Designated ICANN CEO Takes Over Early

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that designated CEO Fadi Chehadé has assumed his new position.

Chehadé’s takeover of the organisation that is responsible for managing essential parts of the domain name system (DNS) and other internet infrastructure assets comes early by two weeks, as it originally had been announced for 1 October.

With the surprise announcement were two new team members named by the new CEO: Tarek Kamel, former Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Egypt (until 2011), and Sally Costerton, most recently CEO of Hill & Knowlton Public Relations for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These are expected to help strengthen ICANN’s international engagement, the ICANN release said.

Kamel will be “Senior Advisor to the President of ICANN, who currently leads the development of an Africa strategy, [and] will assume the role of Senior Advisor for Government Affairs, leading all aspects of Government Engagement“. Costerton will lead the new position of Stakeholder Engagement, a role that will incorporate the communications function. Both will be based in ICANN’s European region. ICANN did not give a reason for the earlier takeover by the new CEO.

ICANN’s largest project at the moment is the introduction of new generic Top Level Domains like .shop, .hiv, .london into the DNS.