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| ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has announced his last day at ICANN will be March 12, 2016 (Icannphotos, Oct 17, 2012) "I expect to add other roles to my portfolio" --Fadi Chehade, My Transition from ICANN |
- Who will be the new President and CEO of ICANN? (And whoever it is, good luck!--You're going to need it!)
- Once current ICANN President and CEO Fadi Chehade is gone, whether March 12, 2016, or sooner, who will be more relieved: Steve Crocker or Larry Strickling?
- Will Fadi move to China and run the "Wuzhen Initiative" for the Communist Party and government of China? Or instead, will Fadi follow the footsteps of his former ICANN Chief Strategy Officer and become Executive Director of his favorite ICANN stakeholder-lobbyist organization? Or, alternatively, will Fadi be offered a part-time job (to add to his portfolio--"it's payback time, baby!") by the only ICANN stakeholder-lobbyist organization which ICANN actually "got in bed with" (joined as a full member) during Fadi's tenure as President & CEO?
- Will NTIA and the Obama administration pull the plug on the IANA transition after Chehade's Wuzhen shenanigans, OR will Congress actually allow the IANA Transition to happen (assuming it gets that far), OR will Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or the Real Donald TRUMP stop it dead in its tracks?
- Will both, or either, .WEB and .WEBS be delegated into the Internet Root in 2016?
- Will Google finally figure out it has no clue how to market domain names or run a registrar or registry, and should have never gotten into the domain names business?
- When will Alphabet realize its brand name and domain name [abc.xyz] are both lame?
- What will happen to Yahoo?
- Which new gTLD will be the first to Go Dark (and take down all its websites with it)?
- Which new gTLD registry operator will be the first to file bankruptcy or receivership?
- How will the U.S. government ensure that its trusted contractor, Verisign, continues as the Internet's Root Zone Maintainer?
- Will Verisign be indemnified by ICANN, and PTI, once Verisign no longer has the benefit of U.S. government contractor immunity as Root Zone Maintainer? In that case, if ICANN's new gTLDs expansion crashes the Internet, could Verisign end up owning ICANN and PTI and/or all their assets--deja vu Network Solutions circa 1995?
- When will the music stop for Neustar and $NSR shareholders in 2016?
- Which U.S. law firm will be the first to file a lawsuit (e.g., antitrust) against ICANN, or its subsidiary PTI, once ICANN no longer has U.S. government contractor immunity (tentative end date: September 30, 2016)? What new potential legal liabilities (pdf) will every gTLD registry operator have after ICANN is no longer a U.S. government contractor?
- What will be more popular with governments, network administrators, and consumers around the world at the end of 2016: ad blockers or TLD blockers?
- Will ICANN ever be accountable? OK, everyone already knows the answer to this one: No.
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