Subject: mobilization in the ICANN at-large election Asia/Pacific region From: SAKIYAMA Nobuo Date: 12 Oct 2000 03:08:59 +0900 Below is based on a mail I wrote in CSIF-l (Civil Society Interet Forum list). 1. I may have little time to discuss this issue I'm poor at English, so it took several hours for me to write the original mail. 2. I am not blaming Mr. Kato, a new ICANN Director, in this article. He does not seem to be responsible for this problem. ----------------------------------------------------------- There was a large top-down mobilization in Japan. Late in September, Japan ICANN Forum officially announced that it supports Mr. Katoh and requested its member organizations actively to apeal to the at-large members to vote for Mr. Kato. ( http://icann.nic.ad.jp/main/forum-towa/shiji-seimei-0920.html ,in Japanese). After that, many companies in Japan asked, reqeusted, or ordered its employees to vote for Mr. Kato, because Japan Federation of Economic Organizations ("Keidanren") is the member of Japan ICANN Forum. For example, I, an employee of Toshiba Corporation, was requested to vote for Mr. Kato. That was a mdoerate request, because it was a simply forwarded one from Japan ICANN Forum and because my superiors did not know who have the membership. (Of course, they may think that many of the employees are loyal to the employer and that they have no duty to report on the mobilization). But, Telecom Service Association (Telesa), a member organization of Japan ICANN Forum, announced that they have 12,427 at-large members in its 27 member companies before the activation of the membership. ( http://www.telesa.or.jp/katsudo/h12_08/h120814040.htm , in Japanese). This means that Telesa and its member companies know who have the at-large membership. Moreover, I heard that some companies set up a database that has membership numbers of its employees (I have no evidence about this). I did not hear the detail of the mobilization in the voting period in these actively mobilizing companies, but obviously employers in these companies could strongly urge its employees to vote for Mr. Kato. When the mobilization started, nobody in Japan ICANN Forum knew the detail of the vote, because the voting site was not opened until the vote started. So, Japan ICANN Forum set up an illustration page after the voting site was open. http://icann.nic.ad.jp/main/vote/vote.html This page is of course written in Japanese, but it is an illustration page with pictures, so I think that everyone can know that intent. I'm amazed that this illustration plainly leads people on to give their votes exclusively to Mr. Kato. The title of the page is "Let's contribute the activities of ICANN". Until the voting period was over, this illustration page was linked from the top page of Japan ICANN Forum http://icann.nic.ad.jp/ . Now the election ended, so the link was removed. I think that webmaster will remove this illustration shortly after, so I will recommend to mirror that illustration locally if you need. -- SAKIYAMA Nobuo sakichan@sakichan.org