 Rodney Jaffee, one of the early DNS pioneers, Rodney, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. How did you become initially involved with the domain name system? Actually quite interesting, as you might imagine. I actually started out providing some of the connectivity for the very early part of the commercial internet. Also in the late 80s, early 90s, John Postel, who at that time was at USC, was looking for someone to provide a node for the Los Nedos network, which is one of the original networks pre the real commercial internet. And I happened to be based in an area of Los Angeles where I was able to complete a circle for the network they were putting at that time, it was a T3 network. When you say you were based in a place, you mean geographically based? Geographically. So when they looked at a map around Los Angeles, there were a group of members of Los Nedos. There was USC, UCLA, Caltech, JPL, Rand Corporation, and TRW. But there was no one in the San Fernando Valley. And I had met John. He knew that I was involved in starting a little ISP in just dabbling. And so probably 1992, 1993, he asked if I would make room in a rack for a router that would complete the circle around Los Angeles for Los Nedos. And I did that and got obviously very friendly with John. And the ISP that I'd started as part of my computer company, which at times is called American Computer Group, that ISP had started up in this little building in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. Over time, it began to add more customers. So I became a former part of the Los Nedos network. And I then sold a piece of that to a company called Bechtel. With Bechtel, I developed some capabilities with load balancing. We'd formed a company, an ISP called Genuity, which was really the original hosting ISP, backbone hosting ISP, sort of created the category of co-location, bringing computers to where the network was rather than taking network to the computers. And we did that in about 1995. And I'd asked John if he would be my other board member. There were board members from Bechtel, and I had two seats. And I asked John if he would be my other board member. And oddly enough, it was the only time that John ever got involved with a commercial company. But he saw the value in it and was a good friend and mentor. And so John took the other position. We built that company. I ultimately sold it to GTE. But during that process, I had actually developed some technology and a patent around load balancing, which made use to some extent of DNS. I'd looked, once I'd sold the company, I'd looked at some of the things that I'd wanted to do with load balancing and with content distribution. And there was some need around DNS. I talked to the folks that were really key with DNS world at the time, people like Paul Vixie, who was a good friend. And I suggested doing two things would have made a difference from the commercial point of view. I think I was probably the first person who came out of the commercial world into the backbone of the internet rather than coming from the internet world. And Paul had said that things that I wanted to do were inappropriate and violated the RFCs and the spirit of the way things worked. And I sat and thought about it for two or three weeks and then decided to go ahead anyway and built a company called Ultra DNS with the technology. The key thing that I developed then was I really pioneered the use of anycast for DNS, which was one of the two things that Paul had said was totally inappropriate and wrong. You didn't care about the inappropriate part. I, through most of my life, if something seems right to me, I move forward with it. And it had a lot of people very upset. I began to develop that company. And John actually, John Postel, had suggested that I hire part time one of his key researchers at USC, Steve Hutz. And Steve Hutz as the person actually wrote something called DIG, which is still today the most commonly used method of looking at DNS records. But Steve came to work with me. We developed Ultra DNS. I actually was enough of a pariah that I was almost ejected from an IETF meeting in San Diego in 1998 and 1999 for the heresy that I was proposing. I developed anycast as a method of being able to really survive distributed denial of service attacks that hadn't really happened yet, but there were threats of it, but also provided a lot more reliability. And so a short time after we had this in production, somewhere around 2002, there was a major denial of service attack against the root servers. And it turns out that some of the root server operators had been testing what I'd been doing. I'd made it publicly available, had been watching it, had seen that, in fact, it made a lot of sense, even though the RFC said that it couldn't and shouldn't be done. They decided to implement it themselves. And in the DDoS attack, there were 13 root servers. A portion of them weren't affected by the DDoS. They remained up and serving. And it was a portion that used the anycast technology. And so it was quite interesting because not very long after that, and this is almost becoming a discussion about Paul Vixie, who's certainly one of the fathers of DNS together with Paul. He's certainly a legend, yeah. Yes, together with Paul Machu Patras, who obviously invented it. Paul had actually done an interview and said that DNS violates all of the RFCs, it violates the rules, it breaks all kinds of things theoretically. But as it turns out, in the case of denial of service attack, it's the only way to remain up. And he, at that time, was operating the froot server. And he said, so we're going to be implementing anycast on the froot server, which was almost an invindication for that idea. So that's how I got involved. As I said, John Postel, one of his folks that actually joined me in 1998. Talk to me a little bit about Postel. I mean, obviously I never met the man, but I've heard so much about him on a personal level. What was it like to work with him? It was very interesting. John was, when you dealt with him, was one of the gentlest of souls. I mean, he literally was incredibly thoughtful. I'd never heard him raise his voice. Obviously, I'd never worked for him. We'd worked together under different things. I was in the private sector. But I remember at one of the Los Netos board meetings, he'd come up to me, and very proudly, one of the first times ever, had taken out a little box, and he opened the box, and he showed me something. And I said, what is that? And he said, well, he just received a medal from the ITU, which was really odd because the ITU was almost a sworn enemy of the internet with their interest in really having some kind of input and control or trying to think about how to do that over the internet. John was very proud of that. So it was interesting because he was humble, but he also occasionally things made him feel pretty good. It was anything I ever saw where he actually had this sort of smile about, look at this neat thing one of the few times. Besides that, he was very quiet, obviously very thoughtful and brilliant, incredibly trusted. In fact, one of the things that used to happen is when he sat on my board, which was 95, 96, we would fly up to San Francisco from Los Angeles once a month for a board meeting. And we'd have conversations. And during this period, John had actually been sued by someone who wanted to get a top level domain called God, the dot God top level domain. And John, of course, wasn't going to have any of that. He wasn't in his plan at all. But he was ultimately sued by the person who was actually a small group of two or three people. And it put enormous amount of pressure on him. And one of the things that I was able to do with my partner's bechtel was to provide him with some legal support to be able to actually deal with that. But at that time, I could already see that there were a couple of things he was thinking of. He was worrying about, number one, his health and the pressure on him. Number two, he was worried about the fact that in this particular case, things may happen to the internet from a government point of view. This was just at the time that the US government were starting to recognize that the internet was more than just an experiment for scientists. But it was pre-Ira magazineers involved. Correct. Pre-His involvement. And so John and I would talk on the trips up and down about what kind of thing would actually work putting it in place that were protected from what he saw as the coming threat to the government. He also said, now that the internet was becoming more of a commercial thing, he had a concern. He said, his first concern was, I'm one person and I'm running IANA and I'm assigning names and numbers. But I'm just one person. And at the time, he was obviously under attack from legal point of view. And so he started to think and discuss this idea of putting together some kind of organization that would be able to take it over from him should something happen. So it was clearly, I think he'd been ill in 1990 and had some surgery. And so there was some concern with that. Over the next couple of years, so all the way through 1996, so in 96, 97 when we sold the company to GTE, that sort of gelled and we'd have conversations. I know I was a minor part of it. He was talking to many other people, people like Vinton and Steve Prokka and Esther Dyson and many others. But he would try ideas on me because I seemed to be the one person who'd actually started companies. And he said something had to be started. We then sold the company, but I was then involved with Los Neros. And so with the Los Neros process, we then move into the area where, as you know, Iro Magazine came into the picture. The whole issue of control of the internet, he ran his famed experiment where he pointed, he had some of the root servers point to him for an update instead of Verisign, which certainly was an eye opener. Of course, that got the government. Eye opener for a lot of people. But it also got the government obviously very upset. But the interesting thing is that it absolutely showed the trust that he had. So this is even before the time when he and Iro Magazine would travel around the world trying to get countries to sign on to what ultimately became the organizational ICANN. John was already the most trusted person out there. Everyone trusted him. As the ICANN thing came along, he would come to the board meetings and talk about the fact that he was now doing a lot of traveling together with the government who were looking to get signatories. I guess that sort of a way of maybe finishing that part up was, as you know, on a Tuesday in the beginning of October in 1998, he took ill. I got a call from the folks that I worked with, Atalos Nados and USCISI who said that he was very ill. They called for blood donors. I'd asked why it wasn't being talked about publicly and they'd indicated that they'd been asked by Iro Magazine or the US government interchangeably to keep quiet about it because it would upset the negotiations of getting on to get countries to sign the original ICANN agreement. So we were told to keep it very quiet. There were only a couple of hundred people, I think, who knew about it. I wasn't able to give blood. I'm born in South Africa and at that time it was a ban on anyone from the sub-Sahara donating blood. And then on a Friday afternoon, about 1.30, I got a call from USC to say that John had just passed away. Danny Cohen, who hopefully you'll be talking to or talk to already. Danny was in the room with John at the time. John passed away and it's very interesting if you go back and look at the internet archives. It looks like the reason that Iro Magazine and the government who were so concerned about announcing the fact that he was ill and obviously gravely ill was that they were concerned that some of the governments that were partway to signing the agreement, which was just done based on trust of John, might get cold feet and maybe back out. And so from what I understand, and I don't know this firsthand, but I was told that there was a flurry of people who were actually traveling around the world trying to get the agreement signed with different governments in a hurry. I got the call at about 1.30, I think that John had passed away about, if you go back and look at about 2.00 or 2.30, there was the official announcement of the creation of this thing called ICANN. The US government announced that there was now this formal organization that had, I think, 40 or 50 signatories. And then half an hour later, they announced the fact that John had passed away. So it looked like that was, for two weeks over there, it was a driver to get as many countries as possible to sign. Interesting. And the lid was put on the fact that he was ill in order to not jeopardize people from the government being able to go out and sign and get signed the agreements that ICANN has founded on as many of them as possible before something occurred with John, which sadly occurred on, in fact, October 16th of 1998. So in those early days, in ICANN's initial days, they were borrowing space from USC in Marina del Rey. Correct. And it was mostly people just doing good things. It was engineers, probably technical people. Obviously, John, there were people who'd work with John who were involved with it. It grew legs over time and not only legs, but it grew very big legs and it grew many bodies. And it started to become much more of an organization. I was involved relatively early on, just talking to John on the side. Once ICANN came into being and John was no longer involved when he passed away, I wasn't that involved in the development from a policy point of view, just not my thing. I consider myself to be predominantly a geek. However, I ended up being involved with the ICANN Security and Disability Advisory Committee, the ASAC, Steve had asked me to join. I was involved with the nominating committee for a number of years. And over time, it became very clear that the GAC part of it, the government part of it, was starting to impose itself more and more into the everyday business of the internet. Some of it may have been good. A lot of it, I think, became very political. There were a number of things that went on in back rooms that I was part of around certain communities in the world, certain countries that felt they were underrepresented quite rightly. Things like the internationalized main names, there was an issue. And then it started to become just yet another one of those really big organizations when the expansion of the GTLDs came about. It was very clear that this was now becoming a large enterprise. There were things that I saw that I just didn't agree with in terms of how funds were spent, funds were raised and how they were spent. The committees just seemed to expand. And it got to the point where it wasn't enjoyable and fun anymore and I didn't feel that I could make a difference. What I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong, what I'm hearing is it sounds almost like you're buying into the concept of ICANN, the way that it was formed and the way it's supposed to function, but you were concerned the committees were becoming so large that there were so many desperate voices that it wasn't coming together smoothly. That's a rough interpretation. So is that basically? So yeah, that's a good part of it. The second part of it is that there was special interest that we're getting more and more influence and control. Meaning their voices were getting louder? Their voices were getting louder and obviously they had more and more influence in terms of the committees and the ICANN organization itself. So that you would have this rotating group of people who didn't know much about the internet but knew about policy, people that knew a lot about the policy of the internet and the commercial world but didn't have technical knowledge. There were very few people on the ICANN board that had technical knowledge, which is one of the things that during my time on the nominating committee we did everything we could to change. But it just got to the point where the bloat seemed unreasonable, where the special interests looked like everything else that I'd come to see in Washington but on a larger scale because it was multinational. And in addition to that I'm guessing this sort of marriage between policy formation, representatives of GAC for example and the technical types of which you were one and sort of the coordination and the marriage of them toward the formation of policy sounds difficult at best. It really was. I mean the interesting thing is that the internet worked and still today works really well because the technical folks are actually making it happen, not the policy folks. There are a number of initiatives that go on behind the scenes where it's just us geeks keeping the wheels on the bus. And as we've sort of migrated into the modern world where security is a real issue, ICANN has no value and provides no value add whatsoever from a security point of view. No matter what anyone says, there's no value there but that's probably the single most important thing that's facing us. It's the technical folks. And so what's really happened is that the technical part of the internet, the geeks and the scientists and so on and the technicians and the operators are the people that actually kept the wheels on the bus. And ICANN has very little influence on that and really doesn't matter a whole lot. It's just not relevant. Well, at the end of the day, ICANN is supposed to be oversimplified of course but supposed to be a technical coordination body. Are you saying it's kind of straight from that or it's not involved in the, you mentioned security? Critical issue from this point forward. Are you saying that it's straight from that or are you saying that that is part of a mission that may not be the central or primary focus that it should be in the future? I believe that the technical aspect of the internet is no longer and the operation of the internet is no longer core to ICANN. There are some brilliant, wonderful, technical folks in ICANN. Over time, some really good people have been brought on. There was a period when there was a shortage of them within ICANN. ICANN I guess has enough of a budget now to be able to say we have to fill seats. We may as well go and fill them with technical people and they happen to host some very, very good technical people. But in reality, this has become a policy-based process and a business-based process and the technical part of it is just by the wayside. Well, you can look at that by the way when you look at ESAC. ESAC within the chart, I don't think it's changed, was developed and it's charted to provide advice to the CEO of ICANN. Instead of saying it really needs to provide policy and some form of oversight that actually affects the technical operation of the internet. So you have the ESAC looking at problems. Coming up with papers and presentations and recommendations. Most times those things get knocked down because there's a business constituency that those policies don't suit and I've seen that happen for years. It sounds almost like you're saying ICANN has lost its roots. Oh, there's no question that's lost its roots. There's no question of that. So it's not almost, I'm saying it. I am saying that. But there are still some good people but they have an uphill battle and I don't know where ICANN's gonna go. What's the biggest risk to ICANN moving forward? I believe the biggest risk to ICANN is that it will become yet another international organization that's controlled by policies within governments around the world and has very little interest in the constituencies that actually rely on the internet. Rodney Jaffee, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you very much for having me.