The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the Internet domain-name system, is in the final stages of preparation for a worldwide election of five new at-large members of its board of directors.
ICANN's 76,000-plus registered at-large members are scheduled to cast their votes during a 10-day period starting Oct. 1. The Marina del Rey, Calif.-based organization today announced that the election will be conducted via the Internet by Election.com Inc., a Garden City, N.J., company that plans to provide secure login, voting response and tabulation functions. The voting system will be offered in multiple languages and is supposed to be available around the clock during the voting period, ICANN said.
One director will be elected from each of five regions: Africa, Asia/Australia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean and North America. The nominees for the North America slot are Cisco Systems Inc.'s Karl Auerbach; BBN Technologies Inc.'s Lyman Chapin; University System of Maryland's Donald N. Langenberg; Stanford University Law School's Lawrence Lessig; the Information Technology Association of America's Harris Miller; the Association for Computing Machinery's Barbara Simons; and University of Texas's Emerson Tiller.
ICANN CEO Michael Roberts today said the major issue facing the winners of the election when they go to work next year will be to sort out the contentious issue of how at-large directors will be elected in the future -- or whether the organization should even have at-large members and directors.
Earlier this year, ICANN's board said it favored having the organization's at-large membership choose directors indirectly by electing a council that would then select the at-large board members. But it backed off that idea after civil liberties groups complained that the indirect elections would be undemocratic.
Instead, the board decided to go ahead with the upcoming direct election of the five at-large directors and then follow with a thorough study of the entire issue next year. "Everything will be on the table, including whether there should even be an at-large [membership]," Roberts said.
Roberts said the board also will continue to contend with a fundamental misunderstanding of ICANN's mission. "There's a lot of loose talk about how it's the governance body for the Internet [as a whole]," he said. "But if you read any of the charter documents, you don't find any of that in there."
ICANN is a nonprofit corporation that was formed two years ago to take responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain-name system management and root server management functions previously performed under federal contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and other groups.