair and Assistant-chair
(Amadeu's vision is poor) upon the departure of first-chair, Michael
Schneider of the ISP' constituency.
They had understood these two very well before, when they delivered in Spanish and they had not been impressed by any democratic leanings displayed.
"That man talks too much", said someone beside me.

Andy told me that he had heard from the Mexican, Middle and South American delegates that they expected great difficulty getting funding to attend the coming LA annual ICANN meeting.
We have to think of ways to help them by pointing them to funding possibilities.
Perhaps the Markle Foundation can help with some accellerated procedure to save the crucial momentum.
A word of great praise for Andy here. Without him I would have been as hamstrung as I was in Berlin.
He sacrificed this stopover from his own meagre funds (but I think Fate is rewarding him with a Unix contract that he is picking up here--teleworked, of course).
At least his hotel cost can be paid from what the ISOCNZ council (remember, not a branch of ISOC) has voted to help us with. We shared a very small room in the Presidente.
(for the sake of total transparency, let me add here that I also managed to relieve NSI of a thousand dollars for my ticket, at the last moment, without any obligation to say anything nice about them and with the self-imposed obligation to pay them back as soon as I can afford it-- desperate times require desperate measures)

Andy, looking like a member of the crew or the band, or both, rolled up cable with the best of the Berkman Center and I think they all acquired a Unix based respect for each other. <g>
Fate rewarded him also with the company of a very beautiful Central American lady-- think of Cleopatra doing Linux. ;-)

I had very mixed feelings when I finally walked away from the Universidad de Chile.
On the one hand, I was happy to see that even the physical GA, in spite of the fact that the back of the auditorium had been packed with expensively flown-in trademark lawyers, could now find favour with us in broad consensus. That was more than I could have hoped for.
On the other hand, there was this slightly scary feeling that the now unstoppable momentum of ICANN, in it's critical initial stage now clearly captured by big money interests, would roll over even the most sincere and determined attempts to empower individuals in the ICANN structure, simply because they did not fit into their antique business models.

Buenos Noches,

--Joop Teernstra LL.M -

From the Press:

Internet Board opens Chile Meeting amid protests.

Jeri Clausing's Article in the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/articles/25domain.html

"Playing the Domain Name Game"

Esther Dyson joins the ABC Chat

http://chat.abcnews.go.com/chat/chat.dll?room=e_dyson

INTERNET GROUP SAYS INDIVIDUALS WILL HAVE TO WAIT Jeri Clausing in the NY Times

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet's new governing body, has again rejected request to create a membership group that would represent individual Internet domain name owners. ICANN has plans to adopt a policy for resolving domain name disputes at its board meeting, which is being held at the University of Chile this week. Critics say that the proposal on the table, which was written without input from an official voice of individual Internet user and non-commercial interests, favors major trademark holders over individuals and small businesses.
<snip> Topping the agenda on Thursday is adoption of a policy for resolving so-called cybersquatting disputes -- a proposal that was written without input from not only an official voice of individual Internet users but also before a key membership group of non-commercial interests was officially formed. Because of that, critics say, the proposal on the table favors major trademark holders over individuals and small businesses.

More than 200 people from around the world traveled to South America for the three-day meeting, which like ICANN's past meetings, has been marked by controversy and accusations that its decision-making process is being driven by the interests of the governments and big businesses that can afford to send representatives to the far corners of the world.

The only representative of the movement to create the proposed Individual Domain Name Owners Constituency was Joop Teernstra, a New Zealander whose plane ticket was bought with a $1,000 donation from Network Solutions, a Virginia-based company that is one of the biggest opponents of ICANN. In fact, ICANN's key charge from the Commerce Department has been to break up the monopoly that Network Solutions holds on the lucrative business of registering Internet addresses in the top-level domains of .com, .net and .org.
But Teernstra is far from the only person who has expressed a concern that the membership structure being created by ICANN for electing a permanent policy-making board excludes the voices of individuals and non-commercial interests.

New to the geographically diverse audience at the meeting in Chile -- more than 5,000 miles from New York -- was a representative of the Center for Democracy and Technology, one of the country's leading consumer advocacy groups for Internet policy issues, and officials from the New York-based Markle Foundation, which recently committed $100 million to ensure nonprofit public interest groups gain a stronger voice in digital-age policies.

The focus of the Markle Foundation and the CDT at this week's meetings has been more in the creation of a constituency of non-commercial domain-name holders. Teernstra is focusing his efforts on individuals.
The ICANN board first declined to put Teernstra's proposal on the Santiago meeting agenda during a telephone hearing earlier this month. But participants at an advisory committee session here on Tuesday voted to ask that ICANN to reconsider that decision.

On Wednesday, Esther Dyson, ICANN's interim chairwoman, and other board members remained unanimous in their decision to defer consideration of the proposal until the board gets farther along in creating an at-large membership, which will elect half of the what is ultimately supposed to be an 18-member board.

An ICANN proposal for creating that membership, however, is still in the early stages. And none of those nine seats elected by the at-large membership will be reserved for specific constituencies.

The nine other elected board seats, on the other hand, are reserved for election by three supporting organizations representing domain-name interests, Internet service providers and technical standard-setting bodies. Each of those three groups will elect three board members.
So Teernstra and others have for the past three months been pushing for a guaranteed voice for individual domain-name holders through a group called the Cyberspace Association. One of the board's criticism of the proposal from that group is that is small -- with just 120 members -- and is not representative of the broad spectrum of international Internet users. That criticism is ironically similar to the complaints many have made about ICANN itself.

Teernstra pointed out that his membership is growing, despite his lack of money for recruiting Internet users. He said the biggest influx of new members came after recent news coverage of the board's first vote in a telephone meeting earlier this month to defer action on the proposal.

"That was the best outreach, so I must thank Esther for her latest rejection letter," he said.

Although Teernstra was the only IDNO member present at the meeting in Chile, some of his backers participated online during a webcast by the Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society .

"Given that individuals are the single largest group of Internet users, it is remarkable that substantive issues that speak directly to the rights of domain name holders are being resolved with neither individuals nor non-commercial users being represented," wrote Mikki Barry of the Domain Name Rights Coalition.

"The very idea that the individual constituency is being questioned sends a very strong message to the general public that they are 'not welcomed' at the ICANN table."

[SOURCE: CyberTimes, AUTHOR: Jeri Clausing] (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/articles/26domain.html)

(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/articles/30domain.html)

WIRED

http://www.wired.com/news/news/email/tip/politics/story/21411.html and http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/14589.html

Business Week

By Mike France

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_36/b3645101.htm

http://www.searchz.com/Articles/0831994.shtml (Dana Blankenhorn)

Industry Standard

Kraaijenbrink: playing a part in a staged play (Elisabeth Wasserman)

http://intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue280/item6052.asp

http://www.rain.org/~openmind/icann.htm

http://www.thestandard.net/articles/display/0,1449,6080,00.html?home.tf