ICANN Names a Lebanese as its New Chief Executive

The U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Friday named Fadi Chehade as its new president and chief executive as of October 1.

Chehade, who is currently chief executive at U.S.-based Vocado LLC -- a company providing cloud-based software for schools -- will replace Rod Beckstrom who had earlier announced that he would step down on July 1.

"Fadi has an amazing track record of success and the obvious leadership qualities to help carry ICANN into the next stage of its evolution," ICANN board chairman Stephen Crocker told a news conference in Prague.

"He has a 25-year career in building Internet companies," he told reporters.

ICANN's chief operating officer Akram Atallah will be in charge of the California-based global online governance body and domain manager from July 1 until Chehade, who has also worked for IT giant IBM, takes over.

The 50-year-old Chehade, who was born in Beirut but left war-ravaged Lebanon in 1980, said he was "naturally humbled to... lead an organization that defines itself by an international multi-stakeholder model and one that is the very core of the security and stability of the Internet."

"I owe the Internet everything that I've achieved to date. I believe in this enterprise," said Chehade.

On June 13, ICANN unveiled 1,930 requests for new web address endings, ranging from the general like ".shop" to the highly specialized such as ".motorcycles".

It said the new names are essential given the huge expansion of the Internet, with around two billion users worldwide.

There are currently just 22 generic Top-Level Domains in use, including the most popular ".com".

ICANN said it hoped the first of the new suffixes to be live by the first quarter of 2013, but warned that evaluating all of the applications could take around 20 months.

"Most of the things that are ahead of us are in the processing of these applications," said Atallah.

"The worst is behind us and hopefully the challenges ahead of us are minor compared to the period of collecting all the applications," added Atallah who was also born in Beirut.

"We were in the same boy scout group when we were teenagers. This is a friendship and relationship that will help me in performing my duties," said Chehade.