Update: ICANN president calls for major overhaul

IDG News Service - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the much maligned nonprofit group charged with overseeing basic technical matters related to addressing on the Internet, is in need of fundamental reform, according to a frank assessment of the organization written by its president and presented to board members over the weekend.

"I have concluded that ICANN needs reform: deep, meaningful, structural reform, based on a clearheaded understanding of the successes and failures of the last three years," wrote Stuart Lynn, who has served as president of the organization for the past year.

Lynn blamed a flawed structure and movement away from core technical issues for stalling the organization. His report calls for sweeping changes that would give governments a seat at the table and that would create a new governing structure that does away with an election system that gave every Internet user the chance to vote on some of the directors.

The proposals are sure to spark debate among the many groups and individuals that have a part in ICANN and will likely dominate ICANN's next meeting, scheduled to take place in Accra, Ghana, from March 10-14.

Under the proposed structure, the group's governors will be trimmed from 19 to 15. Of those, 10 will be nominated to their posts -- five by governments and five by an open nominating committee; four will come from three policy councils and a technical advisory committee; and the final member will be the president.

The structure Lynn envisages would put an end to ICANN's attempt to connect with average Internet users through its at-large elections. The elections, which have taken place just once, resulted in the appointment of five people to the ICANN board of directors, each representing one of five regions. A little more than 34,000 of the 76,000 people who registered and became eligible to vote took part in the elections in 2000.

In a conference call Monday afternoon, Lynn rebuffed the wave of criticism that had already arisen over his proposal to cut out the At-Large elections.

"It is absolutely not the case that we are just trying to deal with the At-Large [issue]," Lynn said. "These are very deep and substantial reforms and if we don't change things, ICANN is not going to work."

Still, the removal of the public from the ICANN process is central to Lynn's argument that ICANN's mission should be much narrower than it has become, focusing on technical discussion instead of tackling other issues and embracing the entire Internet community.

"The core