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Where is the ICANN ombudsman?ICANN, the entity responsible for managing the domain name system, has been an object of interest for the dispute resolution community for the manner in which it has managed (or mismanaged) its Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. The following is an update on another ICANN dispute resolution activity, that of appointing an ombudsman and establishing an ombuds office. 1. There shall be an Office of Ombudsman, to be managed by an Ombudsman and to include such staff support as the Board determines is appropriate and feasible. The Ombudsman shall be a full-time position, with salary and benefits appropriate to the function, as determined by the Board. ICANN advertised for the position of ombudsman over a year ago. Perhaps ICANN will tell us tomorrow or the next day who the individual is who will serve as its first ombudsman. If that were to occurr, we might continue to wonder how this appointment could have possibly taken two years but we could also move on and hope that the ICANN ombuds office functions as the ICANN reform process hoped it would. Yet, the appointment of the ombudsman, at this moment, is highly troubling and seems to be an endless process with unexplained and unexplainable delays. A little more than a month ago, in its tenth report to the United States Department of Commerce, submitted on October 7, 2004, ICANN stated that The last report indicated that ICANN had retained the services of a professional search firm in order to locate and hire a suitable candidate for the position of Ombudsman. After an intensive search, that candidate has been located and contract terms have been settled. The identity of the candidate will be publicly announced in the near future. What the "last" report, the Ninth Report to the Department of Commerce (April 7, 2004), also stated was that “ICANN expects to have this position filled and for the ombudsman program to be fully launched before June 30, 2004.” That did not happen. It is almost six weeks since the statement was made in the Tenth Report that the “The identity of the candidate will be publicly announced in the near future.” That has not happened. It is almost four months since President Twomey announced at an ICANN meeting in Kuala Lumpur that “we are very close to having the ombudsman situation finalized.” At this date, nothing appears to have been finalized. It is more than six weeks since President Twomey suggested to a U.S. Senate committee on September 30. 2004 that the ombudsman office had already been established. There is no evidence that this statement was accurate. ICANN has pledged many times to improve levels of transparency and accountability. After many years of controversy, ICANN finally, in April 2004, appointed a dispute resolution provider to allow review of board actions (although I have been completely unable to find where on the ICANN Web site there is any information about the independent review process). The series of delays involving the ombudsman prompted me to complain to President Twomey nine months ago. If transparency and accountability were taken seriously, we would not see the pattern of delays and non-action that continues to this day. In 2009, we will celebrate the appointment of the first ombudsman, a position mandated by the Swedish constitution. We have almost two hundred years of experience with this position, one that in recent decades has become quite common. ICANN is a novel entity but it is hard to understand why it would take ICANN longer to appoint such a person than it did the Swedes in 1809. 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