Rod Beckstrom Named New ICANN CEO

netczar writes "Former US cybersecurity chief Rod Beckstrom has been selected as the new ICANN president and CEO. The decision was publicly announced during ICANN's 35th meeting in Sydney, Australia on Friday. Beckstrom will be replacing Dr. Paul Twomey, who had been serving this position since March 2003 and announced his resignation earlier this year. Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to 'rule over' the NCSC." Reader darthcamaro notes a story which quotes Beckstrom as saying, "The system on [the] whole is healthy, but also strained, and part of the strains are natural and part of the democratic process. The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN. This is massively complex — wouldn't run well top-down. We would not reach the same balance of decisions to propagate through the network. All of us are humbled by the process. No one is in control, so everyone is in control."

Comments

ICANN the trademark policeman

[karl.auerbach]

I hope he recognizes that ICANN is supposed to make sure that the domain system works and that ICANN is not to be a policeman doing trademark enforcement for the intellectual property protection industry or enforcing various governments' views about what is acceptable use of the net.

Thank you ICANN

[winkydink]

The process may be noisy, but a stable Internet is what has come out of ICANN.

Oh yeah. I mean, where would we be without ICANN? All of that wealth created by domain tasting & cybersquatting would never have been created.

Thank you ICANN. Thank you.

s/Thank/Fuck/g

No Kidding

[typosquatting]

No one is in control, so everyone is in control.

At least the first part is true. If you watch ICANN for any length of time you realize that there are so many diametrically opposed contingencies that they have a hard time agreeing to or implementing anything of significance.

Stable?

[girlintraining]

If by stable, you mean strangled, then he's right. ICANN's only functional purpose is to maintain the status quo. It's stated purpose is to hand out IP addresses, protocol number assignment, and manage the DNS. And towards that end, it's been a complete cock-up, and has only survived because it's burrowed its way into the infrastructure like a parasite and can't be easily removed now. Oh, ICANN, how you've screwed up... let us count the ways;

They've massively extended the number of TLDs to the point that most people don't even know what they all are, and plan on making the number go from "barely comprehensible" to "infinite" soon. They've thrown the RFCs right out the window when it comes to domain naming convention, and have turned domain name management into a mangled corporate turf war that costs us billions of dollars in litigation globally every year, and despite the fact that it has repeatedly pledged to serve the international community, it remains based in, and under the complete control of, the United States. And the changing of the guards -- they're replacing the existing president, Paul Twomey, a man who was very international and worked with goverments all over the world, and was exceptionally well-educated and cultured (for a CEO) with Rod Beckstrom, who's lifetime achievements have been... creating a wiki, selling off a risk management company, and authoring a book on some whack management style about starfish, spiders, and Al Queta. His education got as far as... you guessed it.. he's an MBA. So they're replacing a cultured world-wise man with some delusional middle-management type who doesn't know much about international anything.

This institution is crap on a stick, and it's set to be salted to perfection with the tears of billions of consumers who will be forced to watch the internet steam along, captained by a man who been hand-picked by the US Government to be a total patsy. We are sooo f--ked.

Re:Stable?

[rs79]

I address the troll issue here: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/shills/

Paul Twomey for 8 years collected nearly a million dollars a year from ICANN and in ten years they've never made any new tlds to speak of. They do not have an elected board like they were supposed to and there is no viting membership in the legal sense, in ICANN - another guiding principle that was supposed to have been done but never was and still isn't. Let's be clear that ICANN was to create new TLDS, not to debate whether they should be created, the governments mandate was to do this as its primary function. It was also to study the trademark problem but lets not loose sight of the fact there are laws that protect trademark holders.

I met Paul Twomey at the beginning of his tenure. He's a professional politician and in my opinion his job has been to see there are no new tlds and no voting membership and a continuence of self perpetuating board.

The rest of that nicely written rant I agree with.

Re:Stable?

[Tacvek]

The IANA (which is the technical devision of ICANN) assigns ip addresses to ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.

Those in turn assign IP addresses wsithin the assigned region. I believe the same system is used for handing out Autonomous System numbers.

Anyway, it is worth noting, that the IANA is the only technical part of ICANN. It publishes the DNS root zone file, as well as other information.

The rest of ICANN (the overwhelming majority of it) does little more than set policy for the domain name system, and in a horribly inefficient fashion.

It should be dissolved (corporate charter revoked), with two new organizations being formed under the umbrella of the Internet Society (ISOC).

ISOC already has the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and IESG (internet Engineering Steering Group), both under the oversight of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC).

A new organization named "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority" (IANA) (being completely separate from the existing one, but performing the same tasks) should be formed, and be placed under the oversight of the IAOC.

The other new organization under the umbrella of the ISOC, would be the "Internet Naming Policy Commitee" (INPG). This would be a cut down version of the ICANN policy forming components. It is not clear to me if it should be under the oversight of the IAOC, or some other group.