ICANN will be called to task over new top level domain names next week.
Next week The U.S. House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet will hold an “ICANN Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLD) Oversight Hearingâ€.
You can be assured that someone from ICANN will be asked to attend. Hopefully it won’t be the train wreck the non-profit experienced in June 2009.
In 2009 the same committee took then ICANN President/CEO Paul Twomey to task for a number of grievances. It was ugly. (You can read my coverage of that hearing here, here, and here.)
Frankly, Twomey wasn’t prepared. But ICANN was also paying for many years of not responding to the community.
Of course these meetings are a bit humorous and misguided to begin with. It’s basically a bunch of representatives reading aloud a briefing report their staff put together for them.
Question: Will ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom make a power play and suggest it wouldn’t be appropriate for ICANN to attend a U.S. government hearing? It would take some guts to do this right before the IANA contract comes up. But I wouldn’t put it past him.
Couchpotatogal says
I suspect ICANN will have someone there, but I would be surprised if it was Beckstrom. In fact, they will be better served if it isn’t. If they’re smart it will be Kurt Pritz.
Michele says
It will be interesting to see who they’re calling on as “witnesses”.