ICANN CEO’s abstention from .xxx vote is weak.
During ICANN’s meeting in San Francisco last month a number of board members gave their rationale for or against .xxx. Some members abstained and stated their reason.
So it was a little odd when ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom didn’t vote. He whispered something away from the microphone to chair Peter Dengate Thrush about publishing his reason for not voting, but it was barely audible.
His rationale has now been published, albeit discretely. His statement (last page of this pdf) seems to indicate that he would have voted against .xxx. (At least it doesn’t give any reason he would vote for it.)
Clearly he is worried about legal risks as CEO of the company. And it wouldn’t look good if the CEO voted on the opposite side of an issue than his board. But when you get paid $750,000 a year, you’re expected to put yourself out there. You have plenty of insurance from your organization against personal legal risk and get paid a hefty salary.
Not voting — and worse, not giving your reason publicly the same way the rest of the board did — is inexcusable.
(via @thereforeICANN)
Jp says
Good news for him, the stakeholders are not the ones who vote him into power. His comrades are right?
Elephants are People Too says
Very weak.
He should be fired for that, seriously.
David Wrixon says
Dot XXX is not an issue at best it is a distraction and at worst it is a horrible waste of Board Time.
Even New gTLD are red herring. What the Board need to be concentrating on is opening up the internet to non-Latin Languages.
Steve says
@David,
I agree completely. These other distractions .xxx and .whatever are holding up the international internet. idn.idn for .com, .net needs to happen yesterday. The longer these dingbats keep playing around with the registry the faster idn.cctld will become the norm for non-english speaking surfers. imo. They should have rolled out the idn.idn for .com and .net when they did the idn cctlds for .cn, etc….
Lumping idn.idn for .com and .net in with the new gtld’s was/is outrageous!!! Wake up Rod, wake up iccan’t . There are more non-english speaking internet users on the internet than English speaking. The sooner you recognize this the better.
Rod Beckstrom says
I did state my reasons, as covered in this online article and elsewhere: http://www.domainssa.com/news/1353-why-rod-beckstrom-abstain-from-voting-on-xxx-
I also shared similar remarks in Brussels.
Steve says
@Rod,
Great to see you take the time to comment here. When will idn.idn be applied to .com and .net?
Apologies for the animated comment but idn.idn is way over due for .com and .net. imo. Making international surfers type 2 languages to reach their idn.com and idn.net destination is not good. Please fix asap.
Best Regards.