ICANN Elects Peter Dengate-Thrush as New Chairman

An anonymous reader writes "Peter Dengate-Thrush, a New Zealand lawyer, has been elected unanimously as the new Chairman of the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. "I am delighted that my colleagues have placed their confidence in me for this challenging and important role," Dengate Thrush said. Peter practices civil litigation, specializing in intellectual property, competition, and Internet law. He has been involved in ICANN since its inception. As a member of the Boston Working Group, he provided comment in 1998 on the early drafts of the ICANN bylaws, and he co-chaired one of the pre-formation meetings of the Intellectual Property Constituency in Wellington, New Zealand."

Comments

Obligatory Man from U.N.C.L.E. reference

[Eudial]

I expect Illya and Napoleon to already be on their way to foil T.H.R.U.S.H's evil plans to infiltrate I.C.A.N.N, no doubt to build some sort of massive death ray to blow up buildings from across the planet.

THRUSH making inroads

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Who you gonna call?

First decent icann chairman, ever

[rs79]

I know Peter pretty well. He one of the few sane people in the DNS mess and it's nice to see him replace the string of crazies that came before him.

Not that the chairman can do a whole lot with the pack of sharks that make up the rest of icann mind you.

Peter is a scream in real life, you'd never know he's a lawyer. I'd pay big money to see him and Berryhill on stage debating almost anything.

Now lets see if he can actually herald the creation of some new tlds.

Will Dengate-Thrush stop Storm?

[r7]

Under Cerf ICANN has degenerated into a politically paralyzed organization unable to pass ANY legislation. The biggest downside to this so far is the Storm worm. Storm only exists because "Domain Tasters" can register a domain for free and use it until the Tasting period expires. ICANN could fix this policy in a single meeting.

Domain Tasting works particularly well in combination with "fast flush" DNS. FF violates RFCs and is a particularly nefarious way of covering one's tracks, but registrars are helpless to do anything about it without an ICANN policy. Again, ICANN could fix this policy issue in a single meeting.

Without Tasting and FF there would be no Storm worm, and Storm only exists due to ICANN's dysfunctional board of directors. If Dengate-Thrush cannot fix ICANN is suspect Storm will force the US government to take over ICANN, probably by executive decree, and we all know how well the US government manages things (USPS, TSA, Amtrak, ...)

Re:Will Dengate-Thrush stop Storm?

[ScrewMaster]

Well, you can slam the Feds for a lot of things, but I'd say the U.S. government managed things quite well up until ICANN came into existence. That's because the folks that originally operated the domain name system were left to do their jobs without too much politicizing. I often wonder how things might have gone if Jon Postel were still running IANA ... he didn't suffer fools gladly, and he was usually right. Too bad he died.

Maybe if a lot of people hadn't pushed so hard to "internationalize" DNS management and just left well enough alone, we'd not be having these problems. When the original architects of a key subsystem of the global network are taken off the job and replaced with ineffective bureaucrats, well, you should expect to have problems.