Dr Steve Crocker was unanimously elected chair of the ICANN board Friday at the board meeting that traditionally concludes each week-long meeting.

Bruce Tonkin, continuing an Antipodean influence, was elected vice chair unanimously, while Chriss Disspain, CEO of auDA, the Australian domain name policy and regulatory body, replaced Peter Dengate Thrush. As Peter Dengate Thrush noted, Disspain continues the "silver-haired Antipodean lawyers" on the board.

The meeting saw Dengate Thrush and Rita Rodin Johnston leave the board, having served their two three-year terms, both receiving glowing tributes from fellow board members and standing ovations from those in attendance at the meeting.

Also elected to the board was Canadian Bill Graham.

Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today's Internet. He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force and initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared. For this work, Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award. Crocker also holds an honorary doctorate in mathematics from the University of San Martin de Porres in Lima, Perú.

Crocker's experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and The Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc. His prior public service includes serving as the first area director for security in the the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the IETF Administrative Support Activity Oversight Committee (IAOC), service on the Board of the Internet Society and the Board of The Studio Theatre in Washington, DC.

Crocker earned his B.A. in mathematics and Ph.D. in computer science at UCLA, and he studied artificial intelligence at MIT.

Steve Crocker was selected by the 2008 Nominating Committee to serve as a Board Member. He has been Chair of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) since its inception in 2002, and he served as SSAC's non-voting Liaison to the ICANN Board until being selected by the Nominating Committee. His current term runs from the end of the 2008 annual meeting through the conclusion of the 2011 annual meeting.

Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., a start-up company focused on dynamic sharing of information across the Internet and on the deployment of improved security protocols on the Internet.

Dr Crocker's biographical information is courtesy of the ICANN website.

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