According to the established rumor, three men were chosen for the final stage of selections, and front-runner Australian former civil servant Paul Twomey is currently in negotiations with the board about accepting the job.

The same rumor mill has Chris Disspain, CEO of auDA, the body which manages the .au top-level internet domain, and Keith Teare, former CEO of RealNames Corp, as potential choices. ICANN classifies the matter as a personnel issue and declined to comment.

Twomey was head of the Australian federal government’s National Office for the Information Economy for between 1997 and 2000. After NOIE, he founded Argo Pacific, a technology/business consultancy, which he continues to run out of Sydney.

Twomey’s US business partner is Ira Magaziner, who served as senior advisor to Bill Clinton on matters internet, and who was intimately involved with the creation of ICANN, including the recruiting of its inaugural chairperson, Esther Dyson, in 1998.

Twomey has also chaired ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee since 2001, which rounds off a set of respectable credentials for the CEO of an organization that has identified a closer relationship with international governments as a goal.

The rumor mill has it that Twomey and ICANN are currently negotiating whether Twomey will have to move to Marina Del Rey, near Los Angeles, or whether he will telecommute, and that decision is due to be made this week.

The other two top rumored contenders seem less likely. Chris Disspain, whose credentials include running a country-code domain and actually having a close relationship with ICANN, told an Australian news web site last week that he was not in the running.

Keith Teare, who did not respond to an email request for comment by press time, is the British founder and former CEO of RealNames, which provided a naming system for web sites that in many respects competed with the domain name system.

RealNames went out of business last summer after a contract with Microsoft Corp ended, leaving the company indebted to Redmond to the tune of $25m but without the leverage to raise the money. Teare resigned from the board of the company after posting Microsoft-damning internal documents to his personal web site.

Current ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn announced his intention to retire last May. He will likely be remembered as the CEO who acknowledged ICANN’s flaws and kick-started a dramatic internal reform process to address them. Lynn, British-born but now a US citizen, took over from founding CEO Mike Roberts two years ago.

Source: Computerwire