Citizen Volunteers to Govern Web Are in Short Supply.

ON the Net, democracy takes a back seat to capitalism.

Actually, that expression doesn't do the situation justice. It's better to say that while capitalism is driving the Net's growth, democracy is back in the trunk with the golf clubs and spare tire.

The Internet didn't become the fastest growing communications medium in history because people embraced its democratic potential. Its success stems primarily from stock quotes, chat rooms, porn sites and everything else posted in hopes of producing a profit. While good-hearted geeks still donate their services to the Net, they're a distinct minority in a place they once had to themselves.

Of all the Internet protocol numbers out there, most are used by people looking out for number one.

So is it realistic to expect that ordinary Net users will volunteer their time to provide an honest-to-goodness democratic government for the Web?

I seriously doubt it. But that's exactly what the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, is hoping will happen.

ICANN is a nonprofit group created by the U.S. government to oversee the assignment of domain names, those dot-com-ic phrases that serve as Web addresses. ICANN's governing board is supposed to be made up of 18 elected representatives, including nine people representing players in the domain name market and another nine people representing the Internet at large.

The first nine have been chosen, but those second nine present the real problem. After all, it's not every day that someone holds an election in multiple languages with more than 200 million anonymous constituents scattered around the world.

To take on that task, ICANN has recruited help from public interest groups and funding from the Markle Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has pledged $1 million to get the public involved in Internet governance issues.

"The management of the Internet by a private entity will not be stable or legitimate if it does not adequately include the public voice," foundation President Zoe Baird said. "We risk seeing public decisions made without the public."

By all rights, Net users should be interested in ICANN. By setting rules for the sale of domain names, the group will make or break hundreds of companies and determine the balance of power between copyright holders and individual Web publishers. It also will decide what data about domain holders must be made public, thereby impacting online privacy.

The problem is that most people couldn't care less about this stuff. If you don't plan on buying a domain name, nothing ICANN does really affects you. And while it'd be nice if Net users felt an urge to be good online citizens, that might be too much to ask when most people don't even vote in real-life elections.

ICANN hopes to recruit an active membership of 5,000 or more Net users who will then vote to fill out the board. Those membership spots are likely to be filled, not by everyday users, but by every-hour users -- hardcore geeks and others who have a stake in the domain name market.

That's fine by me, so long as nobody goes around calling it democratic. A democracy extends voting rights to most every constituent, regardless of whether they show a particular interest in the process. ICANN, by contrast, is leaning toward a Hamiltonian system in which the Net's landed aristocracy is trusted to look out for the rest of us.

The only way ICANN could secure widespread participation would be by abandoning democracy and appealing to the free market, the Net's only real form of government.

How could it do this? By launching an initial public offering.

Sure, ICANN is a nonprofit corporation. But when's the last time you heard of an Internet company turning a profit? ICANN is as likely to climb into the black as any of the dot-com-panies that went public this year, and those stocks were bought up faster than cold beer at a Brewers game.

If ICANN sold, say, 10 million shares at $10 a pop, it would raise enough money to cover its costs for a generation. It also could resurrect a once unpopular plan to collect a $1 fee for every new domain name, since revenue-hungry stockholders would outnumber whiny domain name holders. Even if shareholders couldn't collect profits, they could make ICANN's board of directors do something useful with the revenues, such as building infrastructure in less affluent countries.

I'm kidding, of course: There are laws against this sort of thing. But if it were possible, this scheme would prove a lot more popular than any attempt to interest Net users in the finer points of democratic process.

It'd be nice if Net users really did want to participate in ICANN, the first incarnation of an actual online government. I honestly hope I'm wrong about the level of interest the group will be able to stir up.

But I'm afraid that for most users of this capitalist-minded medium, investing in the Net is a phrase that will be understood only in its most literal sense.