ICANN Blogs

Read ICANN Blogs to stay informed of the latest policymaking activities, regional events, and more.

Farewell, My Friends

30 June 2012
By Rod Beckstrom

Today, July 1st, 2012 I pass the ICANN CEO baton to Akram Atallah, who joined us as Chief Operating Officer some two years ago. We are extremely pleased to see Akram stepping up into this position until Fadi Chehadé joins in the fall.

It has been a great pleasure and honor to serve ICANN as President and CEO.

These have been three of the busiest, most intense years in a rich and varied career I have been fortunate to have. ICANN has always been caught in the middle of a global storm of politics surrounding the root of the Internet, and these three years have been no different. Despite the enormous and continuous pressures placed upon this small organization, as I shared in my opening speech, I think we made key progress in three areas. 1) Overhauling the organization, 2) opening up and providing further security to the global domain name system (DNS) and 3) further internationalizing the organization. Everyone has their interpretation of what took place these past years. I have summarized some of my perceptions in the following document “Three Years of Connections and Conflict” [PDF, 764 KB] which has benefited from edits and review of the Executive Management team. Much of the material came from the two most recent annual reports. There are always countless opinions and views on ICANN and the attached summarizes my own impressions of some of our accomplishments as well as challenges.

I thank the Board of Directors of ICANN, all of you, for the unique opportunity I had to serve this organization during these transformative three years.

I am now heading off for a vacation with my family who has done so much to support me these past three years as I was often off to far reaches of the globe on ICANN related activities. I am deeply grateful to them for this.

I have remained very busy literally until today, my last day in this specific role.

For any who wish to remain in touch, you can contact me via Twitter or, if you wish, follow my periodic email updates.

Authors

Rod Beckstrom

Former Former President & CEO