Not many Indians for Internet vote

By Our Special Correspondent

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, JULY 30. Not many Indians will be voting for the first world-wide election to the governing board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is considered the de facto Internet Government.

With hardly a day for closure of the membership campaign, only 1,709 Indians have registered as members. Of them, 75 are yet to sent in their responses which may confirm their membership and eligibility to vote in the elections scheduled for October.

The Indian presence in the membership list is minuscule compared to the 18,012 from the U.S. and the 17,409 from Germany. Special campaigns had been held in Germany to increase enrollment so that the country would have a say in the governance of Internet. However, China managed to top them all on account of the sheer size of her population. The total number of Chinese registered so far is 28,738. However, as many as 20,932 are to be finally enrolled as members as on Sunday. This suggests that most of them would have registered in the past few weeks. The membership is confirmed only after the registrants activate their membership. The activation of the membership can be done only on receipt of an e-mail from ICANN giving a password and a letter containing a PIN number. The PIN number is sent by post.

Japan is also in a similar position as China with only about 15,000 people in the confirmed list, with total registrations at 33,227. There are 6,247 registrations from the Republic of Korea of which only about 4,000 have been activated.

Another interesting aspect is that Canada, the U.K. and the Russian Federation are not much better than India in terms of the number of people registered as members of ICANN. There are just 1,975 registrations from Canada, 2,080 from the U.K. and 1,859 from the Russian Federation. On the other hand, Taiwan has a membership exceeding 10,000.

It has also become clear that men would dominate Internet governance. They outnumber women heavily. From India, out of the confirmed members, only 162 are women. China has 5,994 men among the confirmed members and 1,806 women. In the case of the U.S., 12,843 of the members are men while women number only 2823. The position is not much different for Germany also with just 1,714 women having got the memberships against 13929 men.

The age-wise distribution of members also show an interesting pattern which may be connected to Internet usage. The largest number of registrants are from the age group of 20 to 39. And, in the case of most countries, people in the age group of 20 to 29 outnumber those between 30 and 39. A major exception is Japan with a dominance of 20-39 age group. In any case, the governance of Internet will be in the hands of the youth.

Many Indians could not register as voters as the server of the ICANN was continuously overloaded during the month. India has about four million users of Internet. Though any with an e-mail address and residential address could have registered, many could not do so as it was a prolonged wait to get access to the ICANN database. Many Indians with dial up connections could not do so. ICANN has announced that registrations would end at 24 hours on Monday though many could not manage to get registered on account of the deficiencies of the ICANN's Webserver. Ballot for the election of five directors would be posted on August 1. The details are at the ICANN site: http:\\www.icann.org.

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