ICANN picks new president

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit group that manages the Web’s address system, named Fadi Chehadé as its new president on Friday. 

He will succeed Rod Beckstrom, who announced last year that he will leave the organization on July 1 when his contract ends.

Chehadé was born in Lebanon to Egyptian parents and was educated in the United States. He has worked for IBM and founded RosettaNet, a nonprofit that establishes standards for the sharing of business information.

{mosads}Most recently, he was the CEO of Vocado, which provides cloud-based software to educational institutions.

He will join ICANN sometime before Oct. 1, the group said. Chief Operating Officer Akram Atallah will serve as an interim president.

Chehadé will take the helm at ICANN as the group implements the largest ever expansion of the Internet’s domain system.

Earlier this year, ICANN began accepting applications for new top-level domains ending in almost any word or phrase, instead of just traditional endings like .com and .org.

The group had expected to receive about 500 applications but received more than 1,900.

The list unveiled earlier this month includes company names, such as .apple, .gap, .ford, and .jpmorgan, as well as generic names, such as .movie, .love, .life, .auto, .news and .beer.

Google alone applied for more than 100 domains, including .youtube, .lol, .car, .cloud, .mom, .dad and .fun.

Amazon was close behind, with more than 70 applications, such as .app, .coupon, .book and .shop.