ALAC - powerless and unrepresentative

["Richard Henderson" <richardhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Article XI of the ICANN By-Laws, Section 2, Sub-Section 4 states:
http://www.icann.org/general/bylaws.htm#XI

a. "The role of the ALAC shall be to consider and provide advice on the 
activities of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual 
Internet users."

POINT 1: ALAC IS POWERLESS.

The interests of hundreds of millions of individual internet users are not 
represented in any voting capacity on the ICANN Board, and it is wholly 
unacceptable that such a large constituency - the greatest constituency of all 
- should be limited to "observer status" and "providing advice"... advice that 
can simply be over-ruled by ICANN.

POINT 2: ALAC HAS NO MANDATE AND IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE

The ALAC is insufficiently representative of individual Internet users, and it 
is wrong that membership of the ALAC should exclude the right of individual 
users to apply or be voted for membership as individuals, in a committee set up 
to represent the interests of just that category of people. There is, in 
addition, no process for mandating ALAC members who purport to represent the 
interests of individual Internet users, except for the claimed mandate of a 
small number of 'validated' structures, that first have to be accepted by ALAC 
itself. In short, there is a total lack of accountability to the Internet users 
of the world. Membership of ALAC should be open to all, and should not be a 
"closed shop" selected by ICANN to create the pretence of participation, while 
locking out individual users themselves. If one-person-one-vote works in all 
other democratic processes around the world, why is there so much opposition to 
the same democratic principle being applied to all those individual internet 
users who want to be involved in helping to determine policy and representation 
for ordinary users in what is, essentially, their own resource?

Yrs,

Richard Henderson