Its a weird situation, that anybody from whatever country with whatever background or regulations can influence everything. Lets take ICANN as an example: do you really think that I will have >the chance to influence a vote at the ICANN >members board without being a member ? Well, they might listen, what others have to say, but finally it will be a vote. Lets have a vote asking all >RIPE members abuse this proposal instead of listening to every criminal from the world
The WHOIS service is a universal service used by people around the world and the RIR's have agreements in place to provide these services. People in other regions receive spam, abuse attempts, etc from the RIPE region and they need to use the whois just like the RIPE region needs to use other RIR whois. WHOIS policy should be set by a region, it should be universal across all RIR's. The underlysing system is paid for by the US taxpayers via the IANA contract. If your ideas were to be used RIPE members should have no say, only the US taxpayer should dictate how it is run. As for ICANN, they are paid for by a domain tax. You are correct that the people that pay the tax generally have no say whatsoever which is why ICANN is not actually an Internet "governance."