ICANN Community Thanks Vint Cerf for Extraordinary Efforts

Retiring chair's efforts have ensured ICANN's consensus-based model has worked.

November 1, 2007; 04:31 AM

LOS ANGELES -- The ICANN community came together to thank retiring chair Vint Cerf for his eight years of service on the board at a gala ceremony at the 30th International Public Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

"Vint was very much a part of the ICANN model's creation. No individual, no country, no company controls the Internet. Instead, it is the Internet community that drives the ICANN agenda," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO. "I want to thank Vint for his friendship, his enthusiasm, and his guidance. People may not realize that Vint, like all members of the ICANN board, serve the ICANN community as volunteers. It's an incredible sacrifice made in the name of a stronger and better single globally interoperable Internet. That model works."

Dr Twomey led the tributes at the event, which included speeches from Ira Magaziner, who oversaw the Clinton White House policy on the Internet that led to the creation of ICANN, and Steve Crocker, Chair of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee and a life-long friend of Vint Cerf.

There were also video tributes from across the globe:

"If the Internet is about networking -- the sharing of information with no central point of control -- then as ICANN's board chairman, Vint has applied that same basic philosophy. He has led a model that is about coordination not control," said Vice President Al Gore. "On behalf of Internet users everywhere, Internet users everywhere I would like to simply say thank you so much. Thanks for your work at ICANN; for your vision; thanks for being a great friend, mentor, and colleague."

"Vint is a great friend of Egypt, he is a great friend of mine. I have known him for the past 20 years," said Dr. Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Arab Republic of Egypt. "He has led the board of ICANN for many years with vision and the right leadership in an issue that has been creating a debate worldwide."

"I have one great hero in my life, and his name is Vint Cerf," said Dr Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Google. "It's no surprise that during the last almost 10 years of his leadership in ICANN, you all working hard have delivered more than four times global internet users, the creation of many new internet domains, and more importantly the values espoused by the kind of governance and consensus building that has so characterized Vint in his entire professional career."

"The European Commission has been supportive of the ICANN process since the outset and it will continue to be so as ICANN addresses future exciting challenges such as internationalized domain names, new generic top level domains, the transition to IPv6," said Commissioner Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission (Information Society and Media). "You leave ICANN a much stronger organization now than have you entered it, and an organization that has benefited much from the skills and the reputation of its chairman."

"Vint doesn't limit himself to being in California, or part of the Unites States, or in our planet -- he wants to develop an Internet that is across the whole Solar System, the idea being that anyone can dial in an address for a space craft, or a rover, or any assets we have in space and you can directly communicate with them," said Dr. Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This is an example of how visionary Vint is."

ICANN will be posting a video of these tributes later this week.

About ICANN:

ICANN is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet's system of unique identifiers like domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .uk) and the addresses used in a variety of Internet protocols that help computers reach each other over the Internet. Careful management of these resources is vital to the Internet's operation, so ICANN's global stakeholders meet regularly to develop policies that ensure the Internet's ongoing security and stability. ICANN is an internationally organized, public benefit non-profit company. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.