Dennis Jennings is Ireland's first director on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number, writes Karlin Lillington

Dennis Jennings, one of the newly elected directors of Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has in many ways come full circle.

As chairman of the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries - at the time, the European organisation in charge of managing European domains - Jennings was indirectly involved with the initial (and controversial) establishment in 1998 of Icann, the non-profit group that serves as the internet's central administration.

Now, a decade later, he will take a seat on that organisation's board, the first Irish director to do so. It's a prospect he views with excitement; for anybody with as long and pioneering a history as Jennings has with the internet, the opportunity to contribute to its management at the highest level is, he says, an honour.

But that is leavened, perhaps, with just a bit of trepidation, knowing as he does first hand how vicious the arguments have been in the past about how Icann is run, what its role should be, even if it should exist at all.

He remembers well the volatility that surrounded Icann's birth.

"My view was, we didn't want the US government telling the IEDR [the domain registry of the Republic, which he was running at the time] what to do, but we agreed it should be some self-governing organisation."

Many of those initial discussions are preserved in old online comment boards where, already, the politics that would enmesh the new organisation was evident. And this was just the technical crowd having fairly purposeful discussions. As Jennings notes: "What I hadn't appreciated was that the commercial, vested interests were so aggressive. Some were making a fortune."

One of Icann's first tasks would be to decide how to decentralise the registration of domains from the single entity that had held an exclusive contract from the US government to perform this task - meaning every single dotcom, dotnet and dotorg had to go through one company - to a new privatised system.

For obvious reasons, commercial interests wanted to limit who could register domains. And the techie crowd, as robust as their own discussions might be, were not prepared for what ensued.

"I totally underestimated the intensity with which those with commercial interests would undermine the old style collegiality of the tech crowd," he recalls. "It was intensely political."

In addition, there were what he calls the "internet for all" folks who believed the net should be an open access place of free interchange with no governing body.

The result was "enormous meetings that were horrendously complex" as many divergent voices tried to influence how Icann would operate and its policies.

Ultimately the organisation came into being with a wide range of directors from different countries and a recognition by national governments that the net wasn't just a geek playground but a place where commerce was increasingly being conducted, and that "this was a vastly important infrastructure", says Jennings.

The former director of UCD Computing Services decided against trying to be personally involved with Icann itself at the time. "My priority was to get involved in the investment area," he says, a goal that saw him become founding chairman of UCD spinoffs such as WBT Systems and NTera Ltd. More recently, along with Ray Naughton, Jennings founded and co-manages the €17 million venture fund 4th Level Ventures.

Less well known is his close involvement with many of the early pieces of the embryonic internet in the 1980s. He advocated connecting Irish universities on one single network, which would become HEAnet and now forms a core piece of Irish research infrastructure.

He also got involved with the creation of the European Academic Research Network (Earn) in the early 80s. Those early connections led to him being offered the job of program director in charge of networking jobs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US.

Jennings took up the offer, a position that placed him in charge of NFSnet and in the funding and decision-making seat when key decisions were being taken. He was central in getting TCP/IP adopted, the technical protocol that allows computers to talk to each other over telephone lines and which now underlies the internet.

He also argued that the US needed a "backbone" (a central ultrafast network corridor), that the isolated networks in universities should start to connect up to it and talk to each other, and that the overall network should be for general purposes, not limited to select researchers. All of these approaches were adopted.

But back to the future, and Jennings says he sees a couple of challenges ahead during his director's term. Icann will be considering the introduction of new character sets, so that Chinese or Arabic websites can have domain names expressed in their own languages.

He'd like to see further internationalisation of Icann, and have the organisation turn its attention to major problems such as spam, cyber warfare, and cyber attacks, which he says are largely ignored as a problem.

But he doesn't expect it to be an easy run. "Some say I'm absolutely crazy 'You are setting yourself up to have brickbats hurled at you'." But you get the feeling that being in the fray is part of the attraction of the job.

WHAT IS ICANN?

IA non-profit organisation, Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, serves as the central administration and policymaking group for the internet.

Icann oversees the management of domain names and addresses, a crucial function with many political ramifications.

Located in Marina Del Rey, California, the organisation was established in 1998 by the late Jon Postel of the University of Southern California on foot of a request from the US department of commerce.

The US government, which had funded much of the development of the internet through the defence department and then the National Science Foundation, was trying to move into a less involved role.

Icann has steered the management of domain name registration from a government to a private company role and has also worked to decentralise this role.

Icann also set up a policy framework for the resolution of domain name disputes.

It has 19 directors and nine directors at large. Of that group, 15 can vote. Voting directors represent six continents; four are from the US. The group is currently chaired by Vint Cerf of Google.

Because of the many vocal groups with an interest in how the internet is managed, Icann has been the target of numerous disputes since its formation, though the turbulence seen in its initial years has calmed considerably.