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Accordingly, questions are now being raised about whether the present ecosystem of Internet governance, including ICANN, is able to adapt to such momentous change. The challenges fall into four main areas:

1) The global public interest:

In this continuously evolving environment,  has ICANN been able to keep pace with growing public interest requirements, and to adapt its methods to better serve them, or has it remained beholden to the narrow interests of those who, from the outset, were its original most powerful stakeholders (registries, registrars)?

In its pioneering years, ICANN served a public of a few millions, for whom the Internet represented novelty rather than a necessity. The Today, the duty to serve the public interest today, at a time when interests of a greater public -- the billions of people to whom the Internet is an indispensable global facility for 2,3 billion users, -- takes on an entirely different meaning. As long as the By keeping its own concept of "public interest" remains ambiguous , it is easy for ICANN has been to pay lip service to it, even though its responses to publicly-identified problems problems identified by its own self-defined At-Large community, 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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