Organization

ICANN has announced its new CEO, Fadi Chehadé. He will begin on 1 October 2012. Current CEO Rod Beckstrom will leave the organization at the end of this month.

We identified Fadi as one of the last four candidates for the job back in April. He previously worked with ICANN's current COO Akram Atallah, with them both in the same roles.

Here is more information about Mr Chehadé.

US Assistant Commerce Secretary Larry Strickling gave a broad-ranging speech covering everything from the current privacy debate to the IANA contract, WCIT meeting in December and ICANN's new gTLD process and general accountability.

There were no bombshells but Strickling made it clear that he rejecting some calls to make discussions around a privacy code of conduct a closed-doors discussion. He also gently chided ICANN and warned that he was still watching the organization closely on its promises to improve accountability as well deals with policy and compliance problems.

He finished his speech but warning against about the potential dangers of the WCIT meeting to be held in Dubai in December.

ICANN announced that its new gTLD project manager Michael Salazar had resigned. The claim isn't true. Following an unannounced Board meeting at the end of last week - the third in as many months - chair Steve Crocker demanded that someone on staff be held accountable for the failure of the TAS application system which had caused a six-week delay in the program. Salazar was identified and promptly fired. The decision has left the new gTLD program without a head at a crucial time. A replacement for ICANN's CEO is due to be announced this week although he isn't expected to start for several months.

The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN sent a strong letter to the organization's chairman advising the organization to move away from the badly flawed "digital archery" process for splitting the 1,930 new gTLD applications it has received into batched. "ICANN may not have fully considered the implications of these processes, and highlights the need to fully consult with the community before taking decisions of this magnitude," it chided. The letter also warned ICANN that the GAC would not be in a position to make determinations on new gTLD applications until April 2013 - five months later than ICANN had hoped.

ICANN finally released details of the new gTLDs program. There were a few surprises: Google and Amazon applied for 101 and 76 applications respectively. A number of new organizations also appeared with large portfolios of generic names. Now they will have to duke it out with others to find out who gets what. Shortly after the release of information, .Nxt published its database of new gTLD applicants and applications to provide a more useful and user-friendly version of the information.

Keynote Speech by Lawrence E. Strickling Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information U.S. Chamber of Commerce Telecommunications and E-Commerce Committee

Read it on the NTIA website.

Washington, D.C.

June 15, 2012

I am pleased to be invited to address today’s meeting of the Telecommunications and E-Commerce Committee at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Today is a particularly timely opportunity to address the multistakeholder process of policymaking for the Internet as it has been a busy spring for developments in this area.

We've been through everyone of the 1,930 applications and here are our picks.

KETCHUP

Why pick this?
Because it pushes the boundaries of commonsense

Who applied for it?
Heinz

What will it be used for?
Dot-ketchup will be a “trusted, hierarchical, and intuitive namespace for consumers to access content related to Heinz Tomato Ketchup worldwide.”

So what?
We can see many wonderful and innovative uses for new top-level domains but, forgive us, we really think that a single ‘ketchup.com’ would probably do on the topic of ketchup. Do you really need a fundamental piece of Internet infrastructure to cover the vagaries of tomato sauce? (No, you don’t.)

What does it tell us about new gTLDs?
That some companies felt compelled to protect their leading brands, even
when it made little sense to do so. This should be a prime candidate for Heinz to drop now that they know no one applied for it, and recoup $130,000.

Anything else?