 Becky Burr, who is formerly with NTIA now, an ICANN board member, Becky, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. If Vince Surf is considered the father of the Internet, I've heard you refer to as the mother of the Internet, what was it like in those early years working with Ira Magazine or to get ICANN going? So first of all, I have been called the godmother of ICANN, but I'm not going to take credit for the Internet. The early years were very exciting in the following way. There was a problem, funding for both the, funding for the IANA functions had been stopped by the National Science Foundation. There was need to sort of secure a firm foundation on which to continue the DNS work. There was talk about moving it into a more international organization kind of UN agency, and a lot of people were very concerned about it, and a lot of people were very concerned about it from many, many different focuses from keeping the Internet, the Internet being able to continue to move at Internet speed, not having a heavy governmental overlay, allowing the sort of creativity that comes from private sector writ large management. And so in order to figure out what to do, we conducted a very extensive sort of talking couple of months where dozens and dozens, hundreds of people came in and talked to us about what it was they needed to see going forward, what their problems with the way things were running then. There was a lot of disputes, trademark disputes, other kinds of disputes that had been kind of building up. And so we got an enormous amount of input from speaking with people, and this was around the world, so it wasn't just the U.S. And then we sort of crafted the green paper, which we wanted to throw out there and see what's coming back at us. We sort of put it out there, and we got thousands of comments, and thousands of comments, they were online comments from around the world, which was, I think, in, this was 1997, it was probably first in terms of online comments globally from the U.S. government perspective. So then we did more talking, more talking around the world, more talking with people and produced the white paper. There was a huge amount of excitement about it, there was an enormous amount of energy. Was there a crepidation as well? Well, of course there were some people that were saying that it wasn't going to work or that it should be managed by the ITU. But in fact, it was a pretty small number. There was very strong global consensus for allowing this to move into a non-governmental setting. In fact, it was really trying to replicate or preserve as much of what had been going on because while DARPA had been funding the work that John did, it was with a very light touch and he was really running it. So it sounds like there was pretty much universal acceptance that the DNS management of the DNS would at least go toward a private model instead of a government model, right? Yes. And just to put this in context, that was a time in which there was an enormous amount of optimism and awareness about what the Internet was doing. The U.S. government produced a paper on a framework for global Internet commerce that called for a very light regulatory touch. The European Union produced one, there was one produced by Japan and there were big international conferences where people were very focused on not imposing a heavy governmental regulatory regime on the Internet. And there was a little bit of a sense of what if everyone did, so a few passed the regulation. So I grew up in the midst of a very vibrant global discussion about allowing the Internet to be the Internet and a sort of light-handed regulatory approach to it. So some of the things that we've seen in more recent years were really not there. The whole concept, I can't as such an unusual beast in this sort of bottom-up policy formation system with multiple inputs, unlike traditional organizations where it goes from the top down. Where did that come from? It came from what we were saying was the whole notion all along was private sector leadership. Now today we wouldn't call that, we wouldn't say private sector leadership, we would say multi-stakeholder. We didn't mean just business or anything like that, but stakeholders who were part of it would be involved. That had always been the case. John Postel worked very closely with the ITF and with the CCNSO managers and the like. There was a need in that transition to expand the definition of stakeholder. There were more stakeholders, there were end users, there were business users of the Internet. The pot was getting bigger, the stakeholder group was getting bigger. What we wanted to do was really preserve what was going on and what had traditionally been the basis of DNS management, which is sort of consensus among the stakeholders, but recognize that the group of stakeholders had gotten much bigger and much more diverse and much more global. Help me understand the timeframe. Were you at NTIA then? I moved to NTIA on June 1st of 1997 and we published the first request for comments on June 2nd or something like that. What was it like working with Magazine or on this endeavor? So I was great. He had a group of people from all over the US government working on the framework for global electronic commerce and I was working on privacy and Internet governance. There were people from the US trade rep talking about tariffs, there were people from all over the government putting together the sort of if we want to enable us to take advantage of the opportunity that the Internet represented from an economic growth perspective, what structure would we need to have in place? And so this DNS management piece came directly out of the e-commerce. To that point, Magazine or told us, he said, you know, when he finished with the failed Clinton healthcare initiative and he was going into this, he said a primary driver of this was we wanted a long-term economic growth model. Was the economic viability of the Internet recognized by everybody at those very early stages? We were talking about what percentage of the global economy was already sort of riding on the Internet and how that would grow over time. So there was a clear recognition that the Internet was the growth engine of the future and that we needed to get it right. People got it. Yeah. People definitely got it. Now, some, I think actually our numbers were probably quite low in terms of what we thought would be happening five years down the road. Globally, people understood that this was a paradigm shift like the industrial revolution in a way. Was there a, across the board acceptance throughout the U.S. government in the other agencies, or was there, did you have to argue this sort of, for lack of a better phrase, we built it, we sort of own it attitude? There was remarkably little of that in the administration. Certainly the science agencies that had been part of it never had that attitude. I mean, they had gone global, although in a university and research institute model. There was, interestingly enough, there was a little more resistance to commercialization. But you heard it once in a while, but not at all the executive order that President Clinton signed included moving this out of the government and the private sector. So every once in a while you'd hear it. How about Capitol Hill? Was there acceptance there? Well, there was. First of all, it's pretty complex and what we were proposing to do was pretty unique. We couldn't point precisely to a model of what we were doing because we were building something. Some people on the Hill understood that. There were, of course, some economic issues that created some lobbying on Capitol Hill. We were changing the competitive landscape in a pretty fundamental way and the current winners in the economic landscape of the DNS were resisted a little bit and they got some traction on Capitol Hill. So we had a series of hearings and a series of investigations to make sure that we were doing it right. What was the reaction throughout ICANN's history? There have always been congressional hearings about some aspect. Whether it was the new GTLD program, whether it was the IANA stewardship transition. What was the reaction both within the administration, multiple administrations, I guess, and globally for ICANN being called up to the legislative branch and being asked to explain this or that? Well, so frankly, I think it's not clear but for the change in veriscience position in this that it's not clear to me how much Capitol Hill interest would have been. I think that honestly generated the interest. You think that drove it? I think that there were, I know, that there were concerted efforts to get Congress interested in this. That's fair game. I just want to make sure people do it all the time. But I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. So you're saying veriside drove that interest. And that happens all the time. And you would expect a publicly traded company that has an obligation to maximize shareholder value would take the steps that it could to retain its position. Had there not been that lobbying push, there would not have been as great an interest as there was? There would not have been as great an interest. There clearly would have been interest from the science committees. The Commerce Committee would have looked at it. We also had the Judiciary Committees looking at it from a trademark and an IP perspective. So there were enough issues going on that I think that there would have been some hearings. I suspect that they would not have been quite as hostile. But we did have a Democratic administration and a Republican Congress at that time. So there would have been some of the natural partisan politics. Whenever ICANN was called up to the Hill, it always appeared to me that it was never truly understood that whenever there was a hearing, even right up to the end when the final cruise hearing on the transition, there was a sort of underlying current that a lot of members just didn't quite get ICANN. Well, I think that's right. They didn't get the DNS, right? So you have to understand the DNS to be in with. And then you have to understand how the management is dispersed and how there really isn't a kind of central other than the coordination role that ICANN plays. It's not a single monolithic, it's not a thing. It's a vast network of networks with, you know, managed by the DNS system or navigated by the DNS system. That is, it's complicated. We've gotten better about explaining it. The other thing is that to the extent there was a we built it, we own it, that was based on this fundamental misunderstanding about what it meant to be the authoritative root, right? And John tried to demonstrate that one night by directing the root server system to point to another authoritative root. That could have been, for those of us who understood what he was doing, it was clearly John saying, you guys are just confused, here's how it works. It wasn't John pushing back about the government, it was John trying to. Well, I think it was a moment in which John was trying to demonstrate that some of the arguments were quite silly and taking the opportunity to, in a very tangible way, what where control lay and how control could move from place to place. Now, that's the way I always interpreted it. There were multiple administrations, the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, and so on. Could you ascertain a difference in the way that ICANN was handled or dealt with from administration to administration? Was there a difference? So, you know, the Clinton administration ended in 2000 and it was still really in its infancy. We clearly had the commitment to complete the transition and move it forward. I think that could have been, that might have been the way subsequent administrations would have proceeded. It took ICANN a while to get sort of stable and we had the 2003, 2004 evolution and reform committee. It really changed things with September 11th. At that moment, there was a sort of where are all of the potential control safety kinds of places. And I think that for a while, the intelligence community was pretty convinced that there was an important reason to control the authoritative route. That changed by the end of the Bush administration. And they had sort of worked through the evaluation and understood the system had gotten much more robust and much more dispersed in all of those things. And so, while there was always this commitment to transfer, ultimately it happened that there was a period of time where there was increasing anxiety about what would happen if we didn't have this sort of backstop control over the route. And ICANN was, it was hard work to sort of get to a stable period. So that kind of supported allowing this time to pass. But by the end of the Bush administration, it was pretty clear that people had understood that this wasn't a sort of national security tool. And so that paved the way in the Obama administration for finishing the transition. Let me ask you about another issue, and you were involved in this one, which was dot XXX. Was this a case, because it's often pointed to, is this is a case where the government did try to influence ICANN? So we did do FOIAs, and I don't think that there's anything in the written record that proves that the U.S. government intervened. I had conversations with people who were directly in that line. The U.S. government did intervene in the XXX decision. And it was sort of after the fact, because we had been working very closely with NTIA to make sure they understood what the TLD was about, what was going on. It was all fine until after ICANN board had actually already approved it. And at that moment, there was a very strong political pushback, somebody reaching, a conservative organization reaching back into the Bush administration at the highest level, which resulted in really a sea change from NTIA's perspective. How would you characterize, I asked Vint Cerf this question, and I said, how would you characterize historically the USG's relationship with ICANN? And he said problematic and not very supportive. How would you characterize it? Well, I think that there was support initially. There was a great deal of frustration on the part of NTIA in the early years. The IANA functions were not delivered in the best way. They were not, there were delays, it took a long time. They got lots and lots and lots of complaints from the direct consumers that just serving the IANA functions was difficult. There were some kind of heavy-handed moves to try to get country code, top-level domains to enter into contracts that were well-intended but seriously backfired. And so there was a great deal of frustration in the early days with performance and sort of heavy-handed tactics. And I think that the government pushed back on that. And then after that, until Larry Strickling sort of got fully up to speed about it, I would imagine it could have been difficult. I think that Larry was fully supportive of ICANN throughout. But I think there was probably frustration on both sides right up to the end. Did you think the transition was going to fly? I was really happy on October, on October 1st, I just have to say. I think it was touch and go. The between the announcement in 2014 and when it finally happened in October of 2016, were there points where you're going, I don't think this is going to work? I think that until the community came together right after the announcement in which the announcement was really focused on the IANA functions technical transition. And the community stood up and said in a kind of astonishing unity that never before seen, that's not good enough. We need these accountability fixes. This is the moment to do this. And ICANN resisted. And frankly, so did NTIA, didn't really understand why we needed this. So we did both complicate the transition process by demanding a more robust review and change to get there. And I was very worried about it until ICANN finally acknowledged the community's views on this and worked to put together the CCWG on the cross-community working group on accountability. After that, I felt pretty good about it. There were moments in between now and then, and it obviously took a lot longer than anybody had hoped that it would. You have had a unique perspective in that you were at NTIA, you were an attorney involved in the dot triple X case, and now you're an ICANN board member. So you've been along the entire continuum. So actually, it's a little more complicated than that. I was at NTIA, but I was also the GAC representative from the United States to the GAC for the first couple of years. And then I was a lawyer in private practice, but I was also on the country-con-name-supporting organization council for many years. So I have had a kind of nice look at the process. So my question, given that broad range of experience, how has that shaped your perception of ICANN? Well, I think I have a pretty good view of sort of what the drivers are across the organization. I think I understand and share the concerns, have a sort of, I have many, many different perspectives, I can look at it and say, as a country code manager, here are the issues at stake. As a business participant, as an industry participant in the DNS industry, here are the concerns. As a government, here are the concerns. And as a member of the board, here are the concerns, you put them together and figure it out. Great. Becky Burr, thank you very much. Appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. It's a pleasure.