KEY POINTS:
We're just a couple of days away from finding out whether a Kiwi will assume the mantle of overseeing ICANN - the body that governs the internet.
Wellington lawyer Peter Dengate Thrush, an intellectual property expert and board member of the Los Angeles-based internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is in the running to chair the organisation, which has some major work ahead of it to ensure the internet continues to function as millions of new users go online and need to be accommodated with an IP address - of which there are a limited number.
Dengate Thrush has a good chance at the chairmanship, vacated by internet guru Vinton Cerf, one of the co-founders of the TCP/IP protocol which underpins the web and now an "internet evangelist" for Google.
Dengate Thrush certainly deserves some good news after the horrendous time he's had in his personal life. Last May his wife, father, brother and a close family friend were killed in a car accident. Half a world away in Morocco attending an ICANN meeting, he received the devastating news via mobile phone.
His response to the tragedy seems to have been to throw himself back into his work - and there'll be plenty more of that if he succeeds Cerf in the role. That's because ICANN needs to reinvent itself and the underlying workings of the internet to handle the next phase of online growth.
An important project is the move to IP version 6 (IPv6), the nuts and bolts of which have been finalised over the past couple of days in Los Angeles.
ICANN president Paul Twomey, an Australian, says the current pool of IP addresses available on the internet will run out by 2011. Only 18 per cent of the 2.4 billion possible addresses on the IPv4 system are still available.
Every device that connects to the internet has an IP address which internet traffic is routed to and from and as more devices go online - everything from mobile phones to games consoles, internet-enabled televisions and even cars - the demand for those numbers is going through the roof.
As developing nations start to improve internet access, with the help of projects such as One Laptop Per Child, the need for more IP numbers is urgent. Some figures mentioned by Cerf illustrate the huge growth the internet has experienced in the past 10 years - there's been a 20-fold increase in internet users to 1.2 billion people. The number of computer servers has increased from 22.5 million to 489 million.
Luckily, more than a decade of work has already been done on IPv6 which, based on 128-bit computing, will offer 4 quintillion (4 trillion trillion trillion) IP addresses. That should keep us going for a while. The upgrade is already underway - some addresses are already supported by IPv6 but a large amount of work reconfiguring routers and networks has to take place to get the bulk of the world's internet users switched over.
Another advantage of IPv6 is that because the number of addresses it supports is so large, it will be relatively difficult for hackers to scan randomly for insecure systems.
Alongside the shift to IPv6, ICANN will also open up the options for internet domain name types - the seven main ones now include .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org. In future we could see .bank or even .auckland.
For the first time, top-level domains are also likely to be opened to other alphabets, so an entire address could be in Chinese or Cyrillic characters.
ICANN has in the past rejected the introduction of domains such as .xxx for adult websites, but seems keen to liberalise its domain system, opening up hundreds of new options from as early as next year.
There are other matters to tidy up.
ICANN was set up in 1998 as a joint venture with the US Government, a relationship that the internet, with its global nature, has outgrown. While ICANN has done a very good job developing the internet over the past 10 years for equal access wherever you log on from, there have been calls from outside the US to strip the body of its domain-name oversight. Making ICANN a more neutral body, that is, free of US Government ties, may pacify critics. ICANN has resisted any changes to its structure so the new chairman's approach will be crucial to the body's future make-up.
Dengate Thrush, the former chairman of internetNZ, is a hardworking and knowledgeable lawyer who is well suited for the job of navigating the politics of the internet.
But he doesn't quite have the status of Cerf, and with an Australian already in the president's seat, may miss out as ICANN seeks a more international flavour at the top.
But it would be good for New Zealand to have him leading what amounts to the online version of the UN, so here's hoping it's his year.
