Rod Beckstrom Named New ICANN CEO 26
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."
ICANN the trademark policeman (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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It can be VERY profitable to be a policeman whose arbitrary and unchallenged decisions enrich friends and shutter enemies.
Especially when they retire.
Then, unpopular decisions can be traded for stock options, gift packages, high compensation advisory roles, etc.
Much more profitable than, say, writing a book about spiders and starfish and management style.
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Thank you ICANN (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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Stable? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Patsy?
I think you mean, shill, tool, puppet, etc.
Re:Stable? (Score:5, Interesting)
I address the troll issue here: http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/shills/ [vrx.net]
Paul Twomey for 8 years collected nearly a million dollars a year from ICANN [icann.org] 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.
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Like Congress, the best we can hope for is that ICANN stagnates while doing nothing but pointless arguments. It's better than anything they would actually DO.
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" Why would anybody sane want ICANN to create more top level domains? Other than a new country forming and requiring a TLD, the only point of new TLDs is to make some illegitimate businesses profit due to consumer confusion, and line the pockets of registrars. .Info? .Museum? .Biz? They're all useless."
Meh. If you don't want them don't use them. We have a long way to go to add new top level domains till we even get close to catching up to the 160 the cctld guys added after icann was formed that all came ip
Huh? (Score:2)
I may fault ICANN on many things, but I don't find myself agreeing with your characterizations of ICANN.
First off, ICANN has been glacial with regard to new top level domains - on average about one per year. That is a long way short of "barely comprehensible" and certainly not even close to "infinite soon".
As for following name conventions - ICANN has been very closely following the hostname conventions and the internationalized name rules established by the IETF. Perhaps the only thing that ICANN has don
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" First off, ICANN has been glacial with regard to new top level domains - on average about one per year. That is a long way short of "barely comprehensible" and certainly not even close to "infinite soon". "
Hi Karl;
Tell us the story again when you were the only board member elected to the ICANN board and they had these secret "executive" meetings without you and your prime goal there irc was to look at the books to see where they spending all those millions. And how you had to sue them they'd let you be a
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I was under the impression ARIN handled IP block assignments, not ICANN. Is that not right?
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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 syst
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Thats about the most informative thing I've read on slashdot this month. Thanks.
Ambitious man (Score:1)
WTF (Score:1)
A person widely known and well-respected by and a frequent contributer to the Slashdot community wins an important position on the ruling body of the internet and all you can do is bitch?
What's that? Oh. Not Ray Beckerman? Never mind.
Steve
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (Score:2)
Sorry but (Score:1)
Corporate dominance is unavoidable (Score:2)
I've been reading a number of other posts in this thread about how ICANN is a failure because it operates primarily in the interests of American corporations.
The thing to understand, however, is that everyone is raped by American corporations. Absolutely everyone. It is inevitable, and totally unavoidable. They chip away, tirelessly, day and night, and eventually they get in and dominate things, and because they are so relentless, there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
So get rid of ICANN if you
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