The changing of ICANN's guard

Venture capitalist and cyberguru Esther Dyson and four other directors will step down from the board of directors of the controversial Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers after the nonprofit group's next meeting, ICANN announced late last week.

The changing of the guard for ICANN will come after the group, which was designated by the Clinton administration to manage the Internet's name and address system in 1998, is scheduled to select several new top level domains from among dozens of proposals.

Whether the board decides to go for dot-museum, dot-web or some other new domain, Dyson's tenure is still likely to be remembered more for the controversies that erupted as ICANN tried to get up and running. Critics from academic and public interest groups have charged that ICANN's policies favor large corporations and trademark holders over ordinary Internet users.

Even as ICANN made the announcement, a new controversy erupted: The departing board members - five of the original nine board members appointed in 1998 - will be replaced by five new directors elected earlier this month in a worldwide selection process over the Internet.

ICANN has yet to decide how to replace the other four original board members, selected in an undisclosed, private process. Friday's announcement said the four would stay on until 2002. ICANN's board also includes CEO Mike Roberts and nine people chosen in a more public process last year by groups with a direct stake in domain-name decisions.

Some critics, such as University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin, charged that the extended tenure violated ICANN's 1998 agreement with the Clinton administration to select board members by a more open and democratic process. ICANN's legitimacy to make policy for the entire Internet is undermined with directors chosen in secret, Froomkin has long argued.

"ICANN is about to do something utterly illegitimate, without even the usual fig leaf of transparency, consultation or 'bottom-up' support," Froomkin charged in an essay posted on his Web site.

Other ICANN watchers said the delay in replacing the final four original board members was understandable given the difficulties in reaching an agreement over how to select their replacements. Under compromises hammered out at its latest two quarterly meetings, ICANN is to conduct a six month study of the election used to select the five new replacements before deciding how to fill the four other board slots.

"This is a natural outgrowth of the compromises that the board struck," says Alan Davidson, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The nonprofit Washington group is pushing for another election to fill the remaining seats, but Davidson concedes that it will take more time to refine the voting process.

Dyson's departure also has set off speculation about who will take her place as chairman. Some in the ICANN community have suggested WorldCom executive and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, who already serves on the board.

In addition to Dyson, the other four directors stepping down are Geraldine Capdeboscq, George Conrades, Greg Crew and Eugenio Triana.

Taking their places will be Karl Auerbach, a Cisco Systems (CSCO) scientist; Andy Mueller-Maguhn, member of the German hacker group Chaos Club; Nii Quaynor, who runs an ISP in Ghana; Masanobu Katoh, an engineer at Fujitsu; and Ivan Moura Campos, a Brazilian Internet executive.

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