Had Rod Beckstrom been involved with the new TLD program earlier…
This afternoon Rod Beckstrom held a briefing call with bloggers about the new top level domain name program.
He’s been on a world tour explaining the program for months, answering a number of repeated questions. Rather than beat a dead horse, I asked him what he would do differently had he been involved with the new TLD process from the beginning. (Remember, he inherited this program when he became CEO of ICANN in 2009.)
Beckstrom noted two things he would have done had he been at ICANN earlier:
1. Gotten law enforcement involved earlier. Beckstrom comes from a security background and said “obviously law enforcement is a really important constituency”. Getting law enforcement more involved earlier would have helped with whois issues.
2. He would have set up more of the operational aspects of the program outside of North America to further internationalize ICANN.
Beckstrom also remarked on what sort of assurances ICANN can give to applicants about the continuity of the program in the face of significant outside pressure and legal threats. Beckstrom said that the assurance it can give is that ICANN works in an open, community-driven process.
Analyst says
Who cares what he says or what he would have done differently. Bottom line is that they will work, but only .COM will work well. The gtld program is doomed to .fail