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2016-10-06

ICANN President & CEO Busy Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic

ICANN President & CEO busy rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic:
This is the problem when the ICANN Board of Directors replaced former ICANN President & CEO Fadi Chehade (who quit in March, 2016, 3½ years into a 5-year contract), with a complete stranger to ICANN, Goran Marby of Sweden, who had no prior experience in any aspect of ICANN, nor any of its three "communities"--domain names, numbers (RIRs), protocols (IETF).

Marby, who started as ICANN President & CEO in May of this year, was previously Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority. Shortly after his appointment was announced in February, 2016, the ICANN Board members, and other ICANN insiders, appeared unaware and surprised when Domain Mondo pointed to reports out of Sweden indicating Marby's temperament and leadership style might be incompatible with ICANN's collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance, resulting in a press conference--MP3 audio archived here and here--in which a Bloomberg BNA reporter asked Marby (@3:45 in the audio) about one of those reports, quoting a Swedish telecom operator that Marby's style was "lacking in transparency," and "threatening."

Perhaps that is why Marby has kept a low profile at ICANN but for his recent appearance before U.S. Senator Ted Cruz's (R-TX) recent Subcommittee Hearing in Washington, D.C., (video), where Marby, under grilling by Cruz, looked like a "deer caught in the headlights."

Clearly, it will take Marby at least a year, if not two, before he is no longer "wet behind the ears" when it comes to being President & CEO of ICANN. Unfortunately, that has given ICANN insiders, who are part of the organization's culture problem, ample time to indoctrinate Marby, who may be completely unaware of ICANN's systemic dysfunction and other problems, including the fact that it was the "ICANN community" alone (not NTIA, ICANN Board members, management or staff), who insisted on the accountability component of the IANA stewardship transition.

This may be evident in Marby's list of his ICANN Executive Team Members as of October 4, 2016, see list below with asterisks marking members who are a known *crony of former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé & ICANN GDD President Akram Atallah. Atallah reportedly got his "old friend" Chehadé the CEO job at ICANN, and in turn, was appointed by Chehadé to the second-highest paying position at ICANN which provides Atallah a total annual compensation + benefits package approaching $1,000,000 in value--who says you can't "profit" from a "non-profit" corporation--move over Bill and Hillary!

ICANN Executive Team Members (Oct 4, 2016):
Göran Marby; *Akram Atallah; *Allen Grogan; *Ashwin Rangan; David Conrad; Diane Schroeder; Duncan Burns; John Jeffrey; Sally Costerton; *Susanna Bennett; Tarek Kamel; Theresa Swinehart; Xavier Calvez.
This list contains many of the same ICANN team members in charge when the ICANN community expressed such dissatisfaction with ICANN leadership and insisted on the ICANN accountability components now known as Work Stream 1 (WS1) and Work Stream 2 (WS2). Compounding the problem, the ICANN Board of Directors has been dysfunctional and failed to properly oversee ICANN management and staff, leading to such embarrassments as the IRP Declarations in the DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA Trust) and Dot Registry cases.

Maybe ICANN wasn't really ready for the IANA transition.

See also ICANN Management Organization Chart 01Oct2016: management-org-01oct16-en.pdf (pdf) embed below:


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