ICANN hopes to get China more involved in Internet management

"China has a huge role to play in the global Internet. Without China and without complete Chinese participation in ICANN, ICANN frankly does not have a global legitimacy," Fadi Chehade, the newly appointed ICANN president, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

Chehade is travelling to Asia on Friday for the first time as the CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit private organization in charge of contentious policies surrounding Internet addresses.

Chehade told Xinhua in his office in Los Angeles before he leaves for China that he will first visit China in his Asian trip to make preparations for the ICANN international conference to be held in Beijing in April, the first time ICANN decides to hold its annual conference in China.

Chehade, who replaced former U.S. cyber security chief Rod Beckstrom as ICANN's chief executive, said "we are going to China first so we can engage with the Chinese community and ensure that our programs and our services meet their needs."

ICANN is also in charge of assigning the numeric Internet Protocol addresses used to identify computers, smartphones and other Internet-connected devices.

Although ICANN has board members from around the world, it is headquartered in Los Angeles and gets its authority from the U.S. government, which funded much of the Internet's early development.

Because of this, some developing countries have concerns over whether the United States has dominance in the field and whether all the other countries have the fair share.

He said there is only "one world, one Internet" and it is important to have a unified platform for all countries in the world.

According to Chehade, the Internet is like air, which has no borders. It is vital economically, politically and socially, and it should remain transparent that no one should have control over it. "We should leave it open and let people use it responsibly," he stressed.

Chehade said his purpose is to run ICANN with transparency and let each country in the world share the Internet resources equally.

Chehade said one of his chief tasks will be guiding the largest expansion of the Internet address system since its creation in the 1980s. The change affects how people find Web sites or send emails.

According to Chehade, there are only 23 domain name suffixes now, with .com the most common. But beginning this year, there will be .love, .goole and .music, and that has opened up a new area for people in the world to explore.

"When the program is implemented, people do not have to worry about the useup of IP addresses and domain names. It is almost unlimited, and at least for the next 10 years people do not have to worry," said Chehade.