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Out Of Balance
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Out Of Balance
ICANN Has Reserved All The Best Seats For The Corporate Elite
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by Sandra Kegel
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It is becoming clearer by the day that there is little prospect of real democracy in the first global on-line ballot, to be held between Oct. 1 and Oct. 10. The unique event is in danger of becoming a farce, even before the final list of candidates is known.
Germans may be reminded of the days when Prussia still had a three-class electoral system. Political scientist Claus Leggewie is not the only one worried that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) election will lead to a decision-making body made up exclusively of privileged people with plenty of time, money and influence.
With the registration period ended, candidates for five of the nine directors to be elected at large in October are in the process of being nominated. The seven candidates from each of five geographic regions of the world are named in two ways; either they nominate themselves, or they are put on the list of "eligible persons" by the organization. But when ICANN finally unveiled its list of candidates -- a topic of heavy speculation in recent weeks -- there was immediate disillusionment.
The importance of ICANN will be immense because of its control of domain names and its role as the Internet's technical and logistical center. ICANN wants to legitimize its authority with the election, which was supposed to guarantee that the "citizens" of the World Wide Web had a say, along with industry representatives. But ICANN has reserved all the best seats for the corporate elite.
ICANN has already filled five of the seven European and four of the seven Asian candidacies in advance -- and Europe and Asia are two of the most important regions. By nominating Germany's Winfried Schüller and other industry representatives for Europe, ICANN has opted for global players, rather than ordinary citizens. Mr. Schüller is a director at Deutsche Telekom, owner of Germany's largest Internet access provider, T-Online. Because 70 percent of the European "electorate" of 35,000 registered people are Germans, Mr. Schüller looks to be a sure bet, since every T-Online user can be expected to give him his vote -- just as tenant farmers used to give theirs to the local landowner.
The method in ICANN's actions can be seen in Asia, where Japan has the greatest number of voters and ICANN has nominated Masanobu Katoh, a top executive with the Japanese computer manufacturer Fujitsu. How many Japanese are likely to vote for the unknown Johannes Chiang of the University of Taiwan, for example?
Yet if Mr. Schüller and Mr. Katoh
are elected, the envisaged balance between users and industry would be
disturbed, and ICANN would lose its original character as a non-profit
organization. Citizens of the Web have to unite to gain a hearing, as ICANN
tries everything to silence them.
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2000
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