International group to advance .ORG as a thriving noncommercial Internet community

Reston, VA April 14, 2003 The Public Interest Registry (PIR) today announced the appointment of an Advisory Council made up of twenty-one international leaders representing a broad and geographically diverse spectrum of the noncommercial community. The Council is one of PIR's mechanisms to ensure that it is responsive to the needs, concerns, and views of the global noncommercial Internet community.

According to Edward G. Viltz, PIR's President and CEO, "Our Advisory Council will serve as a key resource to incorporate worldwide input on policies, strategies, programs and services affecting the international noncommercial community. We intend to use guidance from the Council to reinforce and expand .ORG's heritage as the global home of noncommercial entities on the Internet. We are fortunate to have this distinguished group of international visionaries to assist PIR in developing these new initiatives."

"This is an exceptional group of noncommercial community leaders gathered from across the globe," said Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO of the Internet Society (ISOC), the organization that created the Public Interest Registry to manage the .ORG domain. "I am confident they will make a significant contribution to fulfilling PIR's mission to be a socially aware, publicly responsible registry. Many of the Council members are also affiliated with ISOC, and therefore are able to take advantage of the
breadth of ISOC's international presence and experience."

Below is the list of Council members. Additional details on each are available at www.pir.org .

AFRICA
Calvin Browne, UniForum (South Africa)
Pierre Dandjinou, UNDP (Senegal)
Clement Dzidonu, Valley View University (Ghana)

ASIA
Pavan Duggal, Cyberlaws.net (India)
S.S. Kshatriy (India)

ASIA-PACIFIC
Walter G. Morton, Chamber of Commerce (Republic of Palau)
Adam Peake, Glocom (Japan)
Ian Peter (Australia)

EUROPE
James Cronin, BBCi New Media (United Kingdom)
Ben Laurie, A.L. Digital Ltd. (United Kingdom)
Nadia Evelyn McLaren, Global Action Plan International (Belgium)
Eric Tomson (Belgium)

NORTH AMERICA
Michael Geist, University of Ottawa Law School (Canada)
Michael Gilbert, Nonprofit Online News (United States - WA)
Mark H. Moore, Kennedy School (United States - MA)
Lori S. Schulman, March of Dimes (United States - DC)
Barbara Simons, Association for Computing Machinery (United States - CA)

SOUTH AMERICA
Sylvia Cadena, Tropical Whitefly IPM Project (Colombia)
Vany Martinez, LatinoamerICANN (Panama)
Klaus Stoll, Fundacion Chasquinet (Ecuador)

NONCOMMERCIAL USERS COMMUNITY REPRESENTATIVE (ICANN)
YJ Park (Korea)

ABOUT .ORG

The .ORG domain, which has come to be associated with noncommercial activities, is the Internet's third largest "generic" or non-country specific top-level domain (behind .COM and .NET), housing over 2.7 million domain names worldwide. Late last year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Board of Directors selected ISOC's proposal from among 11 organizations bidding to operate the .ORG top-level domain. VeriSign Global Registry Services' contract as registry operator for .ORG expired on December 31, 2002. PIR assumed control of the registry on January 1, 2003.

ABOUT PIR

Public Interest Registry (www.pir.org) is a not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society to manage the .ORG domain. PIR's mission is to manage the .ORG domain in a way that supports the continuing evolution of the Internet as a research, education and communications infrastructure, and educates and empowers the noncommercial community to most effectively utilize the Internet. PIR is based in Reston, Virginia.

PIR was created by the Internet Society ( www.ISOC.org ). ISOC is a not-for-profit, open membership organization founded in 1991and is dedicated to ensuring the open evolution, development and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people. It provides leadership in addressing issues that confront the future of the Internet, and is the organizational home for many of the groups responsible for Internet standards.

For additional information on PIR and the .ORG registry please visit www.pir.org .

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