There are many ways that parties who are interested in or concerned about ICANN can communicate through the net. A mailing list is one example. Usenet news is another. A web board is yet another. Each has its strenghts and weaknesses.(posted 8899 days ago)There are more "real-time" tools available, such as multimedia conferencing tools. However, they require people to run special software (and in some cases, have a certain type of IP routing service provided to them). Also, being "real-time", they require that everyone interested be participating at (roughly) the same time, which does not work for people spread over the entire globe.
I'm not sure how much historical knowledge you have of these issues, but IMHO, they can be very difficult to follow if you don't know the history. Most of the organizations or bodies who are mentioned here are mentioned by acronym, and there are quite a few of them, which can be confusing.
Also, I have noticed that some people quote the entire article in their response that they are responding to, sometimes not providing clear attribution, so it is difficult to tell who is being quoted where.
A major aspect of the dispute is the culture clash between some of the "old school" types who believe that the engineering/administrative Internet community can find a technical solution to the problems (and are willing to rely on existing laws to handle cases of trademark violation, etc), and some more conservative types who believe that the situation has become so politically charged that ICANN is necessary to provide stability. From what I have seen in this and other related debates (e.g. in the newsgroup rec.radio.broadcasting, there is a split between people who criticize much of commercial radio because they feel it is too homogenized, and people who laud it because it is more profitable today than it ever was [although the profit tends to be realized in radio station valuation, rather than revenue]), the divide tends to be very deep, and there is little common ground. Thus, there is likely only to be disagreement. We are unlikely to ever know what "the public" really wants regarding ICANN or "Internet governance" in general, because of the infeasibility of polling everyone who might have an opinion.
So, I guess to sum up, there are a lot of tools that can be used to communicate, but it won't matter much if the dissenting parties can't come to some kind of compromise.
--gregbo