 Marilyn Kate, a longtime member of the ICANN community, Marilyn, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. How did you first become involved with the organization? I answered my phone. My phone rang. I was on my way to the U.S. Congress to a hearing and I received a call from an AT&T executive who asked me what I knew about the new generic top level domain, Memorand of Understanding and why an organization that AT&T funded was behind moving the A-Boot server to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union, Geneva, Switzerland. I too was amazed, but fortunately I knew who to call. So I called ISOC and I learned that seven people had been meeting behind closed doors with a, I'm going to call it a scheme, to privatize the functions that were being performed in coordinating the CCTLDs and the IANA functions. And I said, gee, this is kind of a surprise. No one knows anything about this. So we had this small working group and we handpicked and we've been meeting and we're going to put the ITU on the board and the World Intellectual Property Organization on the board and the European Commission on the board and then four private sector people. I'm like, not so much. This is not going to be, nobody from business is going to be happy. And Marilyn, this was 1998? This was 1997, late 1997. So at the time I worked for AT&T and I was from the computer industry side and the ISP side. And AT&T was on the board of several of the major high-tech associations. So I convened a industry-wide meeting, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, to listen to this proposal. This group of seven people came into town, into Washington, D.C., packed room, only seated 65 standing room, only about 90 people. And they presented this idea that they were going to privatize the functions and they had a transparency. Now these are the old days, right? Before PowerPoint, they had a transparency with an image of the International Telecommunication Union Tower building, which is 15 towers, 15 floors high, with a red arrow at the top, future home of the A-Root server. And at the bottom, the words United Nations, ITU, Geneva, Switzerland. And the room went bizarre over this idea. Where'd this come from? We don't like the ITU, who told you you could do this. And there were two Hill staff, congressional staff in the room. And they made a phone call and invited the six men and one woman to a Hill hearing. So in two weeks, they came back to the hearing and they took their transparency. Chip Pickering was in the chair and at the end of the hearing, it was kind of like, so you're planning on moving the A-Root server paid for by U.S. Money, Citizens Money, DARPA, NSF, to Geneva, Switzerland, to the ITU, a U.N. agency. Don't think so. Not a popular move. Not a popular move. And that was what led to my reaching out to, along with others from business, the business community was very, very concerned. And we reached out to the White House and to Mack McLarty, who was Chief of Staff to President Clinton, because the Hill hearing that was so aggressively controversial was not going to be good for the Internet. And remember that the Internet was a baby then. Ari Magazine was tasked. He was writing the e-commerce agenda for President Clinton. And he was tasked to kind of oversee looking into this, figuring out, he reached out to Becky Burr in the Department of Commerce. Department of Commerce issued the green paper. There were over 500 comments. Most of the industry associations filed comments. I began coordinating a coalition of the high tech sector, the business sector, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Oracle, all of the associations, CDT, the Center for Democracy and Technology, many of the law firms, to try to develop a business perspective and bring people up to speed. It was very complicated to explain the Internet in the days when there were, when you realized that in 1998, in September of 1998, when we actually launched ICANN, there were 147 million users worldwide. So we were dealing with something that was yet to be understood. When people see, at that point, at that very, very early stage, did they see, hey, in the future, this could be an economic bonanza? The Internet or the domain name system. So email was very young, right? And I think companies were beginning to think, okay, there could be something to this. AOL had 3 million subscribers. AT&T WorldNet had 1.3 million subscribers. Home users. Users were beginning to say, wow, we could communicate more effectively, not send faxes, not make so many phone calls. We could begin to communicate more effectively with our widely distributed co-managers, sales forces, et cetera. So I think they were beginning to get the promise of it. So with that, Marilyn, did the business community see as an extension of that the importance of the DNS? Or was that too in the weeds for them? Much too much in the weeds. Much too much in the weeds. Business people didn't know the name John Postel. I knew the name John Postel, but it was because of my technical background. I knew the name John Postel, but the second phone call that I received, once again I was headed to the Congress for a hearing. It seemed to be what I spent my life at, right? And my phone rang, and it was John Postel. It was after this episode where John had been supporting the idea of the GTLD MOU, or so it was alleged, and there was a lot of controversy about this. And so my phone rang, and John had already retained Joe Sims as the outside legal advisor due to the lawsuit that arose when he re-routed the internet traffic. So phone rang, John Postel, I'm like, I've got a computer scientist on my phone, okay? And John said, Marilyn, this is John Postel, Mike Roberts and Joe Sims told me to call you. And I sat down and talked to him for more than an hour. He's not someone, Brad, that I would have, I was really annoyed at the GTLD MOU approach, was route around trying to put intergovernmental organizations on the board, but John and I talked through what his motivations were, and I agreed to help him, but I also told him, it's going to be done a different way. We cannot leave aside the business community, or other governments, or other users. Remember I worked for a global company, and it really mattered to the company I worked for. When you got out to him, you said, what came back at you from him? He said he didn't understand Washington, he didn't understand the politics. When he re-routed the traffic as a test, he didn't, he did it on a weekend so it wouldn't disrupt anything, but researchers work on weekends. So all the AT&T labs researchers were working all weekend trying to fix the, what they thought was an error. So this was an incredibly well-intentioned scientist who really believed that he was doing, and he did, by the way, so much good for the internet and for the world in the role he played. He didn't get the hard edges of how the rest of the people in the world would view this transition, or the fact that a small group of people were making a decision. Who is a computer scientist and engineer? But the good news is he was getting really great advice from Joe, but better than that he was getting very good advice from Mike Roberts, who you know then became the first CEO and president, and from Larry Landweber. One of the things to understand is we should envision this period almost like a kaleidoscope. So different people participated in different aspects, and as you know when you turn a kaleidoscope you get a different image, but you always get a colorful image, right? And over time people became more interested, Hill hearings in Washington, D.C., congressional hearings always generate press articles and etc. So the issue began to get a lot of attention, and because the U.S. Chamber was following it, it was also getting a lot of attention with the CEOs of major corporations. Was there a time when ICANN was magically accepted, and they were thinking, okay, we need this as regards to the DNS, or is that overly simplistic, and it was just a gradual campaign that eventually got traction? So there were three competing proposals that were submitted in response to the White Paper, and maybe I should talk about the International Forum on the White Paper a bit as well. So the International Forum on the White Paper actually held five meetings, and a voluntary group of people came together and cooperated in planning this consultation on the White Paper. White Paper laid out certain ideas about what it would take to create what we then called NUCO. So ICANN was called NUCO right up to the day of the first board meeting, and there's an organization called KIX, the Commercial Internet Exchange, and my boss was on the board of KIX because we couldn't as a company spend the time doing the coordination with the other far-blung entities that were planning the Asia Pacific version, the African version, the European version, the Latin American version. We and others funded KIX to be the surrogate coordinator. So the reston meeting was, and I was helping to plan it, but more in a background way, helping to fund the work that was being done. Other people like Cappy Kleinman was involved in this. There were many, many others that were also contributing to this planning. When we held the day of the meeting in Reston at 2 a.m. in the morning, my phone rang. Is there a theme to this, phone calls? And Barbara Dooley's husband, Barbara was the executive director of KIX, had fallen into a coma, and Barbara was going to be the emcee for the Reston International Forum on the White Paper. And so the legal counsel, Ron Plesser and I put our clothes, our business clothes in our cars, drove out and stayed with Barbara while her husband was air-backed. And then we went to the hotel and took over her function. So we held this consultation, which was really an interactive consultation. We took different segments of the White Paper. People broke into groups, brainstormed, whiteboarded, came to agreement or not agreement. And that consultation process began to winnow out where there was agreement and where there was not agreement. After that, the five meetings took place. The Department of Commerce received those inputs. And after that, they made a call for proposals. The group I was working with, Larry and Mike and others, submitted a proposal to other groups submitted proposals. The Department of Commerce took aspects from each of the other two proposals and then announced that they were accepting the new co-proposal from our group with modifications. So at that point was when we began to try to convince Congress we're done here. We have a plan. We have a strategy. Ira began engaging. He had been already, but he began engaging actively with Benjamin's staff in the European Commission, who also had an e-commerce agenda. He began traveling to Australia, where he met with Paul Toomey, who was with the Australian government in a related slot then to Japan and elsewhere to try to build support. How tough was it? Not just Ira's mission to try and garner international support for the concept of ICANN. How tough was it on the Hill? It was tough, but we had a different environment then. We had a very seasoned group of senior Democratic senators and a very strong interest from the US Chamber of Commerce, which was very heavily, of course, influential with the Republicans. President Clinton had endorsement from over 500 CEOs of high-tech companies. And so the message on the Hill was basically the high-tech sector, the business sector strongly supports this. How much were you met with this sort of attitude of we invented it? Why give it away? We own it. We got some of that. But remember, we invented it was actually not quite right. But it was the lay perception. It was the lay perception. But the other issue here is the people who were building it were the companies who were coming in and telling their elected members of Congress, this is a good thing. This is going to be good for us. It was a miracle. We managed to get the privatization into President Clinton's e-commerce strategy. Then we had Europe on board because Bangaman was also interested in not being left behind. We had Australia. We had Japan. And those were big trading partners of US business. So there was a little bit of skepticism, but it was more we're going to watch. And that's why, Brad, there were so many continued oversight hearings. Remember, we just had oversight hearing after oversight. Every year, there were two or three annual events. Yeah, or semi-annual. Marilyn, was there a time when you thought this model's in danger? Something had transpired, whether it was a lack of money, whatever. Or you thought, wow, I can't send trouble. Yeah, like the time that I recalled me and said, we're not launching on Monday because we only have three out of the five required competitive registrars. Yeah, I thought we were in trouble then. Gee, it's noon on Friday. We're launching on Monday. So I dug up two more competitive registrars. Any other times that worried you? Yes. You know, there were a lot of people who felt that there was a lot of money to be made, that they could become the next NSI. And that they could exploit the domain name system. And that they can move themselves into positions of power. I will say that NSI was not the easiest monopoly to deal with. And it took them a long time and two or three changes in leadership to begin to appreciate the fact that a competitive environment was better for them as well. They also were extremely tough negotiators. And remember, we opened ICANN's doors with Mike Roberts, four staff, his credit card, and a line of credit. So without the pro bono legal advice of Joe Sims, and then without the pro bono offer of the general counsel, we could never have made it. Just never have made it. The white paper didn't lay out where the funding was. That was kind of up to you guys. OK, we've got the broad outline here. But you guys have to figure out how to financially make this thing move. What were those discussions like? So it's interesting, isn't it, that I could spend an incredible amount of my time coordinating the industry, et cetera. When it came to actually writing a check to fund ICANN, it was really, really hard for business to figure out how to do that. And we weren't alone in that. It was incredibly hard to figure out how to do that. And I think you've interviewed Mike Roberts. So can you imagine how brave it was to open the doors, to convince staff to stay, and to say, somehow we're going to figure out the funding? There was another time when I thought we could fail. And we were in Ghana. And the registries and the registrars were delaying their payments of their fees. They were paying 8 cents a domain name. And they were withholding the payment, paying late, refusing to pay. We were in real financial trouble. And this really brand new guy to ICANN named Ron Andrew, who was just getting involved, turned to me and said, because I was kind of acting like his spirit guy, turned to me and said, 8 cents? 8 cents a domain name? That's all they get? And I said, yes. He said, here. And he sat down and wrote out a speech. And he compared the fee to how much he paid on his. And he called his wife and asked how much the taxes were on his telephone bill that month, went to the microphone and said, I propose that the community tell the board to raise the fee to 25 cents a domain name. Booing, booing, rounds of applause. And by the end of the meeting, the community had called for raising the fee per domain name to 25 cents. So we didn't fix the funding problem, but we significantly softened it. And those were just individual acts of courage. There was no reason for Ron to do this. He was sitting in the audience, and he just thought how unfair it was. What was your motivation at the time? I mean, you tell me about the hard times. Obviously, it sounds like a great deal at work. It also sounds like a little bit of fun. But what was the motivation? Was it that? Was it was there a perception? Hey, we're creating something here that will reshape the world. Or did no one quite see it like that? And was it something else? President Clinton used to say, always be sure you stumble in the right direction. And I think the community was kind of stumbling whoever the community was. We kind of thought, this could be good. It could be good for business, whatever it is. It could grow. It could be good for individual users. There's something there. Do we actually know where it's going to go? Do we really envision what the internet is going, the role it's going to play? Not really. But we did know that point to point communication, which was what we were dealing with then. High-speed point-to-point T1s, T3s, extremely expensive. We knew that could only work for the most advantaged corporations. Huge. The single-blindest item in most budgets of companies and associations was the communications bill, more than their data processing bills, sometimes as much as their salaries. So we knew we had to break that if we were ever really going to advance e-commerce. And e-commerce was the buzzword. Hey, it was on my business card. I was the vice president of e-commerce. So people knew they had a name for it before they could clearly define it, basically. They had this idea of what we now think about as real digitization. You had this like, ooh, we're going to do everything online. It was very catchy. You went to think tank speeches and business projections and this company vying with that company about Oracle talking about their e-commerce platform and IBM and et cetera. So it was the business side of it was really motivated by where we could go with this and what we could build on top of it. How did you accomplish this sort of marriage between business, between the techno geeks, the pastels, who are computer scientists, and the government, which wanted to protect its little thing here? How was there ever a meeting of the minds between those three entities? So I cheated. I was a big D. And for the audience, what that means is I was very actively involved in the Democratic Party and had very strong personal Democratic ties. And the Democrats were in the House, the Senate, and the White House. President Clinton was considered a very moderate Democrat and, of course, had very strong Republican CEO support as well in his election. And so the marriage with government was not hard, really. There was Hill pressure, but we also had a very, very friendly, very friendly Department of Commerce and Office of the President. And on the techno crats, gee, that's what people like Mike Roberts are for. Somebody who's deeply from the technical community, someone Larry Landweber, people who had huge, huge respect in the real techno geeky types out there. And we didn't actually have a lot of think tanks involved. And we had the Center for Democracy and Technology, but we didn't actually have the kind of civil society individuals. We had a few academics, some of whom might like to throw stones just because that's what they were doing when they were teaching. But it was a very much smaller community with only 147 million users on the internet. It really was a much smaller community to try to convince. When you see, I'm interviewing you now, we're in Johannesburg, Ticand 59. When you see a meeting of this size and you think back to those roots, what goes through your head? I didn't go to Singapore where the bylaws were delivered. I sent someone else. So my first meeting was Berlin. And it was a real shock because I went to the microphone to make a statement. And there were two microphones. We could call it the good and the bad, or we could just call it the two different sides. And a certain party was hiring third parties to come and be surrogates for them. And so there we were very, there was Steve Metallitz from the intellectual property side and there was me and there was Jerry Berman from CDT. And I'm at the microphone and everybody else, Brad, from the business side, the IPC side, the ICPs, they're all sitting in the back of the room. I go to the microphone and make a statement. And there's 25 people at the other microphone and they start booing me, right? And I turn around and look at the guys, so to speak, in the back of the room. And then I walk back there and I say, here's the deal. When one of us makes a positive statement, we applaud. And when they make a statement, we boo, we're gonna shut this down now. So when I look at how civil we've become, it's a miracle to me, right? We don't boo each other anymore. We're much more civil. There's so many more of us. And the magic of this is how we have changed the face of the participants, and I can, to be more reflective of the 3.7 billion users on the internet, we used to be so white whenever we came to the meeting. It was also male. What was it like to be a woman among all these business leaders at that time? And particularly the technical world, the computer scientists. First of all, I have a fairly strong technical background and I represented AT&T Labs. So I had a lot of coaching behind me, right? So were you accepted? I was more accepted than most of the other females, I would say, because I did have a fairly strong technical background. And because I always do deep research. And I think also, I believe in effecting change. And I never felt non-accepted by the technical community, but I think a lot of it, Brad, was that I had a lot of technical coaches. And I knew enough to keep them close. Marilyn, you were involved in the earliest stages. When you look back at those early stages of ICANN, and you look ahead to the future, what concerns you when you're looking through the lens of history, what concerns you about the future of ICANN? So there's a RFC called RFC 1591 that John Postel wrote. And that's an engineer, it's written, those are written and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force. And it says that you do all that you do for the good of the global internet. What concerns me is that we are a quasi-standards development body and policy development body. And we need to help the contracted parties understand that they can do well, but also do good. That the DNS is something like Spectrum, it can't collide. And that they are significantly advantaged by their relationship with ICANN. ISPs and data center providers and others have to get a license or an authorization country by country in order to do business. Very expensive. Sometimes the delay is three months to two years to get the license. They have to hire a local counsel in most cases. And if our registries and registrars had to do that on a country by country basis, we would not have a global presence for the registries and registrars. The thing that concerns me right now is that we have so many new contracted parties who didn't come up through the experience. They came, they kind of parachuted in. They thought this was a great business opportunity and they don't understand the value equation of ICANN to them. The historical foundation would help them. When we said ICANN up, we looked thoroughly at the model to prevent antitrust issues, to protect the not-for-profit status of ICANN. When I say we, I mean the private sector attorneys, not just the government, but those of us who were engaged, we ask our inside counsel and our outside counsel. We decided to base ICANN incorporated in California instead of Delaware. I mean these were thoughtful decisions and remember there was only one registry at the time and only five competitive registrars. So understanding this protective role that ICANN provides, the legacy GTLDs, I believe understand it. But many of the new registries don't, they don't and they don't understand that if ICANN loses it's not-for-profit status or if there are antitrust implications, if we lose the balance with the, being an open, transparent standards coordination with the contracted parties, there could be significant financial risk or even they could find themselves being investigated perhaps by competition authorities. And that not understanding that risk, that's what scares me. Talk to me about the human interaction. Have you made friends at ICANN over the years? If we were to take a popularity vote, I think I'd win. I think it is important for all of us to make a contribution and sometimes that means delivering a tough message but I hope it always means delivering the tough message with care, with professionalism and being, you can disagree without being disagreeable. Respectful. And I think that in particular, one thing that really excites me, Brad, is the new energy, the enthusiasm coming to us from the developing countries, the interest in being engaged, the willingness to devote the time that next gen or a fellow spends in trying to learn about ICANN. I'm very excited about new participants and not just the GNSO but in the CCNSO, in the GAC. The GAC has grown and is maturing and it's just, you know, wow, we have created an international organization in less than 20 years, almost 20 years that is stable, respected, reliable and trusted. That's a great point to end on. Marilyn Kade, longtime member of the ICANN community, thank you so much. My pleasure.