ICANN Set To Approve New Domains

The top decision making body of the powerful
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) probably
won't include full representation from the worldwide Internet user
community until the end of next year at earliest under a proposal
submitted today.

The ICANN staff today recommended at its meeting at the Marriott Hotel
here that its board of directors commission a study into the at-large
constituency, which is designed to serve as the voice of the Internet
public
within ICANN.

Under the proposed staff schedule, ICANN would not elect the full set of
at-large board members until the end of 2001, ICANN official Andrew
McLaughlin said today. ICANN, the not-for-profit organization charged
with managing the Internet's addressing system, is meeting here this week
primarily for the purpose of approving the first new generic top-level
Internet domains (gTLDs) since the advent of dot-com, dot-net and
dot-org more than a decade ago.

But in the shadow of that crucial decision-making process which has
drawn unprecedented national media attention to the meeting, ICANN
is also trying to sort out how the Internet-using public will be
represented on its hugely influential board of directors.

Earlier this year, ICANN at-large membership - a worldwide constituency
of Internet users - elected five candidates to serve on the ICANN board.

While those newly elected officials will join the board at the conclusion
of this week's meeting, those at-large members will still be substantially
outnumbered on the board by ICANN's 13 internally chosen members.

That disparity is unacceptable, ICANN critics contended today.

"The question of whether there will be at-large directors and how
many there will be is not negotiable, considering that ICANN is running
off making major policy decisions without the voice of those who will
be affected," ICANN board member-elect, Karl Auerbach, told
Newsbytes today.

Auerbach, a long-time ICANN critic who was elected to represent
the United States by the at-large constituency, has demanded that
ICANN quickly move to elect the full nine members that are called
for under the organization's charter.

At a meeting in Yokohama, Japan earlier this year, ICANN opted to
elect only five at-large members and then to perform a study on that
election process and its outcome. Presenting the final study
proposal to the board today, McLaughlin said that during this
year's at-large elections, "a lot of the things that we were
afraid of came true in one way or another."

Since the election procedure was conducted entirely online, some
observers had voiced security on the election process.

Others worried that due to the small size of the at-large constituency
(which includes fewer than 160,000 members worldwide) the board
slots would be exposed to "capture" by specific corporations or
special interest groups. The proposed study is intended to resolve those
concerns and assure that the elected at-large board members are
truly representative of the Internet public, according to ICANN.

The ICANN board today began hearing comments about the pros and cons
of more than a dozen proposed Internet domains including .web, .biz,
.geo, .co-op, and others) that the ICANN staff said warranted further
review.

The board is expected to approve a handful of those proposals on
Thursday, clearing the way for new domains to go live next year.