Back in August, ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom announced that he would be stepping down at the end of his term. He said he’d stay until July. We haven’t heard much about the CEO search in the time since the announcement, but ICANN provided an update today.
ICANN released the following statement:
The CEO Search Committee has been actively working to identify top candidates for ICANN’s CEO/President position, to commence 1 July 2012.
The window for candidate applications closed on Friday, 17 February. Our partner in the search process, Odgers Berndtson, has collected well over 100 candidates for the position. Candidates have come from community referrals, our ad in the Economist, and the firm’s outreach efforts. Odgers Berndtson interviewed and submitted 27 promising candidates to the committee, and the committee has chosen and interviewed 16 of them by teleconference.
The committee is now selecting a subset of this group for a second round of interviews, face to face. On the basis of this second round, it expects to choose yet another subset for presentation to the ICANN Board for intensive interviewing, followed by a decision to be made by the Board. The target for completion is mid-April.
“I am incredibly proud of ICANN’s achievements throughout my tenure,” said Beckstrom when he announced his resignation. “In two short years we have advanced this organization to a new level of professionalism and productivity, and turned it into a genuinely multinational organization that will serve the world community long after my time here.”
Last month, ICANN began accepting applications for the generic top-level domains, which have been a bit controversial. Watch our recent interview with Dan Jaffe, executive VP of Government Relations for the Association of National Advertisers, who calls the expansion of top-level domains “reckless and premature”:
There’s no question that the new CEO is going to have his/her hands full.
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