Bertrand: It is an interesting and provocative idea. Thanks for making it. Actually, similar ideas were discussed years ago in line with the debates over membership. I see two issues here.

First, you may be making the assumption that a large number of ordinary people who register domains are going to participate regularly and actively in ICANN policy processes once they hear about them. This is an incorrect assumption. I have explained why this is true repeatedly in the ICANN context, so I will do it again. It is a well-established fact about political science, grounded in collective action theory. People are basically rational actors when it comes to ordinary policy - they will invest time and resources proportional to the stakes they have in the policy. Therefore, people with a $20/year stake in a household domain name will not get involved in day to day ICANN policy processes. If they are a commercial user, they will not join CSG simply because they have a domain; and if they are a Noncommercial users they will not join NCSG simply because they have a domain. Think about what it takes to follow even the simplest ICANN policy process. You join a constituency or SG; you get added to an email list; you read tons of emails; you read numerous reports (ICANN releases them at a rate of 5-10 a month); and maybe, just maybe, you go to an international meeting and spend $2-3k on airfare and hotels. you're talking at least 10 hours a week. Now who is going to do that? Either their economic and personal stakes in a policy must be very large (e.g., a big domainer, or a registrar business or a major brand owner) or they must be ideologically committed to certain values (free expression, privacy, cybersafety, whatever). In other words, _by definition_ the vast majority of domain name holders are not ever going to get involved in making GNSO policies and processes. ICANN staff learned this when they spent nearly a million dollars a year supporting ALAC and its RALOs - travel, facilities, staff support, etc. And what do they have to show for it? NCUC is more active than ALAC. The RALOs are dormant. It's not just about money, it's about the motivations and incentives of stakeholders to participate. People have other things to do in their lives. Does this mean that we should not have user representation? No. It means you let the users who are interested and involved get involved. Furthermore, large numbers of people will get involved under two conditions: 1) ICANN or something under its control does something terribly, terribly wrong and creates a disaster, as happened with the RegisterFly situation, and/or 2) you give people a simple, easy, very low cost way to express their preferences, such as VOTING FOR BOARD MEMBERS. In any national polity, the number of people who regularly participate in regulatory proceedings at the national level is tiny compared to the number who vote. My second point is that using Whois data to harvest email addresses to send unsolicited emails in bulk to people is indeed spam. No question about it. That kind of spamming may or may not be illegal (e.g., if you tell recipients how to get off the list and not send any future emails, it may be legal). Aside from its legality or classification as spam, from a practical standpoint one is likely to get 10 angry responses for every positive response you get. Even if it were something we wanted to do, again, based on the arguments above the likelihood that someone will decide to devote 10 hours a week to ICANN because they received an email solicitation is very small. A final point. I'd advise you not to buy in to Kieren's insinuation that there is something unique about NCUC here. That's part of the game he's playing. In objective fact, NCUC is now larger than any of the business constituencies. True, few of our people are paid lobbyists and thus fewer can afford to fly to international meetings or devote time to writing official comments. (But you will note that in all comment venues related to the GNSO charters, there are more comments from us than from any other SG.) Obviously, contracting parties don't have that problem because their whole livelihood depends on ICANN and its policies. All this staff and Board talk about "representation" is completely arbitrary and manipulative, because no objective standards and criteria have ever been circulated defining what is "representative" enough or what makes a SG representative. Tell me, where is the standard K. uses to determine whether NCUC's size is big enough? We don't know, you don't know and he doesn't know. This talk about "representativeness" is all an after-the fact rationalization for a political decision to discriminate against pesky public interest groups and in favor of business because, as Kieren himself puts it, the businesses "have RESOURCES." If you want to understand ICANN's behavior just do what Twomey himself told me, and "follow the money." My view is that representation in ICANN processes is a right, not a privilege. ICANN has global governance authority over essential facilities. We have a right to influence, on equal terms, how decisions are made. Staff members, and even Board members, have no business posturing as judges of the value of different public participants; their job is to provide the framework for the people to make policy. Kieren needs to keep doing his honest work running servers that allow remote participation and avoid opining about things well over his head.