McCarthy, who has chronicled the Sex.com saga between jabs at ICANN over transparency issues, said he felt the non-profit group responsible for administering the Internet had at last begun to take his criticisms to heart.
In April, McCarthy ran for the ICANN board of directors but failed to win a seat.
“The more I looked at the job, the more interesting it became,” McCarthy said. “Basically, ICANN is making vital decisions about the future of the Internet and yet hardly anyone knows who it is, what it is deciding or how to interact with it. It's my job to change all that. And the fun part of it is I will be traveling the globe finding and talking to the people that are doing the most interesting things with new Net technologies to see if I can use them to make ICANN a brand new model of international, open, online decision-making.”
In addition to hiring McCarthy, recent reforms at ICANN include launching a blog, producing its first annual report and publishing the minutes of recent board meetings two days after the event.
McCarthy will assume his new post at ICANN in February. His book, “Sex.com,” will be published in May.