PRAGUE, June 24 -- The new chief executive of the domain name overseer ICANN promised during the opening ceremonies of a meeting here that every decision he makes in his new job will be "in the public interest."
This past Friday, ICANN announced the hiring of Fadi Chehadé, an entrepreneur with limited experience in the insulated world of domain names, as its CEO. He will start in October. The organization faces some of the biggest controversies in its history -- including the accusation that it has drifted from a public-interest nonprofit overseeing a critical global resource to an industry association beholden to big-money domain interests.
Fadi Chehadé is a US citizen who grew up in Egypt and Lebanon. He left the Middle East in 1980, when he was 18. He earned a computer science degree and put himself through school by working restaurant jobs. A master's degree at Stanford followed, as did time at Bell Labs and entrepreneurial stints that put him in the negotiating spot with some of the world's largest technology companies, including IBM.
During his speech to kick off ICANN's nearly weeklong meeting in Prague, Chehadé emphasized his plan to listen to the full range of voices in the Internet community. He teared up when thanking his family for supporting him in what many would call an impossible job. With the last line of his speech, he made clear his awareness of ICANN's most pressing reputational problem.
In addition, criticism over the new domain expansion, which will take the Internet from 22 generic top-level (gTLD) domains to more than 1,900, has taken some unexpected turns. And calls for ICANN to turn over its administrative duties to the UN's International Telecommunications Union or some other multinational have grown stronger than ever.
Since the list of applications for gTLDs was announced, trademark holders have been increasingly concerned that they will have to shell out even more money for brand protection. And the public-interest community is considering the effects of multinational corporations trying to stake out a wide range of generic names.
ICANN also suspended the controversial "digital archery" method it intended to use for processing domain applications. The system would have relied on Internet connection speeds to reward the fastest responses with better places in line for application processing. Unofficially, a number of applicants and others complained that digital archery gave hot-wired developed countries an unfair advantage and opened up an avenue for profiteering by companies claiming to be able to beat or game the system.
One of these companies, Pool.com, is a subsidiary of Momentous, one of the largest Internet registrars, which is owned by the chairman of ICANN's nominating committee. That group chooses candidates for the ICANN board and other parts of the organization.
— Beau Brendler is chairman of the North American Internet user advisory committee to ICANN (NARALO) and was a voting member of its executive committee (ALAC) for three years.
That sure is a huge "can of worms," isn't it, Kicheko? I do not envy the new CEO's many challenges, and indeed that particular domain name issue may be one of the thorniest.
I particularly think he's going to face a big challenge in the area of brand conflict and brand protection in domain ownership. There's bound to be conflicting interests there especially in closely related brands. I wonder how he's going to deal with that.
Surely, this is a high-pressure job in the sense that one has to face a lot of difficult constituents, somehow balance a range of conflicting demands, and cope with public discontent.
It's a witches brew; the last CEO didn't seem to like it very much.
Don't worry, he will have plenty of time to prove himself, hopefully he won't step down before the end of his office term. The organization will be under pressure for the next months to come.
My response to that excuse is that ICANN managed to find a qualified CEO despite the small pool of candidates. I can't think it would be all that difficult to follow up with a couple of board members.
An extra $70K annually and several worldwide trips all expenses paid? Not bad incentive.
No mistake. In fact, the vice-chairman of the board has a material conflict as well, being a c-level executive for Melbourne IT, an Australian registrar and hosting company. And he also happens to chair the board governance committee.
Frequently, these high-level conflicts are explained away as a consequence of not being able to find and recruit people with high-enough levels of technical and board experience. This is one of the reasons the board voted to compensate its directors. This afternoon the chair of the nominating committee addressed the user community saying there's a desperate need for applicants with board governance experience. So, if you have that kind of experience, well, ICANN needs you.
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
The Internet is soon going to get a lot bigger.
North America and Europe led the rest of the world by far in setting stakes on potential new virtual ground as ICANN today released its long-anticipated list of potential new domains.
A group of volunteers has just released a detailed report for ICANN on one of the most troubled, debated, and close-to-useless systems of Internet accountability: Whois.
Just as it's trying to dig itself out from the public relations fiasco involving the failure of its application system for new domains, ICANN finds it needs to rethink a critical component of Internet security, the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) System.
Circumstances for ICANN, the California-based non-profit that oversees Internet domain names, seem only to get worse. At some point on Friday, April 20, the organization is supposed to provide a detailed explanation of why it took its new domain name application system offline a week ago, and whether it can still tell people on April 30 what names were applied for.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
So here we are, the last day of the 2013 US Open Golf Championship at Merion, and Phil Mickelson -- who has been a US Open runner-up five times now but never taken the trophy -- is right up there at the top of the leaderboard.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
