Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

ICANN’s top DC lobbyist gets consumer safeguards role

Kevin Murphy, January 5, 2017, Domain Policy

ICANN has named veteran staffer Jamie Hedlund as its new senior VP for contractual compliance and consumer safeguards.
It’s a new executive team role, created by the departure of chief contract compliance officer Allen Grogan. Grogan announced his intention to leave ICANN last May, and has been working there part-time since August.
The “consumer safeguards” part of the job description is new.
ICANN first said it planned to hire such a person in late 2014, but the position was never filled, despite frequent poking by anti-spam activists.
Now it appears that the two roles — compliance and consumer safeguards — have been combined.
This makes sense, give that ICANN has no power to safeguard consumers other than the enforcement of its contracts with registries and registrars.
From the outside, it does not immediately strike me as an obvious move for Hedlund.
While his job title has changed regularly during his six or so years at ICANN, he’s mainly known as the organization’s only in-house Washington DC government lobbyist.
He played a key role in the recent IANA transition, which saw the US government sever its formal oversight ties with ICANN.
His bio shows no obvious experience in consumer protection roles.
His replacement in the government relations role is arguably just as surprising — Duncan Burns, a veteran PR man who will keep his current job title of senior VP of global communications.
The appointments seem to indicate that lobbying the US government is not as critical to ICANN in the post-transition world, and that institutional experience in the rarefied world of ICANN is a key qualifier for senior positions.