Zeenews Bureau
Prague: ICANN(the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organisation that supervises Internet domain names has appointed Fadi Chehade as its new chief executive to take on some of the major challenges facing the non-profit body in the near future.
Fadi Chehade, who has also worked for IBM (IBM.N), will join ICANN in October. He is presently the CEO at Vocado, a company that provides cloud-based administrative software for educational institutions. 50-yeard old Chehade will replace Rod Beckstrom, who has been in charge of the organization since 2009, and whose tenure ends in July.
Chehade told reporters in Prague, where ICANN holds its 44th public meeting this weekend, that he would pursue consensus-building among all the stakeholders involved in affairs affecting the internet.
"Multi-stakeholder models require patience ... but I believe this process is nearly sacred," Chehade said.
ICANN has suffered several setbacks and criticisms in pursuing its most ambitious internet expansion project, to establish up to 1000 new generic top-level domain names as branded replacements for .com or .org.
It has caused controversy because many brand owners felt they would have to take part in the expensive project or risk rivals bagging domains that could be mistaken for their own.
The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and 26 other organisations asked ICANN last year to make sure domain names such as .un could not be seized under the new system.
ICANN says it has built in safeguards against such so-called cyber squatting.
It has also suffered several software glitches in April during and after the application process.
Chief Operating Officer Akram Attalah earlier said that he believed the address expansion project had cleared the biggest hurdles.
Chehade, born to Egyptian parents in Lebanon, where he lived until escaping the civil war there at the age of 18, has led a number of IT companies in the United States.
With Agency input
