 Vint Cerf, first of all, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Let me ask you, in terms of ICANN's historical relationship with the U.S. government, what are some of the key points that stand out in your mind? Well, setting aside the long history of the Internet's relationship or the government's relationship to the development of the Internet, when we get to ICANN, there were preceding activities starting around 1996 that led to government interest in the ICANN idea. That was a consequence of John Postel's effort to manage the domain name system, IP address allocation, and editing the RFCs, the requests for comments, which document the standards for the Internet protocols, and also managing the various tables of parameters that were needed to exercise those protocols. So John did all of that. He had some help at USC Information Sciences Institute. But as the domain name system became more and more commercial, which is post-1992, there were increasing amounts of potential risk, at least as seen by USC and their lawyers, that somehow this commercialized activity and disputes over domain names would somehow draw the university into all kinds of commercial. So risk litigation wise you mean? Risk of litigation. So I think they put some pressure on John to look for a way to institutionalize the activity outside of USC. On top of that, John recognized he'd been doing this for 25 or more years, that someday he wouldn't be able to do it, and that he ought to have an institutional setting for this to continue, because if it was going to do any good, it had to go on for an unknown amount of time. And the irony, of course, of all this is that starting in 1996, John begins this exploration of how to institutionalize it, and then passes away in 1998. So part of the institutionalization exploration involves something called the internet ad hoc group or committee, I guess, IAHC. IAHC, yeah. And that you could see watching the various interactions that there were dollar signs in people's eyes, and it was clear that there was a certain amount of greed driving the debate back and forth. Ultimately, two things happened. One of them is that John attempted, I think, in response to the IAHC to consider creating an institution in Geneva. After all, that's the home of many international organizations, and this surely even then was recognized as an international phenomenon. And the second thing is that John was, this is at least my interpretation, John wanted to test the root zone management system to make sure that if the A route wasn't the one that was feeding all the rest, but if it was B or C or something else, that it would still work. Now, that's one explanation. Some other people asserted that John asked to change the feeding primary root zone just to exercise his power. I don't believe that, because that's not John's style. He was worried about making sure that systems would be resilient. But as soon as he made the change to have the root servers fed from a different server than the A route, all hell broke loose, and the government stepped in. There was also already some stirring in the Congress about a possibility of the control of the internet escaping out of the country to Switzerland. Let me interrupt you for one second. That incident that you just related to me when John had done this and the consternation it caused in the U.S. government, I had heard, and tell me whether or not this was true, that magazineer had actually threatened John and said, if you don't switch this back, U.S. marshals are going to be at your door. Is that true or is that a fiction? Well, I don't, I don't have primary knowledge of that. Have you heard it? That story has been around. And I think at least the part about Ira magazine or contacting John is almost certainly true. You may have a chance to ask Ira about that in the course of these interviews. And I think that would be an interesting question to ask. I'm pretty sure that that sounds real. Whether he threatened U.S. marshals or something else, I don't know. But it is often thought that that action triggered Clinton's request of magazineer to go figure out how to deal with this problem. Who is going to manage the domain name system and the address allocation? Who is going to perform the IANA functions if it's not under contract to the U.S. government? Did the government, the way you're talking, the government immediately understood the value of the DNS. It sounds like there was no education necessary. They got it. I think in the Clinton administration, very senior people got it, including Al Gore. And certainly, I think Ira was tasked with figuring out what to do. And there was also a belief that responsibility for internet should migrate towards the private sector. And this had been going on for some years well ahead of this particular period of time, way before the IANA system. What was the genesis of that belief? I mean, was it there automatically? Did you guys help push that? Did John push that? Or was it just there? Did everyone accept it? John was not particularly interested in commercializing the internet. But as far back as 1988, I was. At that point, I had been away from the government for about six years, because I left DARPA in late 1982. But by 1988, you could see the significant beginnings of commercialization. By this time, Cisco systems existed. Maybe Juniper, by that time, certainly protean, people making equipment that would let you build pieces of internet. There was a show called Interop that was founded by Dan Lynch, who had been the guy running the computer centers at USC, ISI, and before that, SRI International. Interop was an exhibition that allowed companies to show off their hardware and show that it interworked on the show net, the ethernet. And also just teach people about how to write TCPIP and other protocols. So it was actually a very successful enterprise. At some point, he filled the Moscone Center with 50,000 people. So by 1988, this is an ongoing and thriving concern. And I remember walking in to Interop Show in 88 with Eric Benamu, who at the time was the CEO of 3Com, a company founded by Bob Medcamp. And I saw this giant Cisco display. And I turned to Eric, and I said, how much do those cost? And he said, a quarter of a million dollars. And he says, that's not counting the people that you have to pay to man the booth for a week. And I just stood there with my jaw dropping, thinking, my god, some people think this is going to make money. And then I thought, how the hell are we going to get internet into the hands of the general public? Because as of that moment, it was only available to a significant portion of the academic community, especially supported by NSF, and the military. But general public didn't have access. So at that point, I started pushing for steps that would allow the internet to become a self-supporting commercial enterprise in the expectation that the only way the general public would get access to it would be if it had an economic engine driving it. And by good fortune, by 1989, we managed to break the appropriate use policy limitations. It said no commercial traffic on the government back loans. NSF actually allowed me to connect MCI mail up to the internet while I was working with Bob Conn at CNRI. And as soon as we did that, we announced it. All the other email carriers said, well, you want to be connected. And then three commercial internet services popped up, UUNet, PSINet, and Surfnet on San Diego. So by 1989, we're starting to see commercialization. By 1992, we're starting to see commercialization of the domain name system, because network solutions asked for permission to charge for domain name registration. And the National Science Foundation, under which contract the network solutions guys were operating, recognized that they were spending research dollars on what really looked like a commercial enterprise supporting the private sector. And so they said, OK, you should charge for that. Nobody knew quite how much to charge for it. So they said $50 a year for two years. And if there was any excess money, it would go into a fund that would be used to support further research on internet. Well, the Republican part of the Congress didn't like that, because they claimed it was an illegal tax. The then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Sensenbrenner, argued that it was an illegal tax. And the National Science Foundation didn't have the authority to do that. So there was a lot of hu-ha going on in the policy regarding internet well in advance of the IAHC question. So there was visibility about internet and its commercialization and oversight well ahead of this. Then the IAHC, two years worth of turmoil and proposals to go to Geneva happened. And John does this swap, and it triggers what, in effect, is an avalanche and what comes out is a green paper from Ira Magaziner's office, followed by a white paper. Explain the green paper for those who are not familiar with it. Ira consulted with a lot of people, including me, and then produced an outline of what the transfer of authority to the private sector could look like. And so the green paper was a proposal from what that would look like. And there was lots of comments which led to the white paper. And the white paper was the basis upon which the ICANN organization was proposed. And so Ira is sort of being the midwife, if you like, for the birth of this organization. Now, there were competitors, if I remember correctly. Here I don't have a clear recollection of who else was competing. But ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, was one of the competitors and was selected to perform this function under contract to now the National Telecommunications and Information Agency. So we're seeing a transfer of responsibility for this from the National Science Foundation and research community to part of the Department of Commerce. And this is in keeping with the recognition that this is becoming a highly commercial activity. But there was, it sounds like the way you're talking, what I'm hearing is there was general consensus of this needs to happen. It was form and function that was being debated and a variance? Well, yes. Let me say that the parties who were engaged in the Had Hawk group had one model of this, which was complete commercialization and independence. The government had a slightly different view, which was the government hangs on to control of this with contracts, with verisign, with contracts, which had acquired network solutions, and contracts with the new organization, ICANN. And in fact, it was a cooperative agreement with verisign and a memorandum of understanding, plus a contract with ICANN. And all of that comes to fruition in 1998. And by September of 1998 or October, ICANN is formally created. How specific was the White Paper problematic vent? I mean, how specific was it in helping you guys maneuver to this new territory? Well, it was very specific with regard to the way in which the organization would be run. It said nothing about funding, which I found to be problematic. And it had dictated a certain amount of structure to the organization. So it was supposed to be multi-stakeholder, but the stakeholder groups were defined in the White Paper. The process by which board members were elected was also defined in the paper, including that half of the board should be elected by some kind of a global election. And on the face of it, it's not clear how in the hell you would ever do that. How do you qualify the electorate? How do you reach them? You can't rely on the Postal Service. You can't rely on the internet. And that sort of detail was not there. It was not in the document. The detail of implementing it wasn't. But the assertion that in order to assure that the constituencies, the so-called special interest groups, would not dominate the board for their own benefit, they insisted that their civil society have half of the board. Let's back up over one thing. You touched what I think and kind of skimmed over. It seems like a major point. There wasn't a provision for a funding model. There was no funding model. None. So I ended up, I was not involved in the formation of ICANN. I was present at the first board meeting during the period when they were trying to find a CEO. And I was there to, in fact, endorse Mike Roberts as the first CEO of ICANN. So I sat in on that part of the meeting. There was no funding model. And I remember undertaking to try to get funding. I donated money from MCI, where I was senior VP, IBM, and at least one other. Maybe it was digital. I actually don't remember who all the three parties were, but I think they put money into this organization. It was a tin cup model at the beginning. And then there was this struggle, which Mike Roberts and Louis Tutan, the general council and others, had to go through in order to figure out what business model would make sense. Where would the money come from? Would it come from the registries? Would it come from the registrars? Would it come from the IP address allocation community, Aaron and Ripe NCC, for example? And so eventually, with a great deal of effort, a funding model was developed. But at the beginning, the government offered no resources for this organization at all. It was a zero-cost procurement contract from NTIA to ICANN to run the IANA function, the thing which John Postel had been doing. And everything else was left to the organization to figure out. So the white paper's done. What is magazine's role after the white paper's done? Did he step out? Is he still? My understanding is that Ira stepped away. At that point, the NTIA was the responsible government agency, so he had handed this off from the White House. This is where Bill Clinton says, get this off my plate. Ira does the green paper, the white paper, and finally hands this thing off to NTIA inside of the Department of Commerce. So the undersecretary or the assistant secretary of NTIA becomes the responsible government authority. Prior to that handoff to DOC, and I assume you're talking figuratively, but how high up? I mean, we all know about the famous phrase of Gore saying, I invented the internet. How high up in the Clinton administration was this situation being monitored? Was there concern? Or do you know? I would have to speculate, but I also need to correct the assertion that you just made. Al Gore never said I built the internet. He was misrepresented in that campaign, and I will withhold the rent that I normally go through on this point. He actually helped a lot. When he was vice, when he was senator, he helped the past legislation that funded the National Research and Education Network, which turned into an NSF man. This is something which connected 3,000 universities in the United States, and paid for international connections to other similar research and education networks elsewhere in the world. So he should get big credit for his actions as a senator. When he was vice president, he helped to pass legislation which allowed the flow of commercial traffic on government-sponsored backbones, the thing that I had gotten permission to do in 1988, but only as a one-year experiment. And so Al gets credit as vice president for helping to give birth to what is today the internet. Remember that he answered that question in the year 2000. This was during the Dot Boom period from 1995 when Netscape Communications had its spectacular IPO to the Dot Bust in April of 2000. He was asked during his campaign for the presidency what he had done as senator. And he said, I took the initiative in creating the internet. And he's referring to the internet of the present, which is a consequence of his actions, both to fund the NSF Net backbone and also to allow this commercial activity. It sounds like from the get-go, the concept of the privatization, allowing the private sector to have a leadership role in the management of the DNS. Sounds like everybody bought into that. What I'm hearing you say is there wasn't a lot of opposition. Well, actually, so now let's go back in time. It's 1988. I'm arguing that we should turn this into an economic engine that's self-supporting so everybody can get access to it. And my colleagues in the research community are mostly saying, are you crazy? Why would you let the refraff onto our thing? And my reaction was they will benefit from it and they will contribute to it. So we didn't agree on that. On the other hand, certainly at the top of the administration during the Clinton years, there was belief, I think, by Bill and by Al and by Aira and by others. Aira had written a paper on digital commerce or something, or electronic commerce, which in a sense outlined the importance of networking and computer communications to electronic commerce, e-commerce. And so it was a piece of work commissioned by Bill Clinton. So I would say that at the top of the US government, there was awareness of the potential here. You heard Al talk about the information superhighway. He's remembering what his father had done with the 1954 Act that created the Interstate Highway Act, which you may remember was a military act intended to allow us to move missiles around on the road system to keep the Russians from targeting fixed silos. That was never used for that. But it initiated this gigantic economic boom. And I think Al saw at the time the potential for this information superhighway to do the same thing. Interesting. Throughout, from the beginning, when ICANN was formed in 1998 up through present day, what was the most problematic points in your mind in the USG's relationship with ICANN? Oh, so you're asking about the relationship as opposed to problematic things for ICANN in general, which is fine. I mean, let me try to answer that, and then we can go back. So with regard to the relationship, I think that the most troubling thing, in my view, was the nature of the procurement contract under which ICANN functioned. It was as if ICANN were the supplier of pencils. Literally, the contract had this character that was like, for no money, $0, please supply us with IANA functions, which meant inventing new processes and procedures, growing the staff in order to support this, dealing with the explosion of demand for domain names and internet addresses, and also, by the way, working in a very complex environment with multiple organizations having responsibility for various parts of this system. ICANN allocated, for example, big chunks of the internet address space to the regional internet registries, BrightNCC in Europe, Aaron in the US, and later three others, LACNIC, NAPRNIC, and APNIC. And so ICANN had to work with these other independent institutions in a cooperative way in order to make sure that the domain names and the internet addresses got uniquely allocated. So this was a hard thing to do. It's global in scope. This is not just a thing in the US. And there was no model to follow at that point, correct? No, they're plowing new ground, as far as I can see, especially the multi-stakeholder model, which has morphed over time as we've learned more about how to make that work. So I think that the view from the Department of Commerce of this as a procurement contract made it much more difficult for ICANN to function. There would be arguments of the forum, well, I'm sorry, we can't change this contract, or we'll have to recompete the contract if you want to change it. Recompetition of this complex thing, I think, would potentially be incredibly damaging to the internet's function. So I thought that was a testy kind of interaction. Until Larry Stirkling comes along, who still has his own form of testiness, but he was the most articulate supporter of the multi-stakeholder model and of ICANN, of all of the assistant secretaries. Because he believed it conceptually? He believed, I think he absolutely believed that this multi-stakeholder model was the right way in which to deal with policy for the internet. And he put his career on the line, in my opinion, during the period that he served as the head of NTIA. And he argued forcefully and loudly in international settings, including the Internet Governance Forum, and the W, what's called Wicked, the World Conference on Information. Yeah, Wicked, yeah. So he was a huge friend, even though he was a tough friend, but he was a huge sponsor. That was probably the most positive period of relationship that I can remember. When we talked to Larry Stirkling, he said that the Wicked meeting in 2012 was to him a sort of wake-up call that the IANA stewardship transition had to occur, that it was time. Do you see it that way? Absolutely, I think what happened there is that there was a constant drumbeat from the non-US participants, both in ICANN and in the ITU, for the US government to relinquish its special responsibility or special authority over the internet. And it was just, it was a, the ITU had a leader at the time who really wanted to take responsibility for internet. He was gonna deliver that to the ITU. This is Hamidun Turei. And so there was a persistent theme coming from the ITU to invade the territory of responsibility that was at ICANN. And the usual excuse for this was, why should the US government have this special role compared to all other governments? And that was getting in the way of State Department negotiations on other matters. So it had resonance. So it absolutely. And so during the Wicked meeting in 2012, it was evident that there were attempts being made by particularly the, you know, the Russians, the Chinese, the South Africans, even the Brazilians and maybe the Saudis to capture more control. And then the end result of that meeting was a disagreement, a split between 89 countries that signed the treaty and 55 that didn't. And there could not be a more visible schism in the international community than that. And I think that the crux of this was the US special relationship with ICANN. And I think putting words in Larry's mouth that that caused him to recognize the need to make this transition. And then the question was how to do it in a way that didn't harm the internet and didn't harm, you know, US interests. Was the controversy that surrounded dot triple X a sort of test of the USG's relationship with ICANN? It has been argued by some, I'd like your take on this, that the government, some say more harshly, some say very subtly, tried to influence the decision on dot triple X. How do you see that? The government, well, let's say NTIA in particular, since they had a very direct relationship with ICANN, during a Republican administration was inundated with objections to the creation of a dot triple X top level domain. And to be fair about it, there are other parts of the world who also didn't think it was a good idea. So it's not like the US or NTIA was unique in that respect. Yep, there was pressure of varying sorts to try to get that decision not made or to try to prevent the dot triple X from being assigned, including there was a possibility that if dot triple X had been approved that the US government in the form of NTIA would actually force it to be removed from the route. This would have been an absolutely horrible present to set. It would be the worst possible precedent that you could ever have happened because as soon as that happened, everyone else who complained that the US government could do that and would do that would say see, that's what we told you, they didn't do that. And I think it was wise not to because it would have given credibility to the argument that the government would, for example, decide, well, let's pull, are you out? Or we don't like what Iran has done recently, let's pull them out of the route zone. And so thank God they didn't do that. But you could see scenarios unfolding which would lead to really serious problems. That whole controversy, this issue, dot triple X was fairly well publicized. Were there other times when the US government or DOC had a sort of difficult time with ICANN or vice versa that are not so widely known? Actually, I don't think it, well, there were stressful moments as we worked our way through the DNS sec, the cryptographic signing of the route zone, working through the details of that. The particular mechanism that was finally agreed, in my opinion, was less secure than if ICANN did all of it, but they split the functionality between ICANN and Verisign. And I didn't think that was the best security solution, but I didn't have the vote at the time. So that's one thing. The other thing which was a struggle was the Treasury Department's OFAC, the Office of Foreign, I forget what the AC stands for, but it has to do with any transfer of funds to foreign governments, any assistance that you might give to a government that was on the bad list, terrorist list, for example. So OFAC had the ability to intervene and inhibit any action by an American corporation that would be seen as aiding terrorism. And so as an institution that was supposed to cater to the entire internet, including the country codes of countries that were labeled terrorist companies, you would run a file of this, an argument would be made. I'm sorry, you can't update the pointer to the iranian.ir top level domain because that's assisting the foreign government. Our position at ICANN, at least the one I took, was that this is a global system and we owe integrity to all of the participants in the system regardless of what the US government might have thought. And I remind you that even in the course of the tense relationship between the US and Cuba, the US permitted telecommunications to occur. There was a contract, MCI might have been one of the contractors, but there was always a way to communicate. And in my view, this is a very important diplomatic channel and the internet is another one. And so to arbitrarily cut that off for some political reason is a big policy mistake, in my view. And did you win that argument? Well, I don't think I was the one making an argument with OFAC. I think in the end we managed to get through all of the controversies and as far as I know, nothing got blocked indefinitely but there were periods of time when things took a lot longer than they should have. Interesting. When Strickling made the announcement in 2014 that the IANA stewardship transition was, they wanted the community to come up with a proposal to make that happen, there was a lot of talk about ICANN's maturation. ICANN had matured to the point where this should happen. Is that an oversimplification? In fact, could it have occurred earlier or is that an accurate statement? That's a really interesting question. ICANN is a very complicated organization and it got more complicated over time. This is theorem number 206, everything is more complicated. And ICANN has had the ability to amend its operation, to change its organizational structures and its procedures. It creates new entities at need and so it ends up being kind of a barnacle in crusted ship. And so it's a complicated object to deal with. It has had to change its mechanisms over the course of the 18 years or now 19 that it's existed about 18 and a half. So could it have happened sooner? I think the answer is yes. I think that the transition as we now see it with all the various elements that went into that including new functionality and new authorities probably could have happened sooner. But it would not have happened and could not have happened had Larry Strickling not decided that it should happen. Strickling was instrumental. So I think absolutely, I mean, this would not have happened if he had not asserted that he was prepared to support that if a proposal came back that met the criteria that he had established. That raises an interesting issue. We're talking about the US government's relationship with ICANN, but predominantly we have been talking about NTIA, the executive branch. The Hill, Capitol Hill, has always seemed concerned about letting ICANN go, if you will, to use a vastly oversimplified phrase. Why? So the simple explanation for this is rooted in another example, which I'd like to offer you. When the World Summit on the Information Society was proposed by the ITU, it was convened as an intergovernmental activity in 2003, and the first question that the delegates had was what's an information society? And somebody said, oh, it's kind of like the internet. The next question was who's in charge of the internet? Because they didn't believe anything on that scale even in 2003, could possibly operate without having central control. So we all said, well, actually it's distributed. Nobody's really in charge. Then they discovered ICANN, which has this responsibility for allocating internet addresses and domain names in a unique way to make sure the parameters of the internet are uniquely allocated. And so they decided ICANN must be in charge of the internet. Then they said, who's in charge of ICANN? Of course, I'm chairman of the board at the time. But they also noticed that there is this contract between ICANN and NTIA. Oh, so it's the US government that's in charge of the internet. So that's the international view coming out of the World Summit on the information society. And to make that particular story a little shorter, after two cycles of this World Summit, they still can't quite figure out what does internet governance mean. And so they have this working group on internet governance which doesn't come to any conclusions after two years. So they create the internet governance forum, but it's created as a multi-stakeholder forum where civil society and the technical community academics and governments in the private sector all meet and have essentially equal footing in the debates and discussions that ensue. That was dramatic, because that's gone from the Intergovernmental World Summit to the internet governance forum, which is multi-stakeholder. That was a very important thing, and that's been going on now since 2007, or 2006. So now to take that point about who's in charge of the internet. I think that the US Congress had this view that the internet was created in the United States by the US Defense Department, and therefore somehow the US owns the internet. Even though when Bob Kahn and I did the original designs, we handed them out freely with no constraints, no patents, no other intellectual property claims for very good reason. We wanted this to be accepted with no barriers to adoption. So the members of Congress, especially the more conservative ones, see the US as the creator and owner of the internet. We made it, we own it. And yeah, we made it, we own it. And therefore, handing any authority for it out of US government control is somehow an abrogation of our ownership and our control, as if to say that the US control the internet, which clearly does not. In that context, let me ask you this question. Strickling announces 2014. What a proposal we want to make the IANA stewardship transition happen. It's concluded in 2016. Let me pose the question to you that I posed to Strickling. At any point between that announcement and when it finally happened, did you ever think, this is just not, I know you weren't directly involved, but you're part of the community, you follow it closely. Was there ever any point where you thought this is not gonna happen? Yeah, pretty much every day. It was very clear that first of all, it was getting, it was very hard to get the community to come together. It split into three parts. The technical part, the internet engineering task force was ready instantly. They prepared all their documents to have them ready to go. The registries with a little more work also prepared documents that showed how they would operate in the absence of the NTIA presence and so they didn't have any direct interaction with NTIA anyhow. They were dependent on ICANN handing out these big blocks, but that was it. So that wasn't too bad. So it's five different organizations had to agree. So they got their work done on time as well. The domain name world however is rife with all kinds of incentives for various and some of the policies to be adopted. The domainers, the people who own millions of domain names, have one view of it, the other registries have another and the registrar has yet another. It took months and months way beyond the deadline to get that all sorted out. So while that was in a great state of flux, I would think this is never gonna happen because it was so hard to get that part of the agreement done. And then of course right up at the end, we had attempts by attorneys generals and by Senator Cruz and others to try to block the transition from happening. And so those periods were really tough because it wasn't clear whether their actions would have traction or not. And so it was a miracle when it went through. Final question. In summary, how would you characterize the historical relationship between the government, the US government and ICANN? I think that from the period of formation in 1998 to the time of Larry Strickling's ascendance as the assistant secretary for NTIA, that it was either largely neglected because there were other issues that NTIA had to deal with. They have a much broader responsibility than just overseeing ICANN. To serious interference with the ability of the organization to get its work done. And so I always found it to be a problematic relationship and not a very supportive one. And in spite of that, I am proud of the fact that ICANN has managed to survive in spite of all that. And again, it's not a perfect organization by any stretch and there's still a good work to be done that can be done because even under its current structure in the post transition, there is room for improvement and there are mechanisms for improvement. And it's capable of doing that because I oversaw several major changes to its organizational structure. That's great, then thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Pleasure.