NomCom Announces Wolfgang Kleinwächter As New ICANN Board Member

Wolfgang Kleinwächter imageICANN’s Nominating Committee (NomCom) has announced Wolfgang Kleinwächter has been selected as an ICANN board member

Wolfgang Kleinwächter imageICANN’s Nominating Committee (NomCom) has announced Wolfgang Kleinwächter has been selected as an ICANN board member.

As per the news release below, the position became vacant following the recent resignation of Board member Ms. Judith Duavit Vazquez. Kleinwächter will take up his position on the ICANN Board of Directors immediately and will serve for the remainder of the term vacated by Ms. Vazquez, ending at the conclusion of the 2014 ICANN Annual General Meeting.

 

The Nominating Committee Announces Selection of a Member to the ICANN Board of Directors

The 2013 Nominating Committee (NomCom) is pleased to announce the selection of Wolfgang Kleinwächter as a member to the ICANN Board of Directors.

The position became vacant following the recent resignation of Board member Ms. Judith Duavit Vazquez, selected by the 2011 NomCom. Wolfgang Kleinwächter will take up his position on the ICANN Board of Directors immediately and will serve for the remainder of the term vacated by Ms. Vazquez, ending at the conclusion of the 2014 ICANN Annual General Meeting.

Yrjo Lansipuro
Chair, 2013 Nominating Committee


Wolfgang Kleinwächter is a Professor for International Communication Policy and Regulation at the Department for Media and Information Sciences of the University of Aarhus in Denmark where he teaches “Internet Policy and Regulation” since 1998.He has studied Communication, International Law and International Relations at the University of Leipzig (B.A. 1971, M.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1981). His Academic Teaching Experiences includes courses and lectures on Internet Governance at numerous universities around the globe, including, inter alia die School of International Services at American University in Washington D.C. and the Faculty of Journalism at Lomonossow University in Moscow.He is involved in Internet Governance issues since 1997 and has participated – in various capacities – in 45 ICANN meetings. He served five years in the NomCom (2009/2010 as its chair) and was since 2011 a member of the GNSO Council, elected by the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) where he is a member of the NCUC.

In the WSIS process he was a member of the Civil Society Bureau, co-chaired the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) and was appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as for the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). In the Tunis Summit he was part of the governmental delegation of Denmark. Between 2006 and 2010 he served as Special Adviser to the Chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Nitin Desai. In 2011/2012 he was a member of the UNCSTD Working Group on IGF Improvement. In 2012 he joined the German governmental delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) and served in the Informal Expert Group of the World Telecommunication Policy Forum in 2013.

He is a co-founder of the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EURODIG), the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GIGANET), the Summer School on Internet Governance (SSIG) and chair of the ICANN Studienkreis. He served in the Advisory Board of the dotmobi Registry and became in 2010 an International Adviser to CNNIC. In the EU, he was involved in the Safer Internet Action Plan (SIAP), the Task Force on the Internet of Things and the Inter-Regional Information Society Initiative (IRISI). In the Council of Europe he chaired the Expert Group on Cross Border Internet (2009 – 2011).

For more than 20 years he was a member of the Council of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and served as the president of the IAMCR Law Section between 1988 and 1998. He was a member of the Program Committee for INET 2002 in Washington D.C. and a Key-Note Speaker, Panelist, Moderator and Rapporteur of numerous international conferences.

His research work includes more than 100 international publications, including 7 books. Since 2011 he is the editor of the publication series MIND (Multistakeholder Internet Dialogue). He also served as member of several advisory boards of scientific journals, including Transnational Data and Communication Report, Computer Law and Security Report, The Journal of Media Law and Practice, Gazette and the Journal for Virtual Reality.

He testified in Hearings in the Deutsche Bundestag and the European Parliament. He is Chair of the Board of Medienstadt Leipzig e.V., a recognized At Large Structure under the ICANN Bylaws and got the “Internet Award” the highest Internet prize in Germany, by the German Internet Economy Association (eco) in 2012.

Daily Wrap: .POST Goes Live, Go Daddy Denies Front Running, .HOTEL Objections, 3 gTLD Applications Withdrawn

A new gTLD came into existence this month with the .POST gTLD entering the root of the internet. The gTLD was first approved in December 2009 and there has been a project underway to get it operational since then. In June 2012 Afilias was chosen as the .POST registry operator

A new gTLD came into existence this month with the .POST gTLD entering the root of the internet. The gTLD was first approved in December 2009 and there has been a project underway to get it operational since then. In June 2012 Afilias was chosen as the .POST registry operator.

Go Daddy was recently accused of misusing customer domain name search activity for profit by a blogger. And on a posting on the Inside Go Daddy blog, the company vehemently denied they have anything to do with front running, saying they never have “and never will front run domain names. Ever.”

The process is called domain name front running and it means a registrar monitors customer searches and then registers the domain names for their own purposes.

The posting asks “why would someone believe they experienced front running?” And then answers saying “sheer volume. As the world’s largest registrar, the volume of domain name activity, both in terms of availability searches and registrations we see, is significant. Go Daddy performs tens of millions of availability checks for our customers each day, many of which are searches for the same domain name by different customers.”

“In fact, more than six percent of customer searches for available domain names are performed by more than one person each day. This overlap in domain name requests happens every day. As unique as customers believe their domain name ideas are, there’s more ‘innovation collision’ than many people realize. With so many domain name registrations happening every day, there is a good probability a domain name you searched for is also being searched by someone else.”

Some of the world’s major hotel chains are planning to object to six of the seven .HOTEL gTLD applications, along with applications for .HOTELS, .HOTEIS and .HOTELES, Domain Incite reported.

The coalition of hotel chains says “they want the Independent Objector to object to these applications on community grounds. Failing that, they’ll file their own official Community Objections.”

The “coalition’s members include the Choice Hotels, InterContinental, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Starwood and Wyndham hotel chains. Together, they say they have over 25,000 hotels in over 100 countries.” The applicant that has gained the support of the hotel coalition is DOTHOTEL.

Domain Incite is also speculating that it is Google that has withdrawn three of its gTLD applications with the likely gTLDs withdrawn being .AND, .ARE and .EST, “the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes for the United Arab Emirates, Estonia and Andorra, which would be classified as country names and therefore banned by the Applicant Guidebook.”

Last week ICANN hosted a webinar that Domain Incite participated in which revealed, among other things, in addition to the three gTLD applications that have been withdrawn, there have been 49 requests to change applications, the vast majority of applications will receive clarifying questions with around 90 per cent receiving clarifying questions on financial status and around half of geographic applications not yet supplying letters of support from the relevant government.

Ram Mohan has been reappointed as the Security and Stability Advisory Committee non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board with the new term commencing at the conclusion of the 2012 annual meeting. Mohan commenced this role in 2009. Mohan is Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology Officer of Afilias.