Proposal 9 for ICANN: Get Inclusive by Imposing Rotating Term Limits

This is the ninth of a series of 16 draft proposals developed by the ICANN Strategy Panel on Multistakeholder Innovation in conjunction with the Governance Lab @ NYU  for how to design an effective, legitimate and evolving 21st century Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN).

Please share your comments/reactions/questions on this proposal in the comments section of this post or via the line-by-line annotation plug-in. 

From Principle to Practice

Operating in the global public interest means ICANN strives to keep all of its doors and windows open to allow participation by all interested parties around the world. However, being open to all doesn’t equate to empowering a broad and diverse subset of stakeholders with control over the decisions that affect them most.
As a way to increase and diversify engagement, and be more inclusive when it comes to granting decision-making authority, ICANN should experiment with imposing rotating term limits for all voting positions within ICANN.

What Do We Mean by Rotating Term Limits

“Term limits have roots in ancient Greece, where beginning in the 6th century B.C. many Athenian officials were elected by random lottery and permitted to serve only a year.”[1. Altman, Alex. “A Brief History of Term Limits.” Time. October 3, 2008.]

The idea of imposing rotating term limits at ICANN means capping the amount of time any individual elected or appointed to a voting body within ICANN can serve in that position, and staggering the start and end dates for when individuals serve in those positions in order to create a continuity of knowledge that maintain stability.

In Ancient Athens, term limits served as a means for “avoiding any kind of entrenched bureaucracy.”[2. Manville, Brook and Ober, Josiah. A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations. (Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. 2003) at 127.] Experts note that “the bottom-line principle when implementing the practice of rotation must be that if a competent citizen wishes to serve his organization, he should have a chance to do so.”[3. Ibid.]

As Sam Lanfranco points out in the “Commentary on ‘The Quest for a 21st Century ICANN: A Blueprint’”: “Rotating terms limits are a technique for broadening participation and curbing tendencies for cliques to develop within elected bodies. In national politics these are frequently used to prevent an electoral process from producing what is essentially a dynastic control over an elected position. In some settings it is just to spread the burden of work, or expand the opportunities of participation in decision-making and leadership.”

Why Does this Proposal Make Sense at ICANN?

As Lafranco has noted on behalf of the Not-for-profit Operational Concerns Constituency within ICANN, though ICANN decision-making often involves building consensus after deliberation, “to newcomers to the inner workings of ICANN, there do seem to be dynastic elements in committee composition and structure.”[4. Lanfranco, Sam. “Commentary on “The Quest for a 21st Century ICANN: A Blueprint.” Distributed Knowledge Blog. February 12, 2014.]

Moreover, ICANN’s Board has been critiqued in the past for not operating with complete openness[5. Froomkin, A. Michael. “Wrongturn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution.” Duke Law Journal. Vol. 50:17 (2000) at 33 (“ICANN’s board and staff operate largely in secret, it is difficult for outsiders to know how much influence DoC has over ICANN’s decisionmaking.”).] or for making decisions without fully leveraging insights from vast global participants. In previous years, commentators have noted that, “[w]hile thousands of users since ICANN’s founding have sought to participate through these means, it appears as though this extensive participation has affected few important decisions.”[6. Palfrey, John. “The End of the Experiment: How ICANN’s Foray into Global Internet Democracy Failed.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. (2004)  at 414.] Others have noted that the “central plank” of criticism of ICANN’s legitimacy is that “ICANN’s organisational structures and activities do not comply with the ethos of participatory and democratic governance.”[7. Verhulst, Stefaan G. “Public legitimacy: ICANN at the crossroads.” openDemocracy. September 5, 2001.]

Experimenting with rotating term limits could help to address some of these critiques – whether real or perceived – that the Board is not a mirror of the community as much as a distinct bureaucracy that doesn’t fully leverage the power of the global community as well as it could. Devolving gatekeeper responsibility on a rotating basis has potential to help get new perspectives in and empower a greater subset of individuals to be decision-makers within ICANN. Using rotating term limits also increases opportunities for growing shared knowledge and experiences throughout the ICANN community in order to remove actual or assumed hierarchical barriers and invite a wider community to contribute via ICANN’s gatekeeping functions.

Specifically, experimenting with rotating term limits has the potential to:

• Infuse new insights into decision-making positions within ICANN[8.  Basham, Partick. “Term Limits: A Reform that Works.” at 1.];
• Increase “voter choice” and the diversity of the candidate pool [9. Ibid. at 4-6.];
• Increase the level of “learning and on-the-job experience” throughout the ICANN community[10. Manville, Brook and Ober, Josiah. A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations. (Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. 2003) at 127.];
• Enhance the collective intelligence of the ICANN community over time and thus “enhance[] the sharing of knowledge intrinsic to a company of citizens.”[11. Ibid.]
• “Promote ‘deliberative democracy’ and ‘civic virtue’.”[12. Euben, J. Peter, Wallach, John R. and Ober, Josiah. Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy. (1994) at 339.]
• Avoid entrenched, incumbent bureaucracy.[13. Manville, Brook and Ober, Josiah. A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations. (Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. 2003) at 127.]
• Prevent possibility of “long-term incumbents abusing power or gaining extraordinary financial or political power in office.”[14. Ibid.]

Experimenting with rotating term limits will require that new representatives be selected. ICANN could use alternative voting methods such as preferential or ranked-choice voting to select these representatives. Craig Simon has suggested that ranked-choice voting could be “an attractive solution for any scale of participation” and noted that “done right,” the method has the “potential to empower massively scalable venues for online discourse and priority selection.”

Implementation Within ICANN

Piloting this proposal within ICANN might involve testing the value of rotating term limits within ICANN voting bodies to limit the potential of institutional capture. Piloting this proposal may also prove useful for those Board committees that serve organizational and administrative functions for which public comment may not be required, for example, the Structural Improvements Committee and the Finance Committee.

Rotating term limits are likely more appropriate in those “gate-keeper roles” within ICANN where votes are cast, as opposed to where individuals contribute insights, expertise or perform facilitative functions.

Notably, as Lafranco indicated, membership continuity has merit in order “to preserve a presence of ICANN’s organizational knowledge in its decision-making processes.” Therefore, in piloting this proposal, it is important to consider with the community the most appropriate length of time for an individual to hold a voting position within ICANN and the best schedule for rotation, so that experiential knowledge can be shared. It is also vital to institute the appropriate support mechanisms for sharing and memorializing institutional learnings so that individuals can be adequately prepared at the start of a term and capture their contributions for future leaders.[15. Otten, Laura. “Term Limits for Nonprofit Boards.” Nonprofit Resource Center. (August 2009) (“Institutional history should be documented and in a format that is easily shared with others.”).]

Finally, it will be vital for ICANN to take a benchmark of the current state of affairs in order to measure the successes and potential failures of rotating term limits against the status quo.

Case Studies – What’s Worked in Practice?

• Term Limits in California – In 1990 in Sacramento, California, Proposition 140 set term limits for legislators. In 2004, the National Conference of State Legislatures, Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders’ Foundation performed a study of the effect of term limits, concluding that the proposal “helped to accelerate trends of increasing female and minority representation that were already underway in California.”[16. Cain, Bruce and Kousser, Thous. “Adapting to Term Limits in California: Recent Experiences and New Directions.” Joint Project on Term Limits. (2004) at 2.] The study did find, however that “new members after term limits are more likely to have local government experience and to run for another office.”[17. Ibid.]
  • Notably, the measurements used to assess the impact of term limits in Sacramento included analyzing data related to “legislative performance, voting behavior, committee activity, and the breadth and complexity of bills” produced after the implementation of term limits.[18. Ibid. at 11. See also Basham, Patrick. “Assessing the Term Limit Experiment: California and Beyond.” Policy Analysis. No. 431. August 31, 2001.]
• Not-for-profit and charitable boards – The boards of many non-profits and charities include rotating term limits as an “effective way to ensure board vitality” and to ensure “fresh ideas, experience, contacts, etc.” are brought in while providing new board members “a sense of their maximum service before having at least one year off the board.”[19. “Rotation of Board Members (Fixed Terms).” Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.] Rotating board members out of their position also increases the pool of viable candidates for committees and/or task forces.
• Presidential Innovation Fellows – While not a rotating term limit in the traditional sense, Presidential Innovation Fellows within the United States are essentially “top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia” who are paired “with top innovators in government”  for a “6-13 month ‘tours of duty’ to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation.” The individuals are selected based on a desire “to produce the maximum amount of good in the shortest amount of time.”[20. “FAQs.” Presidential Innovation Fellows.] This type of short-term, project-based methodology could be one possible approach for coordinating issue-based working groups.

Open Questions – How Can We Bring This Proposal Closer to Implementation?

• What institutional or cultural barriers may pose challenges to implementing this proposal?
• Should rotating term limits apply to ICANN’s consensus-based working groups? Why or why not?
• What is the appropriate term limit for which positions within ICANN? Would it be appropriate for ICANN to run controlled experiments to determine which make-up works best for which group or structure?
• How could ICANN assess the successes and shortcomings of those voting bodies that embrace some form of term limits at present in order to design the most effective pilot?

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