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Poblete to replace Disspain on ICANN board

Kevin Murphy, March 3, 2020, Domain Policy

Chilean registry manager Patricio Poblete will join ICANN’s board of directors this October, replacing longstanding member Chris Disspain.
PobleteThe Country Code Names Supporting Organization confirmed Poblete as its new nominee at the weekend following a lengthy election process also fought by Australian Nigel Phair and South African Calvin Browne.
Poblete is the director of NIC Chile, the ccTLD registry for some almost 600,000 .cl domains. He’s been involved in ICANN since its very beginning.
In the election, he received 57 votes compared to Browne’s 42 and Phair’s eight.
Disspain, a very influential member of the board who was vice-chair for years until he stepped aside last September, is being forced out due to term limits in ICANN’s bylaws. He’s almost done serving his third and final three-year term.
Poblete will become one of two ccNSO-selected directors. The other is Nigel Roberts, who runs the Channel Islands ccTLDs. Roberts’ term ends next year.
The nomination frees up a spot for a possible future director from Asia-Pacific, while reducing the available spots from Latin America.

Botterman is new ICANN chair

Kevin Murphy, September 10, 2019, Domain Policy

ICANN has announced that Maarten Botterman has been selected as its new chair.
He, along with newly selected vice chair León Felipe Sánchez Ambia, will take their seats after a formal board vote to come at the end of ICANN’s annual general meeting in Montreal next month.
Botterman replaces Cherine Chalaby, who has been in the role for two years. Chalaby is term-limited, having joined the board nine years ago, and will leave ICANN after Montreal.
Chris Disspain and Ron da Silva also stood for the chair, Chalaby said in a blog post last night. Becky Burr stood unsuccessfully for vice chair.
Disspain, currently vice chair, has stepped aside immediately to be replaced for the next month by Botterman. Disspain’s nine years come to an end next year.
Botterman is Dutch, based in Rotterdam, where he works as an “independent strategic advisor” at his own company, GNKS Consult.
He’s also on the board of the non-profit NLnet Foundation, which funds internet research, and is a former chair of Public Interest Registry, which runs .org.
He’s got a background in the Dutch government and the European Commission.
He was put on the board by the Nominating Committee three years ago and renewed for another three years last month. Theoretically, he could stay as ICANN’s chair for the next six years.

ICANN names new directors, replaces Facebook exec

Kevin Murphy, August 20, 2019, Domain Policy

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has picked two new directors to join the board of directors this November.
They are: Mandla Msimang, a South African technology policy consultant, and Ihab Osman, a serial director who ran Sudan’s ccTLD two decades ago but whose main current gig appears to be managing a Saudi Arabian dairy company.
Dutch domain industry figure Maarten Botterman, who had a stint heading Public Interest Registry, has been reappointed for his second three-year term.
But Tunisian Khaled Koubaa, head of public policy for North Africa at Facebook, who joined the board with Botterman in 2016 and also previously worked for PIR, is not being asked to return.
Msimang and Osman replace Koubaa and Cherine Chalaby, the current Egyptian-born chair, who after nine years on the board is term-limited.
Basically, it’s two Africans out, two Africans in.
In a statement, NomCom chair Damon Ashcraft noted that the committee had received 56 applications from Africa, more than any other region. Only two applications were received from North Americans.
This is perhaps unsurprising. NomCom had been duty-bound to pick at least one African, in order to maintain ICANN’s bylaws-mandated geographic balance, but there were no spots available for North Americans.
Replacing one male director with one female may also go some way to appease critics — including the ICANN board itself — who have claimed that the board needs to be more gender balanced.
The switch means that, after November, the eight NomCom appointees on the board will be evenly split in terms of gender. However, only seven out of the total 20 directors will be women.
The other directors are selected by ICANN’s various supporting organizations and advisory committees.
NomCom received applications from 42 women and 85 men this year.
ICANN has not yet published the official bios for the two new directors, but here’s what the internets has to say about about them.
Mandla Msimang. Msimang’s career appears to show her playing both hunter and gamekeeper in the South African telecommunications market, first working for the national regulator, and later for leading mobile phone operator Cell C. In 2007 she founded Pygma Consulting, a boutique IT consultancy, which she still runs.
Ihab Osman. Osman’s day job appears to be general manager of NADEC New Businesses, a unit of Nadec, a foods company partly owned by the Saudi government. He’s also president of the US-Sudan Business Council, which seeks to promote trade between the two countries. He has a long career in telecommunications, and from 1997 until 2002 was in charge of Sudan’s .sd ccTLD.
Both new directors will take their seats at the end of ICANN’s annual general meeting in Montreal this November.
There’s no word yet on who’s taking over as chair.

KSK vote was NOT unanimous

Kevin Murphy, September 18, 2018, Domain Policy

ICANN’s board of directors on Sunday voted to approve the forthcoming security key change at the DNS root, but there was some dissent.
Director Avri Doria, a Nominating Committee appointee, said today that she provided the lone vote against the DNSSEC KSK rollover, which is expected to cause temporary internet access problems for potentially a couple million people next month.
I understand there was also a single abstention to Sunday’s vote.
Doria has released a dissenting statement, in which she said the absence of an external, peer-reviewed study of the risks could prove a problem.

The greatest risk is that out of the millions that will fail after the roll over, some that are serious and may even be critical, may occur; if this happens the lack of peer reviewed studies may be a liability for ICANN, perhaps not legal, but in terms of our reputation as protectors of the stability & security of internet system of names.

She added that she was concerned about the extent that the public has been notified of the rollover plan, and questioned whether the current risk mitigation plan is sufficient.
Doria said she found comments filed by Verisign (pdf) particularly informative to her eventual vote, as well as comments from the At-Large Advisory Committee (pdf), Business Constituency (pdf) and Registries Stakeholder Group (pdf).
These groups had called for more study and data, better outreach, more clearly defined success/failure benchmarks, and more delay.
Doria noted in her dissenting statement that the ICANN board did not have a chance to quiz any of the minority of the members of the Security and Stability Advisory Committee who had called for further delay.
The board’s resolution, apparently arrived at after two hours of formal in-person discussions in Brussels at the weekend, is expected to be published shortly.
The rollover, which has already been delayed a year, is now scheduled to go ahead October 11.
Any impact is expected to be felt within a couple of days, as the change ripples out across the DNS.
ICANN says that any network operator impacted by the change has a simple fix: turn off DNSSEC. Then, if they want, they can update their keys and turn it back on again.

Van der Laan to leave ICANN board

Kevin Murphy, September 17, 2018, Domain Policy

Former Dutch politician Lousewies van der Laan is to leave the ICANN board of directors next month and be replaced with the former CEO of the Serbian ccTLD.
ICANN said yesterday that Danko Jevtovic, who headed RNIDS from 2013 until July last year, has been selected to occupy van der Laan’s seat following the Annual General Meeting in Barcelona.
Van der Laan, who had been selected by the Nominating Committee for a second term, has had to decline the offer “due to unforeseen family obligations”, ICANN said.
Jevtovic will take his seat at the same time as fellow NomCom appointee, Tripti Sinha of the University of Maryland, who oversees management of the DNS D-root server and replaces term-limited George Sadowsky.
El Salvadorean ccTLD founder Rafael “Lito” Ibarra is the third NomCom appointee this year, starting his second term next month.

Roberts elected to ICANN board

Kevin Murphy, December 4, 2017, Domain Policy

Channel Islands ccTLD operator Nigel Roberts has been elected to ICANN’s board of directors.
He gathered an impressive 67% of the votes in an anonymous poll of ccNSO members conducted last week.
He received 60 votes versus the 29 cast for his only opponent, Pierre Ouedraogo, an internet pioneer from Burkina Faso.
Roberts, a Brit, runs ChannelIsles.net, registry manager for .gg (for the islands Guernsey, Alderney and Sark) and .je (for Jersey). These are the independent UK dependencies found floating between England and France.
He’s been in the ICANN community since pretty much day one.
His election still has to be formally confirmed by the ccNSO Council and then the ICANN Empowered Community.
Roberts will not take his seat on the ICANN board until October next year, at the end of public meeting in Barcelona.
He will replace Mike Silber, the South African who’s currently serving his ninth and therefore final year as a director.
The other ccNSO seat is held by Australian ICANN vice chair Chris Disspain, who is also term-limited and will leave at the end of 2019.

Sanchez beats Greenberg to ICANN board seat

Kevin Murphy, February 27, 2017, Domain Policy

Mexican intellectual property lawyer León Felipe Sánchez Ambía has been selected to become a member of the ICANN board of directors by the At-Large, comfortably beating his opponent in a poll this weekend.
Sanchez took 13 votes (65%) to 10-year At-Large veteran Alan Greenberg’s 7, in a vote of At-Large Advisory Committee members and Regional At Large Organization chairs.
He’ll take the seat due to be vacated in November by Rinalia Abdul Rahim, who will leave the board after one three-year term.
He’s currently head of the IP practice and a partner at Fulton & Fulton in Mexico City. According to his bio:

He is co-lead for the Mexican chapter of Creative Commons and advisor to different Government bodies that include the Digital Strategy Coordination Office of the Mexican Presidency, the Special Commission on Digital Agenda and IT of the Mexican House of Representatives and the Science and Technology Commission of the Mexican Senate.
He drafted the Internet Users Rights Protection Act for Mexico and has been very active on issues like Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA), Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and other local initiatives of the same kind, always advocating to defend users’ and creators’ rights in order to achieve a balance between regulation and freedom.

Sanchez is certainly the less experienced of the two short-listed men when it comes to length of involvement in the ICANN community, but he’s a member of the ALAC and is deeply involved as a volunteer in ICANN accountability work following the IANA transition.
The At-Large was recently criticized in a report (pdf) for the perception that it is “controlled by a handful of ICANN veterans who rotate between the different leadership positions”.
Sanchez’s appointment to the board may have an effect on that perception.
The selection of another (white, male) North American to the board, replacing an Asian woman, will of course create more pressure to increase geographic and gender diversity on the other groups within ICANN that select board members.
A written Q&A between the two candidates and At-Large members can be found here.

Who are the five new ICANN directors?

Kevin Murphy, November 15, 2016, Domain Policy

Almost a quarter of ICANN’s board of directors were replaced at the organization’s annual general meeting in Hyderabad last week.
Five of the 21-strong board are fresh faces, though many will be familiar to regular ICANN and industry watchers.
They hail from five different countries in four of ICANN’s five regions. One is female.
They replace Bruce Tonkin, Erika Mann, Suzanne Woolf, Kuo-Wei Wu and Bruno Lanvin, each of whom have served terms between three and nine years.
The newcomers all get initial, renewable, three-year terms.
Here’s some abbreviated bios of the newly appointed directors.
Maarten Botterman
Appointed by the Nominating Committee, Botterman is an internet governance consultant with strong historic ties to the registry industry.
From the Netherlands, he was chairman of .org manager Public Interest Registry for eight years until July 2016 and served as its interim CEO for several months in 2010.
Prior to that, he held advisory roles in the Dutch and European Union governments.
Becky Burr
American Burr replaces term-limited Bruce Tonkin as the GNSO contracted parties representative to the board. Since 2012 she’s been chief privacy officer of Neustar. Before that, she was a lawyer in private practice.
There are very few people more intimately familiar with ICANN. In the late 1990s, while working at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration, she was a key player in ICANN’s creation.
Khaled Koubaa
Koubaa, a Tunisian, is founder of the Arab World Internet Institute, a non-profit dedicated to improving internet knowledge in the Arab region, and until recently head of Middle-East and North Africa public policy at Google.
He was selected by the NomCom. He is also a former member of NomCom, having sat on it during its 2008/9 session. He’s also been a volunteer adviser to PIR in the past.
Akinori Maemura
Hailing from Japan, Maemura works for IP address registry JPNIC. He was selected for the ICANN board by the Address Supporting Organization.
Until recently, he was chair of the executive council of APNIC, which is responsible for distributing IP addresses in the Asia-Pacific region.
Kaveh Ranjbar
Iranian-born, Netherlands-based Ranjbar is chief information officer of RIPE NCC, the European IP address authority.
He was appointed to the ICANN board by the Root Server System Advisory Committee.

Three new ICANN directors started today

Kevin Murphy, October 22, 2015, Domain Policy

A former Dutch politician, a cable company VP and a Latin American ccTLD manager joined the ICANN board of directors today.
The three new directors took their seats at the conclusion of the ICANN 54 public meeting in Dublin.
Two were Nominating Committee appointees, the third was selected by the Address Supporting Organization to replace six-year veteran Ray Plzak.
Lousewies van der Laan is possibly the highest-profile new director.
She is a former politician who has sat as a member of both Dutch national and European parliaments.
She was a member of the super liberal D66 party in the Netherlands, briefly leading whilst it was part of a governing coalition before a leadership vote defeat and her subsequent retirement from politics in 2006.
Wikipedia has her as a former party spokesperson for “foreign policy, higher education, justice, technology, European affairs and gay rights”
Since then, she has spent time as chief of staff of the president of the International Criminal Court and an independent public affairs consultant.
She’s the second former MEP to sit on the current ICANN board, after German Facebook lobbyist Erika Mann.
The other NomCom appointee is Rafael “Lito” Ibarra, who runs SVNet, the ccTLD manager for El Salvador’s .sv domain.
According to ICANN, he is known as the “father of the Internet” in El Salvador, due to his contributions over the last couple of decades.
He seems to have received the .sv delegation from Jon Postel himself, in the pre-ICANN days.
He’s also on the board of LACNIC, the Latin American IP address registry.
The ASO appointee is Ron da Silva, VP of network engineering at US cable giant Time Warner Cable.
His previous employers include AOL and Sprint. He’s also been chair of ARIN’s advisory council.
The NomCom also reappointed incumbent George Sadowsky, who already has six years of ICANN board service under his belt.
The other two departing directors were Wolfang Kleinwachter and Gonzalo Navarro.

Satellite policy expert named ICANN director

Kevin Murphy, August 31, 2012, Domain Policy

ICANN has named Olga Madruga-Forti, an Argentinian telecoms policy expert, as the newest member of its board of directors.
Selected by this year’s Nominating Committee, Madruga-Forti will take over from R. Ramaraj when his second term ends at the Toronto meeting this October.
According to the biography provided by ICANN, she has extensive experience of telecommunications policy, particularly related to satellite, in both public and private sectors.
She currently works for ARSAT in Buenes Aires as international counsel. She’s previously worked for Iridium, Loral and the US Federal Communications Commission.
ICANN pointed out that she represents telcos at the International Telecommunications Union, a relevant data point, perhaps, given the WCIT conference coming up in December.
Madruga-Forti ticks one of the Latin-American boxes on the ICANN board.
NomCom has also reappointed two other directors for second terms on the board: Gonzalo Navarro (Latin-America) and the reliably contrarian George Sadowsky (North America).
New leadership members of three ICANN supporting organizations have also been selected by NomCom.
Jennifer Wolfe of the intellectual property law firm WolfeSBMC, which counts new gTLD applicants Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods among its clients, has been appointed to GNSO Council.
I believe she’s destined to replace Carlos Dionisio Aguirre when his term is up later this year.
Canadian Alan Greenberg and Frenchman Jean-Jacques Subrenat have been reappointed to the At-Large Advisory Committee.
Mary Wong, who currently sits on the GNSO Council representing non-commercial stakeholders, has been appointed to the ccNSO Council.
The full biographies of all 2012 NomCom appointees can be found here.