Voting with a mouse

The voting is over in the first Icann election

By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward

Web veterans and the spokesman for a German hacker group have been elected to the board of Icann, the organisation that oversees the running of the internet.

In total, five executives were appointed in what was the first online election for executive positions in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Another vote will be held later this year to find the final four members of the board.

One of the major tasks hanging over Icann is the job of picking new top-level domain names to complement the suffixes used by websites now, such as .com and .org.

Close votes

One representative was elected from each of five geographical regions - Africa, Australasia, North America, Latin America and Europe.

Election results

Africa - Nii Quaynor

Europe - Andy Mueller-Maguhn

North America - Karl Auerbach

Latin America - Ivan Moura Campos

Australasia - Masanobu Katoh

There were few surprises among those elected, with web veterans and the heads of net service providers leading the field.

The vote for the North American representative went through six rounds before Cisco researcher Karl Auerbach was declared the winner.

Another close race was fought for the post of European representative.

Security failings

Hotly tipped candidates were Olivier Muron, a research scientist at France Telecom, and Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a spokesman for a German hacker group known as the Chaos Computer Club. In the end, Mueller-Maguhn easily polled the most votes.

The Chaos Computer Club are hackers in the original, rather than destructive, sense of the word. Originally, the term "hacker" was used to describe someone with expert knowledge of a computer system or any other device.

A "hack" was an innovative or elegant way of using that system or gadget to a particular end. Many original hacks were practical jokes.

The Chaos Computer Club tends to be more responsible than some of its counterparts, preferring to shame the security failings of companies in public rather than use the "holes" for their own ends.