ICANN announced yesterday that they have appointed Cyrus Namazi as Senior Vice President of the Global Domains Division (GDD). It’s a newly created position, as they’ve decided to discontinue the role of President of GDD. Since the departure of Akram Atallah, who left ICANN recently to head up Donuts, Namazi has been running GDD. The announcement, therefore, formalises his role.
Namazi will now officially report directly to ICANN’s CEO and be part of the executive team.
Here’s the full announcement:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced that Cyrus Namazi has been appointed to the newly created position of Senior Vice President of the Global Domains Division (GDD), and a member of the Executive Team. Namazi reports to Göran Marby, ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer.
“I have seen first-hand that Cyrus has the knowledge, leadership, and management skills required to effectively lead the Global Domains Division, particularly as the domain name industry continues to grow and mature,” said Marby. “I also look forward to his continued contributions as a member of the ICANN Executive Team.”
Marby went on to note that with the appointment of Namazi to this new position, ICANN is discontinuing the search for a President of GDD.
“I’m pleased to lead such a strong team, and I am personally committed to delivering outstanding levels of service to our global stakeholders,” said Namazi. “We will do this by being responsive, collaborative, and proactively looking for ways to improve our service delivery and address new challenges that may arise in the ever-changing domain name landscape.”
The Global Domains Division was initially established in 2013 to handle the increase in scale resulting from the New gTLD Program and to ensure ICANN’s operational excellence. Since joining ICANN in 2013, Namazi has served as Vice President of the group’s Domain Name Services & Industry Engagement activities, responsible for managing ICANN’s relationships with contracted parties; implementing and supporting the lifecycle of policies, services and contracts; and providing subject matter expertise across the ICANN organization and community. He has served as second in command of GDD since 2016, and most recently as interim head of GDD.
Prior to joining ICANN, Namazi served in a number of executive and management roles in the technology sector, providing consulting services and guidance to bring products from concept, design, and manufacturing to market as Principal and Co-founder at Claro Concepts. Previously, he also managed global marketing and application engineering teams at Conexant Systems, Inc. and held leadership positions at AMD, Broadcom, Infineon Technologies, and Solarflare Communications. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla and an MBA from the University of Southern California, both with honors.
