auDA the Australian Domain Administrator announced that Dr. Bruce Tonkin will be taking on the CEO role for auDA in the new year.
Official statement is here:
auDA welcomes new CEO Dr Bruce Tonkin
18 September 2024
The auDA Board is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Bruce Tonkin as auDA’s new CEO, commencing on 1 January 2025.
Bruce is well known to auDA and the broader domain name community having joined auDA in 2017 and served as auDA’s Chief Operating Officer since 2018.Chair Alan Cameron AO said, “The auDA Board is delighted to welcome Bruce as auDA’s new CEO, following a competitive, international search. Bruce impressed the selection panel with his deep understanding of critical infrastructure systems, domain names policy and his breadth of executive and board experience at organisations including ICANN and Melbourne IT.”
Prior to joining auDA, Bruce held the position of Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at Melbourne IT, where he was responsible for taking cloud-based services to global markets across the USA, Europe and Asia. Bruce has extensive senior leadership experience, having served on the Board of ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, from 2007 to 2016, during which time he was Vice-Chair of the Board from 2011 to 2015. He also served as Chair of ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) from 2002 until 2007.Alan Cameron said, “The Board is confident that Bruce, as a respected leader in the industry, is ideally placed to lead auDA as it continues to execute its Terms of Endorsement obligations, works to establish its forward five year strategy, drive growth in domain name registrations, embed its new Sustainability Framework and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), as well as support auDA staff to reach their full potential.”
In-coming CEO, Bruce Tonkin said, “I am pleased to take up the role of CEO at auDA, which plays such a pivotal role in the digital lives of all Australians and in supporting our nation’s digital economy. I look forward to building on auDA’s strong foundations and engaging with auDA’s members and its multi-stakeholder community to ensure the ongoing resilience of the .au domain into the future.”
The Board thanks outgoing CEO Rosemary Sinclair AM for her dedicated and disciplined work at auDA since taking on the role in March 2020. Alan Cameron noted, “Rosemary has applied herself tirelessly in leading auDA’s response to the government’s 2018 review of auDA and to the recruitment and upskilling of staff to ensure auDA can meet the challenges of managing modern critical infrastructure in the interests of all Australians. Rosemary has been an exemplary leader and we wish her every success.”
Rosemary will finish at auDA at year’s end, after which Bruce will commence in the role.
So who is Bruce and why do we feel that he will be good for auDA…
Looking at Bruce’s linkedin profile you will quickly see that he comes with an incredible amount of industry experience starting way back in Sep 2006 working for NetRegistry, now part of Webcentral and then spent 17 years working his way up the Melbourne IT ladder all the way to Chief Strategy Officer. Had a stint at ICANN for over 9 years during that time and most recently for the last 6.5 years has been the Chief Operating Office at auDA.
As Chief Operating Officer at auDA , Bruce would have had the ability to use his vast experience to lead and shape the operations of auDA, while my guess would be at times butting up against the red tape and bureaucracy that comes with a “non profit” entity structure that has been given power to act on behalf of the Australian Government.
So the next question is, will there be someone else taking up the Chief Operating Office role that Bruce is vacating for the CEO role, or will he do both? Knowing that Bruce works out of the Melbourne office is a big plus, the role is critical and being hands on and physically present can only drive even more value.
But more importantly what does Bruce feel he can achieve in this role that he could not as the COO? Time will tell, but we are happy with the news and feel that Bruce is extremely well qualified for the role, though I can not shake that niggly feeling that his best efforts will be stifled by the existing bureaucracy machine that auDA is somewhat required to become. Working on policy that covers the use of .au domains is always going to be hard as there are too many different view points on how things should be done and what should be allowed and what should not.
Bruce takes over an entity that saw the most growth under her Rosemary’s tenure, from under 20 staff to over 50 staff. I hope that this increase in operational costs is not the main reason why auDA did a price increase of all domain renewals/registration set to kick in at the start of October this year.
Overall looking forward to seeing what “Bruce All Mighty” can achieve with his new powers 🙂
