 John, I'd still like to see you. As you know, we're trying to capture some of ICANN's history. And I want to do it in a kind of interesting way. I'm going to ask you two questions. The first question is the easy one. Say a few words about how long you've been involved, how you got involved, what your broad arc is, and that will just be used to frame the rest of what we're going to talk about. So, for the people watching, I'm John Crane. I'm a British citizen who currently lives in America working for the Internet Corporation for Signed Names and Numbers, but I first got involved in what we call Internet Identifiers back in the early 90s in Europe. It's a place called the Rypen CC. It's what we call a regional internet registry, giving out IP addresses and looking at network designs and seeing how the network was building. And then, you know, so I worked a little bit with IANA and John Pastel because that's where we got our IP addresses from, of course. It might be version four back in those days. And we got involved in the formation of ICANN, basically because John asked us to, in the white papers, in the green papers. And eventually, as ICANN became formed, I got more and more involved. I didn't go to the early meetings. I happily avoided them. And then we needed to sign the memorandum of understanding between the address organizations and ICANN. And for some reason, I got stuck with that job, so I was put on an airplane and packed off to Denver, I believe it was, and it was an Aaron meeting. And myself, Paul Wilson and Kim Hubbard, who at the time was the director of Aaron, sat at a table with Mike Roberts, who was then the CEO of ICANN and we all signed memorandums of understanding. And then a little while after that, I was at my office in Amsterdam, a gentleman who you may well remember called Andrew McLaughlin came by and he said, well, you know, we've formed this thing, we don't really have anybody who actually understands the network. How would you like to come and live in California? And I looked out my window and it was raining and I said, what's the weather like? And he said it's always sunny in Southern California. Yeah, for sure. So I moved. The RIPE NCC seconded me. Back in those days, ICANN didn't have anything called money. In the early days, we were formed on loans and we're still paying back those loans. So the RIPE NCC very generously paid for my time and my flights and sent me off to ICANN and before I know it, I was working there and that was about 15 and a half, 16 years ago. So around 2000. Around 2000. So ICANN had been formed in late 98 and had been limping along without you before that. How did they manage to do that? On the shoestring budget. Very dedicated staff. It was a very small organization. It was amazing how dedicated the early staff were. There was a gentleman called Louis Tuton who was a lawyer and if you get a chance to interview Louis, you should. He was an interesting character because he was basically working pro bono at ICANN and everybody would mock him because he's the lawyer. But he was also the guy that was configuring the routers, doing the websites. Louis Tuton pretty much did all the engineering work for the early ICANN. When I first turned up the server room, if I could call it that, was also the kitchen and we had a rack that stood in the kitchen. It was basically a two-post rack and there was a couple of servers in there and there was a piece of fiber running through a back wall into the university server room and there was a refrigerator in the same room and if you open the refrigerator too hard, you disconnected the network. It was very much startup mode. Small offices and the same building as where John had been. It's ISI and everybody did everything. It was really that startup environment where you just have to do what you have to do. I want to get into some deeper issues but I'm curious, by the time you came in 2000 was it still that slim on operation? Absolutely. We sort of got past the loan situation but not really. I had to take a pay cut to come work for ICANN. I think everybody did. Our meetings, one of the first things I did when I joined ICANN was there was going to be a meeting in Marina Del Ray and I used to run the right meetings or parts of the right meetings so Louis gave me a piece of paper and said, we have a contract with this hotel. Go organize a meeting and the meetings back in those days were a couple of hundred people. If you see today, I don't even know the numbers but I'm pretty sure even at this small meeting we're close to 2,000 people and back then everything was just a lot smaller scale and there's many people still here today who are involved there but also many have moved on. So yes, it was very much everything on the budget, small offices, very long hours and a lot of fun. This session I think is much shorter than I'd like it to be so my view is this is the beginning of a sequence and so let me ask, try to provoke a little bit or bring forth, pick out one or two or three really sort of interesting or meaningful events or sequences of events or threads that run through that stick out in your mind as sort of the essence of what really happened below the surface level of holding a meeting here or going off traveling there. So I think part of what ICANN is or was was this experiment in, I don't want to use the word democracy but maybe management or government models it was something different and I think in those first years we were really struggling with trying to figure out what it was so one of the interesting things we did which had started before I joined but was happening as I got there was we voted for board members based on where they were from and one of the ways of doing this was to actually have a voting system so I think you could say that ICANN had what the first global online voting mechanism in the world where everybody theoretically could vote and I mean everybody and it broke. It didn't work very well, it was a fantastic idea in democracy and when you're a small budget organization trying to do something that even the governments of the world have never tried was really interesting but it was sort of this experiment in trying to be inclusive to include the end user, the user of the internet and it kind of worked and it kind of didn't but it was a very interesting way of doing things it was trying new things, it was all about trying to find this balance of getting representation from all over the internet. So when you say it broke two different things come to mind and maybe it broke in two different ways one is the mechanics of the voting and then the other is whether it did achieve appropriate representation and was fair and so forth. So yes, it broke in both ways. When I first joined there was a lady that was running the program, I believe Jody was her name and in our office were stacks and stacks of envelopes and I said well what are those stacks of envelopes and she said well those are the returns and I'm like what do you mean the returns for some reason everything is getting returned and I'm like oh let me have a look at them and I'm like oh interesting these are all from China why are the addresses written in ASCII Chinese postmen don't read ASCII so they hadn't thought about the idea and now today we talk about IDNs and localised characters they hadn't quite considered the concept of having other character sets so that postmen could read the letters so we got a lot of returns also when everybody had to sign up I think it was one of these things where we thought well there's probably a few hundred people coming to the meeting so maybe there's a couple of thousand people will be interested in this and thousands and thousands of people signed up and that caused issues with the servers but that was also part of the system failure is that these board seats were starting to be seen as political interest and people were campaigning to get their citizens to go and vote so you would see large waves of sign ups from particular areas of the world and you could see that from an organisation of maybe two or three hundred participants in the meetings we were suddenly getting tens and tens of thousands of registrations so it was clear that there was interest in those board positions I think maybe the people designing the system hadn't considered I think it was a bit of an eye-opener there's a lot of experience in political systems way before the internet, way before any automation I have a feeling we probably weighted into an area somewhat naively in a way that's worth some significant recounting and getting the accurate picture what did happen and the different points of view and so forth so let me just bookmark that as something that we want to come back to at length I know that one of the things that you've been heavily involved in and particularly in the early days was the IANA operation itself and my first earliest introduction I found myself as you may remember invited by Stuart Lynn the next CEO after Mike Roberts to look into what was some sort of difficulty involving some of the CCTLDs and it was you and Louie on the one hand and Elizabeth Portanov and Sabina Dolderoll and I think Oscar Robles you want to talk a little bit about that episode well it depends which one you're talking about because there were many so I mean especially in the early days the relationship at times could get pretty strange one of the issues we had was about access to data and I don't know if this is the one you're talking about the question of whether or not the zone files should be transferred to somewhere where they could be not actually sure if we even knew what we really wanted to do with them to be honest but it was can we get access to the zone files from the country codes a lot of the country codes just said no and I suspect in retrospect rightfully so so those early periods we were sort of I think trying to figure out what the relationship was between the country codes which are really something that are as they say within a country and for within the national regulations etc and this global body and with the generics it was very clear well firstly there really wasn't generics there was like one and then a few registries but with the CCTLDs the country codes it was really about finding a way and figuring out what the relationship was and it wasn't always friendly I think it was mostly always professional but it wasn't always friendly and yet with all of these people I've always had very good friendly relationships on the personal level but sometimes there was a little bit of conflict there and that made life interesting so yes I'm keenly aware that you have personally a very high reputation very well regarded in ways that are we should try to document and I know that Postel was well regarded and so it's interesting to try to tease out what happened in that transition that interfered in the otherwise smooth operation that had proceeded well I'm an engineer so I like to blame the lawyers I'm not sure if that's the case I think one of the things that happened or one of the changes is John was very light handed so you know I think I met him twice in person to have discussions that would be of the nature we were having with the CCTLDs and that was an RIR that we'd meet with him because we had a problem about something extremely rare because he was very light handed and he believed in letting people do what they do and I think ICAM was this different model or this different mindset and I think a lot of the people that were involved weren't from the engineering background the guys who had worked in building up networks so it was a different style and that caused consternation and a lot of the CCTLD folks probably only met John once and never had to deal with him again on technical issues so people don't like change so in general change brings fear and I think there were misconceptions well maybe there weren't I don't know but I think there were misconceptions that ICAM was trying to control something and I'm not sure that was there but if you've been left alone all this time and then suddenly these people turn up I mean if you talk it to it from the perspective of the DNS root servers for example which is another community which I participate we hadn't even really met each other before this time and then this ICAM thing comes along like well who are these people and one of the things that was often missed and I had to remind people on a regular basis in the early days is all of these people that you're talking to they've been doing this for 10, 20 years they predate ICAM and that was I think something that was lost at times with people It's an interesting thought that a formative period of ICAM may not have been with the greatest of poise and several affairs Well one of the things that of course happened is we lost John Of course and you know I think things may because we don't know You can't run the experiment again You can't run the experiment again but I think things may have been very different if John had been there One would have expected so So the impact is probably not only the most visible things but also a lot of subtle things We need to take a break at this point but identified at least a couple of things that we want to dive into more and I'm sure more will come up So let me thank you very much and let me thank you particularly for years of service You're one of the people that is most appreciated by the people who make things work and probably less well known by the people who like to talk about how things work I'm certainly less appreciated by them Thank you Steve