ICANN Nominations' Deadline Approaches

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September 08, 2000 (5:03 PM EDT)

By Mary Mosquera,

Individuals who applied to become at-large members of the organization that governs cyberspace have until midnight GMT Friday to log their nominations for the first ICANN at-large board election.

The midnight time is also the deadline for at-large member applicants to activate their memberships, which will allow them to cast ballots in the organization's experiment in global democracy.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is the organization to which the U.S. government transferred technical administration of the Internet.

Critics say ICANN favors business interests. ICANN board members say stability of the Internet is paramount.

At-large members from around the world will vote from Oct. 1-10 for five at-large members of the board to represent non-commercial interests, such as public interest groups and non-government organizations, in Internet policy-making.

"In two regions, Europe and North America, voters have shown a clear preference for candidates expressing concerns for free speech, privacy, and democracy, or 'civil society values,'" said a commentary on the nominations from the Civil Society Democracy Project of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Every single successful candidate in Europe and North America has advocated civil society values."

ICANN oversees administration of Internet domain names, IP address numbers, and operation of the Internet's root server system.

ICANN will next start a voter education program, featuring a Web page for each nominee and a question-and-answer forum to facilitate public dialogue among the nominees and the at-large members.

At-large members will vote in October for one nominee representing one of five regions of the world from 18 candidates.

A total of 161 individuals were original candidates for nomination from the regions: 3 from Africa; 24 from Asia/Australia/Pacific; 74 from Europe; 7 from Latin America/Caribbean; and 53 from North America.

ICANN launched an at-large membership campaign in February, hoping to get up to 10,000 members from around the world to bring more non-commercial and geographical representation to the Internet governing body.

More than 158,000 people applied to be at-large members by July 31, overwhelming the site's ability to process all the requests so members could participate in selecting nominees. Interested persons needed only to give their name and an e-mail address to become an at-large member.

The ICANN nominating committee selected these candidates for North America: Lyman Chapin; chief scientist of BBN Technologies and a director of CommerceNet; Donald Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland; Lawrence Lessig, professor at Stanford Law School; and Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America.

Individual members also nominated candidates, including Karl Auerbach, a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force and a network architect at Cisco Systems Inc. (stock: CSCO), San Jose, Calif.; and Barbara Simons, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery