New ICANN Boss Rejigs Management

ICANN’s new CEO Fadi Chehadé started working full-time for ICANN yesterday. His first order of business? Rejigging the organisation’s management structures and bringing in new execs.

It’s going to take time to fully understand the implications and the impact of the changes that were made in yesterday’s announcement, and you can probably expect to see more changes being made over the next few weeks and months as Fadi Chehadé settles in to his new role.

So what was changed?

Kurt Pritz has been moved sideways into the newly created role of Chief of Strategy.

Maguy Serad gets promoted and the Compliance function is moved away from legal with Serad now reporting directly to the CEO.

Akram Atallah, who was interim CEO, moves back to being COO but takes over several of the functions that were previously under Pritz’s purview. He’ll be in charge of Registry and Registrar Services, the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program and Security. (Does this mean Jeff Moss is gone, or simply reporting to Atallah?)

Tarek Kamel becomes Senior Advisor for Government Affairs, which is a new position. Considering ICANN’s rather “difficult” relationship with the GAC over the last couple of years and increasing concerns with respect to government involvement in all things Internet the creation of the new role isn’t a surprise.

Sally Costerton has been hired to handle the new role of Stakeholder Engagement. Whether this is a completely new role or simply a revamping of previous attempts at addressing participation etc., isn’t clear.

Both Kamel and Costerton will be based in Europe, where ICANN already has a number of staff primarily in the policy development area.

David Olive, who heads up the policy team, will now report directly to the CEO as well.

But, as others have noted, there still are gaps that remain to be filled.

Interesting times…

Related articles

• Fadi Chehade starts at ICANN today, immediately shakes up senior management (domainincite.com)
• ICANN Makes Senior Management Restructure to Fix Organizational Weaknesses (circleid.com)
• ICANN’s new CEO announces bold restructure (news.dot-nxt.com)
• New ICANN CEO is Out of the Blocks with Ambitious Operational Plans (icann.org)