Last Sunday Akram Atallah, who was the interim CEO of ICANN after Rod Bekstrom had left his post, handed over the reins of power to Fadi Chehadé, the new CEO, and returned to his former office, COO of ICANN. Prior to that, as the interim CEO, Akram Atallah was interviewed by ‘The Wall Street Journal’ and gave it an update on how opening up the generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) process was going.
It is to be recalled that previously, in the early summer of 2012, ICANN published an information on which generic TLD had been applied for and on applicants’ names. It is currently in the process of evaluating those applications. ‘We are not going to announce any details on evaluation until we finish the evaluation of all of the applications, or unless the community agree on a batching method’, reported Akram Atallah.
He minutely explained the reasons which made ICANN offer batching or ‘digital archery’ as a way to define which applications are to be primarily evaluated and which later: ‘We are committed to add no more than 1,000 names to the root system of the Internet in the year. That does not mean 1,000 in the first day—it means roughly about 40 applications a week. So in order to do that we need some kind of ranking. We could not do random selection due to lottery laws in California. So we had to have some kind of test of skill. That was this digital archery test. The only problem was, everyone hated it.’
He underlined that ICANN has already received a lot of proposals from the community on performing such ranking. As soon as the information is summarized, the ICANN to make a statement on the new solution of this problem.
Speaking of accepted objections and comments on applications for new gTLDs, Akram Atallah noted there had been no objections for that moment: ‘To apply for an objection you have to have standing, you have to pay a fee, and it goes to a dispute resolution service. Either the applicant is awarded the domain or the objection is upheld and the application stops’.
Meanwhile the ICANN has got over 6000 comments, and at the same time, as Atallah states, it is not ICANN that is deciding the outcome. ‘ICANN is implementing the process that the community developed. Our job is to make sure it happens in a transparent and efficient way. We are using world-renowned firms to do the resolution such as the International Center for Dispute Resolution, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the International Chamber of Commerce – these are well known arbitration organizations, they will deal with the comments’, Atallah said.
While commenting the regularly appearing reports on that some ICANN’s functions could be transferred to the International Telecommunication Union, Akram Atallah said: ‘The Internet has been progressing at a fast pace, the current governance model has been very effective, it has successfully balanced the need for security and innovation, and allows for competition and innovation. The balancing act has worked very well. The growth of the net is a demonstration of the effectiveness. I don’t see a need for a change in the model. There are driving forces that are pushing for change, but I hope that we will all continue to work for the best interests of the public and the best model possible. We are not a member of the ITU, and our representatives have not been invited to the conference in Dubai. So we have to wait for the moment when official proposals on the topic are revealed’.
