ICANN's 44th conference has opened in Prague with two topical themes to discuss, namely the appointment of ICANN's new CEO and changes to new gTLD program.
Fadi Chehade, ICANN CEO, has impressed the attendees with his pledges to be transparent and to improve corporate standards. "We must be expected to do five times better, ten times better than the commercial world. This is critical to who we are. So technical excellence, people excellence, contract management excellence”, Chehade said. He also noted that ICANN "cannot become a fortress. ICANN must become an oasis, a place that people see and come to because it works, because it makes sense, because it’s efficient", Chehade told ICANN attendees.
Chehade's appointment was announced a few days ago. New CEO is expected to start his duties at October 1, 2012.
ICANN's new gTLD program has survived another blow with the corporation canceling its "digital archery" portion of the program. Digital archery was a process intended to randomize batching and to give applicants a chance to affect the batching results. At the moment, ICANN has informed applicants that "evaluations are already taking place, and the reasons to cancel the controversial procedure are yet unknown. Some domain experts say that they held tests and the results showed technical flaws in digital archery system.
With digital archery canceled, it is unclear how batching will take place. Kurt Pritz, ICANN's senior VP, notes that evaluations "should take place according to schedule". Earlier, ICANN said that it aims to start evaluating new gTLD applications on July 12, 2012.
Pritz thinks that evaluation will take place in several batches, with batching done at output rather than input. Pritz also said that initial evaluation phase is to take about 15 months, meaning that no new generic top-level domains will go live earlier than 2014.
