Chairman of the Internet

NZ lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush has been named chairman of the Internet’s chief governing body. Dengate Thrush will head the LA-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is viewed as the online version of the United Nations. ICANN oversees global projects including the allocation of domain names and IP addresses (upgrading the number of available addresses to 4-quintillion over ten years), internet policy development and the improvement of internet access for developing nations with the help of projects like “One Laptop Per Child”. In the past 10 years internet users have increased 20-fold to 1.2 billion people and computer servers have increased from 22.5 million to 489 million. Dengate Thrush, an intellectual property expert and former chairman of internetNZ, replaces Internet pioneer Vint Cerf in the role.