Stuart Lynn, outgoing president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, considers its future path

IT Week: As Icann president, how do you see the difficulties for firms on the Internet?

Stuart Lynn: It is easy to focus on problems with the Internet, but that belittles its successes. Icann recently created seven new top-level domains, following a furore for them. Icann was under a lot of pressure to deliver these because they let certain industries compartmentalise themselves.

These are the domains such as .coop and .museum. How are they operating?

There is not such a clamour to register some of these domains - a lot of this has cooled off because we have not seen the growth rate we expected. There used to be a lot of promotion associated with domain names and Web space. Now they are no longer free, people are reluctant to renew them. Also, a number of the speculative moneymen have moved away from the Internet.

Would a separate domain for pornography solve any of the Internet's problems?

Porn operators link their sites everywhere and try to make them turn up in as many search results as possible. What would make them put it there instead of somewhere else? Besides, content is a matter of geography and people have different views as to what constitutes porn, which makes it very hard to police. It is a similar idea to the .kids domain, but how can you stop a hacker changing the content on a site in that domain? I wouldn't want a domain-name to babysit my grandchildren.

As the outgoing president of Icann, you must be pleased that it approved much of a blueprint for reform last month...

I am very pleased about how far we have come. The groundwork has been done, and now we have to start implementing. We might have to rethink policy in the light of how the Internet is today. That is something to be worked out with world governments, the country code top-level domain operators and Icann; this will be a very important dialogue for Icann. We have not addressed all the problems that were in the case for reform, and we still have plenty of things to work out.

Much of the blueprint followed your own proposals for reform. Why did you decide to make those suggestions?

It wasn't a call for the changes I suggested, but an acknowledgement of a lot of problems. I said these might be difficulties, and that this might be one way to solve it. Then I asked people to express an interest.

One change will be the end of public elections for board members. Isn't it strange that Icann doesn't want online elections?

Online elections are too open to manipulation and fraud to be an appropriate way of electing directors. If too few people vote - and last time we had some 34,000 votes from a community of 500 million Internet users - [the vote] can easily be manipulated and one person [can gain] a lot of support.

How will Icann's role develop?

Icann's mission is to ensure co-ordination of the Internet's naming address allocation systems, co-ordination of domain names and addressing, as well as the protocol parameter numbering systems. That might sound technical, but you cannot talk about the other issues - such as handing out new top-level domains - without addressing these kinds of policy issues.

How does the public regard Icann?

People do get confused about Icann's remit. But it is not Icann's mission to regulate content or be a consumer protection agency. There are a lot of localised issues involved in the Internet, such as taxation. People might have opinions about pornography, tax, monopolies and antitrust laws, but these are local legal issues.

How will the funding of Icann affect costs for businesses?

[The review] calls for top-level domain registrars to fund Icann to the tune of 12.5 cents per domain they allocate. But if we are really to reform Icann and build up its reserves, that figure might be doubled.

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About Stuart Lynn
Stuart Lynn has been president and chief executive of Icann since March 2001, but will be leaving next year.

He was associate vice president for information resources and communications at the University of California Office of the President.

Lynn has been director of IBM's Houston Scientific Center, and has served on many boards of directors and advisory councils.