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The board of directors of internet overseer ICANN is said to be fuming after its ethics were called into question by the organisation's outgoing president and CEO.

Rod Beckstrom, who is set to the leave the domain name policy group in July, took to the stage at ICANN's public meeting here in San Jose, Costa Rica on Monday to criticise what he called the "tangle of conflicting agendas" on the board.

ICANN must be able to act for the public good while placing commercial and financial interests in the appropriate context, he said. How can it do this if all top leadership is from the very domain name industry it is supposed to coordinate independently?

There is value in having community members with domain name industry experience but it is equally valuable to avoid even the perception of a conflict of interest, he said.

The address came a few weeks after an ICANN board meeting at which seven of its 16 directors, including the chair and vice-chair, acknowledged conflicts of interest relating to ICANN's new generic top-level domains initiative, which promises to create hundreds of new domain suffixes.

Chair Steve Crocker runs the consulting firm Shinkuro, which has a silent investment from domain name registry provider Afilias. Vice-chair Bruce Tonkin, meanwhile, is a senior executive with Melbourne IT, an Australian company that expects to help over 100 clients apply for new gTLDs.

All seven conflicted directors excused themselves from voting on or discussing new gTLDs, in adherence to new ethics rules approved by ICANN in December.

Beckstrom first raised conflicts of interest as a problem facing ICANN at its meeting in Singapore last June, just a few days before the organisation approved the new gTLD programme.

The programme enables any company to apply to run their own right-of-the-dot domain name either generic terms such as .web or .blog, geographic names such as .london, or branded extensions such as .canon and .hitachi.

The then-chair of ICANN, Kiwi trademark lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush, left the organisation shortly after the Singapore meeting to take on the well-paid executive chairman position at Top Level Domain Holdings, a start-up with big plans to apply for dozens of new gTLDs.

Original post:
ICANN prez calls out own board over conflicts of interest