The board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers early Friday morning voted to adopt a controversial plan for overhauling the nonprofit organization, which oversees the Internet's DNS under a contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Of the 18 members of the ICANN board of directors, 17 voted in favor of a reform blueprint developed during the last several months by a select committee of board members. One board member, Karl Auerbach, did not attend the meeting and was absent for the vote.
The vote was held during a week-long meeting in Bucharest, Romania.
The reform blueprint, posted on ICANN's Web site last week, outlines a streamlined consensus-building process designed to speed up ICANN's decision making and policy setting. Until now, ICANN has been overburdened by process and mired in debate among special interest groups, resulting in slow progress in such areas as adding new top-level domains to the Internet.
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The most controversial aspect of the blueprint is the elimination of at-large elections for some ICANN board seats, which previously were voted on by ordinary Internet users. Instead, ICANN will establish a nominating committee with representatives from its various constituency groups to select these eight board members.
The six other ICANN board members will continue to be appointed by ICANN's supporting organizations for generic top-level domains, country code top-level domains and IP addressing. However, the ICANN board will now consist of 15 members instead of 18 members.
The proposal also addresses ICANN's inability to adequately fund its operations by levying a 25 cent per-name fee on ICANN-accredited registrars and registries.
Other changes include strengthening the advisory role of ICANN's government participants, creating an Office of Ombudsman and limiting ICANN's reconsideration process for board and staff decisions.
The board made several concessions to critics of its reform blueprint during the vote, including the decision to consider creating an at-large advisory committee as a means for the Internet user community to participate in ICANN decision making. The board also noted that ICANN must emphasize geographic and cultural diversity as a core value, and it pointed out the need to improve its working relationships with critical infrastructure providers and the Internet's technical community.
The ICANN board moved decisively on the reform agenda to try to head off criticism of the organization's failings prior to September, when ICANN's contract with the Commerce Department is up for renewal.
"Our belief is that our restructuring and the other things in the blueprint are creating a much more effective ICANN, and I think that's something that all of us want to see including the Department of Commerce," said Stuart Lynn, president of ICANN at a press conference held Friday morning.
The ICANN reform committee will come up with a detailed implementation plan for the reform blueprint that will be on the agenda for the board to approve at its next meeting, scheduled for Shanghai, China in October.
The ICANN reform blueprint is available at the organization's Web site.
In other action, the ICANN board approved a 30-day grace period before expiring domain names can be resold, but it delayed a vote on a proposal from VeriSign to create a wait listing service for registered domain names in .com and .net.
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