Ethics Fight Over Domain Names Intensifies

A boardroom dispute over ethics has broken out at the organization that maintains the Internet address system after its most important supporter, the United States government, reproached the group for governance standards said to fall short of “requirements requested by the global community.”

The Commerce Department said this month that while it was temporarily extending a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to manage the allocation of computers’ Internet protocol addresses — and the .com and .net names of Web sites associated with them — it warned the organization that it needed to tighten its rules against conflicts of interest or risk losing a central role. After the department’s announcement, the soon-to-depart chief of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, went on the offensive, taking an unusual public swipe at his own organization’s 21-member board. “I believe it is time to further tighten up the rules that have allowed perceived conflicts to exist within our board,” Beckstrom said in a speech during an ICANN meeting in San José, Costa Rica, last week. “This is necessary, not just to be responsive to the growing chorus of criticism about ICANN’s ethics environment, but to ensure that absolute dedication to the public good supersedes all other priorities.” “ICANN must place commercial and financial interests in their appropriate context,” said Beckstrom, who is scheduled to step down from his post in July. “How can it do this if all top leadership is from the very domain-name industry it is supposed to coordinate independently? “A more subtle but related risk is the tangle of conflicting agendas within the board that would make it more difficult for any C.E.O. to meet the requirements of this deeply rewarding and sometimes frustrating job.” ICANN directors were taken aback by Beckstrom’s comments. Stephen D. Crocker, chairman of the board, said the chief executive had merely been expressing his “personal views.”