Fadi Chedhadé is President and CEO of ICANN. However, some now refer to him as Fadi Charade because of the inconsistent answers he has been giving to simple questions:
Will ICANN move to Switzerland? The answer depends on which Fadi Chehadé you believe: the one who spoke in French in February at a hearing of the French Senate (see video above) that ICANN’s Geneva office, which had opened the week before he testified, did not have the legal structure it should, “as it is an NGO and ICANN should think about having a more international structure” and later on the French radio program “Place de la toile” said he would like to see the creation of “parallel, legal, international structure (maybe in Switzerland) for ICANN,” adding “This is new, this is the first time;” OR the Fadi Chehadé who testified under oath before a US House Judiciary Subcommittee in April that he had no plans to take ICANN out of the U.S. (source).
Some may ask, what difference does it make? It makes a DIFFERENCE --
One of the most important issues in the pending IANA transition is under what legal system disputes over future Internet policy will be adjudicated. Currently, because ICANN is under contract to the U.S. government, and is a California non-profit corporation based in Los Angeles, California and U.S. law have precedence. Should ICANN relocate to another country, say Switzerland, things might be very different – and in a way that not only harms U.S. political interests (see: Daily Caller article), but economic interests of the global business community -- millions of businesses, in the US and globally, have invested billions of dollars buying and developing dot com domain names, with the understanding that US legal jurisdiction, US rule of law, and US government oversight of the dot com Registry agreement would continue indefinitely.
"Things in the rest of the world operate very differently from how they operate in the United States – something most people fail to realize, even if they know it instinctively." (source)
As always, the devil is in the details.
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