CPSR Life member joins ICANN board

Joichi Ito, a CPSR member and co-founder and treasurer of the local CPSR chapter in Japan is the first CPSR member to join the ICANN's board.

Bill Drake, CPSR President said: This is great news for CPSR, CPSR members and the internet users community.  We are proud that another CPSR member has joined the ICANN board. Ito is a successful internet activist, speaker, businessman, investor and blogger and will be an excellent addition to the ICANN board.

CPSR board members and members actively participated in the work of ICANN's Non Commercial constituency in shaping DNS policies and the ICANN itself, since ICANN's inception. We believe that CPSR views will be well represented by Joichi Ito.

Joichi Ito said:

"As the Internet becomes an exceedingly important part of the lives of everyone on the planet, an increasing number of people and organizations feel that they must be involved in "running the Internet." The fear of terrorism, pressure from monopolies and a variety of interests are threatening to put tighter controls on the bottom-up processes and the open and end-to-end nature of the Internet which has made it successful.

Many of us benefited from the open architecture of the Internet, building our careers around the ability to innovate without permission and control. In addition to the great work that Hans Klein and others have done through the Non Commercial constituency of ICANN, I urge all members of CPSR to participate in the global dialog about Internet governance and help ICANN and other Internet organizations fulfill their mission to help keep the Internet running and protect the open nature of the Internet while addressing the issues of the variety of new stakeholders. I believe it is our social responsibility.

Some fundamental changes in the way the Internet will be run in the future are being discussed and it will affect us all. Feel free to contact me with your thoughts, suggestions or interest in participating."

Apart from ICANN, Ito is the Vice President of International for Technorati, the Chairman of Six Apart Japan and servers on a number of boards including Creative Commons. (His CV can be found here: http://radio.joi.ito.com/outlines/cv.html and his blog is: http://joi.ito.com/)

CPSR is a global organization promoting the responsible use of computer technology. Founded in 1981, CPSR educates policy-makers and the public on a wide range of issues. CPSR has incubated numerous projects such as Privaterra, the Public Sphere Project, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), the 21st Century Project, the Civil Society Project, and the CFP (Computers, Freedom & Privacy) Conference. Originally founded by U.S. computer scientists, CPSR now has members in over 25 countries on six continents.


Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
PO Box 717
Palo Alto, CA  94302  USA
phone: 650-322-3778
fax: 650-322-4748
email: cpsr(at)cpsr.org