ICANN
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a non-profit corporation which was created on September 18 1998 in order to take over a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed by other organizations, notably IANA.The contract for ICANN came from the US Department of Commerce and was "sole sourced", which means no-one else (such as the Open Root Server Confederation which was also formed at the time to bid on the contract) was able to submit a bid to perform the task. These tasks include managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of seven new generic top-level domains. Its activities, however, are very controversial.
Since March 27 2003 Paul Twomey is President/CEO of ICANN.
On March 14, 2002, in a public meeting in Accra, in Ghana, ICANN decided amongst other things, to reduce direct public ("at large") participation in how it is run.
ICANN holds periodic public meetings for the expressed purpose of staying in touch with its membership. Critics note that the locations of these meetings are often in countries with disproportionally small Internet access and far away from locations that the majority of the Internet-using public can afford to reach, thus making public input less likely.
In September and October 2003 ICANN played a crucial role in the conflict about VeriSign and its much disputed wildcard DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter of ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, the company shut down the service on October 4 2003. Following this step VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN on February 27 2004, claiming that ICANN has overstepped its authority. Subject of the claim is not only Site Finder, but also VeriSign's much criticised Waiting List Service.
At the last meeting of ICANN in Rome taking place from March 2 to March 6 2004, the Corporation agreed to ask approval of the US Departement of Commerce for the Waiting List Service of VeriSign.