ICANN Picks New CEO – Fadi Chehade

ICANN, the governing body of the Internet, has picked a new chief executive in advance of a large news conference on Monday about new domains.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers said today that entrepreneur Fadi Chehade will take over from Rod Beckstrom as the head of the governing organisation, on 1 October. The current CEO, Rod Beckstrom steps down on 1 July, and ICANN chief operating officer Akram Atallah will run ICANN in the interim.

ICANN do that job!

Chehade is intended as a neutral choice, as ICANN suffers from criticism over its handling of the new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and the alleged conflicts of interest where past heads of the organisation have moved on to lucrative positions with domain holdings companies expected to profit from gTLD allocation.

Chehade has worked at IBM , and his previous work includes the founding of ResettNet, a neutral body brokering standards for exchange of business data in the early days of online commerce.

ICANN suffered an embarassing failure during the process of registering applicants for the $185,000 each gTLDs, as a security breach let applicants read the names of other users’ data files. The eventual list which was released, included a lot of applications from Google and Amazon, and has raised fears of a commercial cave-up of new Internet space.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Mr Chehade said: “Anything new like this is going to create angst and controversy and it’s going to create opportunity.”

Chehade will be paid $560,000 (£360,000) a year, plus up to $240,000 (£154,000) as a bonus.

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