General manager of public participation, ICANN
Joined on July 9, 2006
Total Post Views: 14,330
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I am ICANN's general manager for public participation, previously a freelance journalist covering ICANN, amid more general Internet and Internet governance issues.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Kieren McCarthy on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Mention ICANN in Internet circles and you will always find a multitude of views of what the organization should do, needs to do, and should have done; how it has to change, and why; and what it needs to focus on. Well, the time has come to make those views known and to try to persuade the rest of the community that they represent the best step forward. more»
You'd be surprised how many people are asking that question at the moment, but you won't be surprised to know that the only thing they agree on is that they either don't know, or that they disagree with the people that believe they do. I am not going to attempt to provide my own answer, but I will point to a paper just released by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). POST, among other things, produces regular, concise briefings for the UK Parliament on whatever are the important topics of the time. And they have now done one on Internet Governance. more»
The ICANN Board will vote today on a new registry service put forward by PIR for .org which is its attempt to solve the domain tasting issue. It takes the form of an amendment [pdf] to the .org contract and enables PIR to charge five cents per domain "when the number of such deleted registrations is in excess of 90 per cent of the total number of initial registrations"... more»
The number of applications this year for the seven positions within ICANN has been so low that the NomCom has gone to the trouble of printing up pamphlets, holding a public meeting at Marrakech and extending the deadline by a fortnight. At the two public Board sessions in Marrakech the grand hall that was provided was virtually empty, sparking some debate as to why. Susan Crawford ventured that it was because ICANN was failing to connect with people; Vint Cerf suggested that ICANN was so successful at doing its job that people didn't feel the need to attend. Mouhamet Diop pointed out that we were in a French-speaking Arabic country and no one was going to sit through four hours of discussion if they didn't understand a word of it... more»