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In its pioneering years, ICANN served a public of a few millions, for whom the Internet represented novelty rather than a necessity. To The duty to serve the public interest today, at a time when the Internet is an indispensable global facility for 2,3 billion users, takes on an entirely different meaning. As long as the concept of "public interest" remains ambiguous, it is easy for ICANN to pay lip service to it, even though its responses to publicly-identified problems and its ability to minimize conflicts of interest and enforce its own regulations have been unsatisfactory. The lack of a clear public-interest engagement strategy, geared to the present and future importance of the Internet to the world, undermines the respect and trust of Internet users towards ICANN. The increasing success of alternatives to the multi-TLD naming paradigm already indicate such erosion of public confidence.

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Are the arrangements for the global governance of the Internet’s critical resources (including ICANN’s internal governance arrangements), as inherited from the pioneering years, still adequate?

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Recommendations:

The above are some of the concerns that are being expressed, with increasing vigour, from many sources including those who would seek to undermine or even eliminate ICANN. In response, the following recommendations are made to initiate the kind of in-depth change required for ICANN to enable ICANN adapt to these and other future challenges:

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