Link To Full Story: www.wired.com
ICANN is nominally in charge of the internet’s policy around site names and addresses. It sets the rules on who can sell domain names, what language domain names are in, whether a domain name violates someone’s trademark and how people find their way from those names to the numerically addressed servers that host them online. In a system that works by connecting the world’s computers together, ICANN is oddly both powerful and powerless.
Beckstrom is in many ways the online equivalent of the mayor of Switzerland, with an arsenal of peacekeeping tools pretty much limited to his reputation.
The agency was chartered as an independent corporation by the U.S. government in 1998, when it wrested the net’s root file from net pioneer Jon Postel. And the Commerce Department has kept close (some say too close) a watch over it ever since.
Beckstrom became a known quantity in D.C. after a year stint running the National Cyber Security Center in the Department of Homeland Security. He was hired as ICANN chief in July 2009, in no small part for his D.C. connections, which ICANN hoped would convince Washington to trust it.
That plan paid off on September 30, just months after his tenure started, when ICANN and the Commerce Department inked a new operating agreement that declared that “ICANN is independent and is not controlled by any one entity” and that reviews of its performance will be done by the global internet community, not just the Department of Commerce.
Until then, the agency was closely controlled by the U.S. government, to the point that it required daily federal sign-off on changes to the internet’s root file, which tells the world’s computers where to look to find authoritative addresses.
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