Rod Beckstrom officially appointed as ICANN’s new CEO

Rod Beckstrom was officially appointed as ICANN’s new CEO during the ICANN board meeting in Sydney, Australia in June 2009.

As part of his vision for ICANN, Beckstrom has highlighted 4 areas of primary focus including Internationalization of Domain Names, efforts in the deployment of DNSSEC, and the introduction of new generic Top-Level Domains.

On IDNs he had the following to say in his speech:

“The first step is to support the implementation of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) so that businessmen in Russia or India, as just two examples, can use their native languages and language scripts to write their domain names, and can access written information and other content in the same way. Perhaps it is appropriate that this very significant change in the Internet marks its roughly 40th anniversary. That same forty years ago, man’s first footsteps on the moon enlightened mankind’s view of his place in the universe. In the same way, IDNs will guarantee that all mankind can have a place on the Internet in their native script.

From here on, once IDNs are released and supported, every language group in the world that signs up and implements their language will be able to see their Internet in ways unimaginable until now. Thus, the rollout of IDNs over the next year is a small but enormously important step for the ICANN community and for the broader global Internet community.“