I. Introduction

Throughout my childhood, I was a practicing member of the Religious Society of Friends (the ‘Quakers’). Now, for the first time, I am participating in an ICANN meeting (specifically, the 34th in Mexico City). While at first blush these to two experiences seem to have little in common, it is actually striking how much they are alike. I believe that the importance of these similarities is not the fact of their unexpectedness, but rather that to my mind my, participation in the relatively new institution of ICANN would be well served by an understanding of long established Quaker faith and practice.

The root of the similarity between the two is twofold. Firstly, it has to do with the nature of each Quaker’s direct relationship with God and each user’s direct relationship with the Internet. Secondly, it has to do with the collective decision making process that each group has chosen.

II. Devine Authority

When Martin Luther published To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation in 1520 he established the idea of a ‘universal priesthood’ in which all baptized Christians have a direct relationship with God that need not be intermediated by the Papacy. This protestant theology is deeply embedded in the Quaker tradition. As a result of this theology and the resulting notion of a direct relationship with God, each Quaker believes he can and should, upon proper reflection and prayer, claim divine authority for his actions and opinions. This claim on divine or righteous authority gives ‘weighty’ Quakers a deep and abiding belief and confidence in their opinions.

Given the non-religious nature of ICANN, I have found striking the similarity between the sense of confidence and, yes, righteousness, of ICANN participants and that of the Quakers I learned from as a youth. However, the more one thinks about the two, the less surprising this similarity becomes. The reason is that much like Quakers, the ‘theology’ of the Internet (or perhaps, in non-religious terms, its ‘organizing philosophy’) is based on the direct relationship between the individual and the whole and the authority derived from that participatory relationship. From its very beginning, the Internet has operated using this theology (with the idea of the ‘RFC’ as governing document being a prime example). Quakers are born into a direct relationship with God through baptism –Internet users are reborn into a direct relationship with the Internet thorough domain name registration. Thus, It is not a stretch to say that each Internet user can claim to be part of the Internet’s ‘Universal Priesthood’—each Internet user is just as connected to the Internet as any other and in a moral sense, the authority each user derives from this connection is the same as well.

What this sense of righteous authority meant for Quakers was that it was very, very difficult to justify a top-down authority structure. For ICANN, it seems to have meant the same thing.

III. The ‘Consensus’ Based Approach

The second similarity between my ICANN and Quaker experiences is the consensus based nature of their respective decision making processes. This morning I participated in a meeting concerning the development of working groups as part of the policy development process. In that meeting, there was much discussion about how the chairs of such working groups should lead and what it meant for a working group to reach ‘consensus.’ However, the meaning of this word ‘consensus’ was not well defined (and was not well defined in any ICANN document I was able to find after a moderately thorough review).

Into this absence of certainty a participant in the session fed his group’s (W3C) definition of the term: “Consensus: A substantial number of individuals in the set support the decision and nobody in the set registers a Formal Objection. Individuals in the set may abstain. Abstention is either an explicit expression of no opinion or silence by an individual in the set. Unanimity is the particular case of consensus where all individuals in the set support the decision (i.e., no individual in the set abstains).”

Taking this as a rough proxy for ICANN approach to the meaning of the term, I was struck by the similarity to the Quaker understanding of the word ‘consensus’ (or more specifically the ‘Sense of the Meeting’) I experienced as a child. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends has expressed the Quaker ‘consensus’ process in this way: “Our search is for unity, not unanimity. We consider ourselves to be in unity when our search for Truth is shared; when our listening for God is faithful; when our wills are caught up in the presence of Christ; and when our love for one another is constant. A united meeting is not necessarily all of one mind, but it is all of one heart.”

IV. What it Means for My ICANN Participation

To my mind there are two lessons that I can draw from the realization of the similarities between my early faith and the ICANN experience. The first is that, so long as my belief is well and truly founded in my direct experience with the Internet, my voice can be as much a source of authority as that of any other person. Put another way—the Internet has no Pope. The second is that I must use this authority wisely in the context of group decision making for righteousness can easily become self-righteousness and thus the truth that comes from a consensus decision be obscured. Put another way—there is no substitute for knowing when to say when.