Vint Cerf is 64, and he’s quitting at the end of this month. I’ll be very interested to see who’ll replace the “father of the Internet”.
In a way, it’s pretty sad that Cerf is stepping down, because he lent ICANN a certain measure of credibility just from having such a pioneer as their chair. Keith Davidson, who’s in charge of the Kiwi .nz registry, internetNZ, has suggested that the change will severely affect the status of the organisation in the eyes of the public.
However, I’m pleased to hear that Cerf is encouraging the public to have their say. The fact is that the chair of ICANN is in a unique position to affect policy on all sorts of contentious issues, most notably the WHOIS database, and new generic top-level domains. ICANN has, of late, got stuck in a rut with the WHOIS debate, and a new chair might find ways to shake that up a bit and speed us along to a mutually satisfying solution.
As for new gTLDs, I’ve been troubled of late by ICANN’s quiet shuffling into the world of censorship and moral decision-making. However, I have a feeling that a young, excitable new chair will want to increase ICANN’s scope, if anything, so it remains to be seen how things will turn out in that area.
It looks like Peter Dengate Thrush (sadly bereaved of his wife, father and brother last year) is a leading candidate. He’s a lawyer, and I’m not sure how good that’ll be for ICANN, but he has been involved with the organisation since its inception, which is obviously a good thing, and he’s an expert in things like intellectual property and Internet law. He also used to chair internetNZ.
Resources:
Vint Cerf on Wikipedia.
Posted by: domainstreet
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