Internet Governance & "Producers' Cooperatives"

[Bob Allisat <bob@wtv.net>]

The use of the "Producers' Cooperative" is legitimate only when dealing
with specific issues and limited areas of responsibility. It is perfectly
useful in, for example, the limited realm of name services provider
discussions, the setting of technical standards or deliberations on
smaller issues. The final decision and power of veto must rest with
the hundred million citizens increasingly of all nations who actually
drive this medium.

There is no merit in utilizing the possession of Secondary or Top
Level Domain name holders as anything even vaguely resembing a
consituent or representative assembly of the Internet at large. "One SLD,
one vote" (or "One TLD, one vote") is as unfair a system as "One house
one vote". What happens is that those with the most houses/SLDs/TLDs
simply dominate the process and all fairness flies out the window.

Similarly, alotting control to Industrial/commercial segments breaks down
into the same basic injustice on a general level. The same outcome results:
"One mega-site/corporation one vote" and the overwheleming majority composed
of small stakeholders are relegated to so much background "noise". In my
experience the vast majority of Internet commerce is in the form of small
business and individual sites. So indeed the netizen is truely the majority
stakeholder. And we are effectively frozen out of the process in favour of
the alleged big players in any power block structure governance proposals.

Further more, it also is unfair to place the plethora of small interests
which make up the majority of Internet activity into one subset facing
large Internet business or commercial blocks. If, for example, two seats
are given to ISP's, two to corporate players, two to technical experts
and two to Domain Name registries leaving two places for miscellaneous
netizens one has effectively rendered the real-time majority stakeholder
netizen into a powerless position. We cannot and, I hope, will not
relegate the men and women of the Internet to a bit player "extra"
status.

"We the people" are the major driving net.force. It is our ISP bills,
our small businesses, our credit card transactions, our visits racking
up their hit count, our two hundred million pissant Web sites that
drives this whole beast that makes their their profits. Let us not
forget that.

 Bob Allisat
 Director, World TeleVirtual Network
 bob@wtv.net - (416) 534-1999 - http://www.wtv.net
 Free Community Network - .FCN free TLD Registry - http://fcn.net