 Dr. Stephen Crocker, board chair of ICANN from 2011 to 2017, Steve, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Let's get right to it. ICANN's relationship with the U.S. government is very long, very complex. What would you deem as its most problematic points in its history? Problematic points, yes indeed. Different people have different perspectives, tell you mine. We operated until last fall under an IANA contract. Fall of 2016. Yes, thank you. And as we know, there were really two parallel relationships. There was the IANA contract and then there was another relationship which was first started as the Memorand of Understanding and then transformed into a joint project agreement and then transformed again into affirmation of commitments. And now the affirmation of commitments have been swallowed up into our new bylaws. That sequence was aimed at general properties of ICANN, accountability and general oversight. I found the IANA contract, however, which was a more cut and dried, ordinary contract of we are hiring ICANN to do the following things and here's the list and you execute that and we evaluate you and if we don't like what you're doing, we'll tell you about it and if we really don't like what you're doing, we may move it and so forth. I found all that to be much more problematic and for reasons different from what most other people found. The IANA contract served as an irritant on the international stage because it made very clear that the US controlled the IANA function and that was somewhere between uncomfortable and threatening depending upon which countries we're talking about. I had the privilege of seeing all of it from the inside and seeing how it all operated and I found it uncomfortable for sort of lesser or more subtle reasons in that there were aspects where we couldn't be forthright about some of the details. We couldn't publish all our procedures, we couldn't be forthcoming about how long it took various things to happen and so forth and those are very, very small points which you can work with and as we did over time but it's corrosive, it unbalances the relationship and it put us, I can, in a very awkward position of not being able to be as forthright and as transparent as we would like to have been as we should have been. So for an organization that utters the words accountability and transparency every third sentence, it seems like it would be incredibly problematic. It was for exactly everything, it was incredibly problematic and just to emphasize it, it was philosophically as you're suggesting it was completely contrary and so there's this sort of deep irony that we had to operate under that despite what we were saying and then even if that had not been as big an issue just any organization that's operating like that, it's very unbalanced. People who are in the position of providing that service and interacting with the government find themselves having two masters. They have the internal management structure and then they have the external government oversight and sometimes those are at odds with each other. Why was that in the contract? Why were these nondisclosure factors built into the contract? I don't know. I had, in my earlier life when I worked at DARPA been in the same position of overseeing contracts and we took a completely opposite position only if there was a very specific reason having to do with classified information basically would we put controls on our contract and mainly we wanted them to be as open and as forthcoming as possible. We put very few restrictions on. So I don't want to speak for them. I can only speak for what I saw as the results and the effects and that I found inappropriate and hobbling in a way and I am just absolutely delighted that we have gotten past that point. An interesting question is whether there will be some different set of things that get in the way but hopefully not. When I interviewed your good friend, Vint Cerf and asked him to characterize the U.S. government relationship with ICANN he said, not very supportive and problematic. Is that an overstatement? It's not an overstatement and I know why he said that. He was focused on yet a different aspect which was there were and there continue to be some very specific intellectual property questions and sort of legalistic questions that at the time he was looking for strong help in disposing of certain issues and government was not willing to do that and so those issues have to be fought out separately. I don't want to get into it because I haven't spent the same amount of time as he did but our domain names property are is that kind of catchphrase question that comes up you have people suing for damages against the country and winning a lawsuit against the country and saying and their top level domain ought to be something that I can have and take away from the country and say oh my god that's very problematic. You mentioned the stewardship transition so let's deal with that for just a second. Strickling announces that March 14th, 2014. How much back and forth had there been between ICANN and NTIA or other branches of the US government for that matter prior to that announcement? Quite a bit. I could joke and say oh it just came out of the blue but that's obviously not the case. There's a long and a shorter view of it. It had been an open question for a very long time when ICANN was formed in 1998, late 1998 it was expected that that contract would expire within a couple of years. Year 2000 was kind of mentioned as the other thing. Well here we are, more than a decade later it's still going on and on and on. There have been a lot of attempts to revisit it to understand why and so forth. A number of things came together in the few years just prior to that date. Fadi Shahadi was hired as the CEO. I had been chair for about a year when we brought him on board so this was very much on my mind and he was kind of a person that was a change agent and went about trying to position ICANN so that it's status was appropriate for believability, for credibility, for beacons. And then there were external events. There was WICAT WCIT in 2012. There was the Snowden revelations. Different people will give you different estimates as to which of those and maybe other events were sufficient to trigger willingness within the US government to think that it's now time to distance ourselves from this relationship because the US government was being treated as, talked about as if they were exercising a great deal more control than they were and so this was like a millstone around their neck. So Steve, if you hadn't had those things, if you hadn't had Fadi Shahadi as CEO, you hadn't had Strickling as NTIA and you hadn't had the Snowden disclosures as a backdrop, would it have happened? So that's an unknowable question. What do you think? I don't think it was a given that it would happen under all circumstances. And in fact, taking that question and moving forward in time, even after it was announced in March 14th in 2014 and when the community went through an enormous amount of work right up to the very last minute, it wasn't 100% certain that it was going to happen. Did you think between the, and I posed this question to several others that we've talked to, did you think between that March 2014 announcement and when the contract ended in October 2016, did you ever think this puppy is not going to fly? I was always quite optimistic, frankly. I recognized where the pessimism, where the concerns came from and I could see that there were the possibility that it wouldn't happen. And when you're in a position like that, you obviously have to take the next step and say, oh, what are you going to do if it doesn't go? So you start to think about Plan B or you start to think about alternatives. And we did a certain amount of that and I certainly did some mental preparations and did not want to wake up the next morning and be destroyed. So I kind of knew what I was going to say if that was the way things played out and where we were going to try to steer things after that. But I genuinely believed that that was going to happen. I always believed that this was going to fly. Later I came to understand exactly how close it was. What does that mean? Well, there was some last minute struggling within the U.S. government and Congress about whether Congress was going to force NTI to continue the contract. The sort of backward situation, it wasn't NTI had the authority to let the contract expire. Congress would have had to take explicit action to direct them to extend the contract, which they could have done. And this was tied to the budget, which was not passed and so there's a continuing resolution. This is all the inside baseball for the U.S. budget process, which is as bizarre as anything. And there was last minute haggling about whether to put a rider on there and some Republicans wanted to put it on. And they didn't. And then there was yet some more skirmishing afterwards. It didn't matter very much. We learned later how close it was that it didn't get put on there. Let's talk about the legislative branch, the Hill, for just a couple of minutes since you brought it up. That last hearing, which Senator Cruz chaired before the transition was approved, where he laid in pretty heavily to both Strickling and to our CEO, Jordan Marvy. Did that send alarm bells ringing for you? No, we just sent flowers afterwards because they were subjected to serious abuse. Steve, the community decided to launch into accountability as an element of the transition, which was not originally proposed by Strickling. Correct. Was that problematic? Well, it was problematic in a couple of different ways. One of the big and most obvious things is that it caused a whole year's extension in the process. It caused a lot of people to be involved in discussions that were somewhat distant from the original question about, are we an up-and-running organization? Are we doing our job? Are we structured right to carry out the IANA function? And so it was sort of layered on multiple other issues. And as part of that, it also triggered political discussions about is the U.S. giving away the Internet and so forth, which is not really relevant because they didn't have the Internet anymore. Let's deal with that point for just one second, if we could. It appeared to me that throughout many of the hearings on the Hill, not just toward the final days dealing with the transition, the Hill never really got ICANN, didn't really understand ICANN. Is that incorrect? I think that's right, and I think it's right in varying degrees, depending upon whom we're talking about, of course. Some did well, really understand it. It's also not a whole lot of mystery because ICANN is a funny, peculiar, odd duck in the spectrum. It is serving a global purpose, serving the entire world. And yet it is a non-governmental organization. It's just a California nonprofit corporation. So that discrepancy challenges a lot of preconceptions. We're a multi-stakeholder operation, and so people say, yeah, but government should be in charge. And the answer is no, government should be participating, they should be involved. Government people typically have a hard time understanding things like that. So the model of what ICANN is is not a standard, oh yeah, we've seen many of these and we know what they look like. So that doesn't create a lot of surprise that congressmen and senators would not have an instantaneous recognition of what we're talking about. How much did the affirmation of commitments, the AOC, set up the transition ultimately? That's a very good question. I simply don't know the answer. What the affirmation of commitments clearly did is it got rid of that other layer of formal relationship. And that was a big step forward. It was a clever, insightful move. Paul Toomey and Paul Evans set that up and Rod Beckstrom sort of signed the deal after that. And it set in motion a useful set of reviews, a little bit of heavyweight in some respects, but that's fine, we can deal with that. Throughout your tenure, not only as chair, but your total involvement with ICANN, forgetting the transition for a moment, what was the most problematic or troublesome interaction with the U.S. government that ICANN sustained? I got involved with ICANN through the Security Stability Advisory Committee. My good friend, Vint, who you mentioned, was chair of the board and this Security Stability Advisory Committee was created in late 2001, early 2002 as a response to the 9-11 aspects. And Vint asked me to come in and chair it for a little while. So I knew what a little while meant and I'm still here. And so that was my entree into the organization and that was my focus for a good period of time and I got more involved with the board level stuff and for a while I was doing both things and then gradually moved over. But anyway, that's my background and that's where my focus was. So the kind of things that I found troublesome were the way things relevant in that area got handled compared to the way they should have been handled at least by my light. So for example, the critical function that ICANN carries out is publication of the parameters for the top-level domain in what's called the root zone and the related who is information. The ethic for that is it's got to be absolutely perfect. Absolutely perfect. And because that is dependent upon by everybody around the world and if there's any hiccup in that, that ought to get first-class attention. Not just like we'll take care of it, that ought to be a fire like the alarm going off. So as it happened, a small but nonetheless distinct error happened more than a decade ago and I watched closely to see what the reaction was and what I expected to happen were two things. I expected that the specific problem would get fixed quickly and it was. And then I expected that there would be a focused effort on understanding what went wrong, how that came to be, what we call a root cause analysis and a fix of all that. So the fire alarm went off, but the cause of the fire was never addressed. Yeah, not very well. I mean, they sort of looked at it. In my view, they did more of a cover-up and a patch and so forth. And sure enough, about a year later, a second event very similar for essentially the same reasons happened again and that caused a bigger reaction, but nonetheless still done under wraps, no documentation, no insight, no review. And that's just not the way you run a first-class system that is a critical system that people are going to depend upon. You've got to have it. Why wasn't there a fuller review? Why wasn't there greater depth? Well, now we go right back to whether I want to say why other people chose to do what they did or what their attitude was. And I don't know. But I'm sure you must have raised questions. Oh, I've raised it more than once along the way. Well, what came back at you? Basically just sloughing it off. I think this goes back to the point that I made at the beginning, is I think the approach to dealing with ICANN was to keep things hidden from view, from a government point of view, so that there just wasn't a lot of questions asked. And, you know, I think we're fortunate that nothing enormously terrible happened. But as I said, it's not the way that I was brought up and not the way I would expect that to run. As you're well aware, there was a lot of talk around when the transition was being debated. There was a lot of talk about ICANN's maturation. It was more mature now, so it was time to let it go. In point of fact, could it have, could the transition have occurred much earlier? Oh, yeah. One of the markers, very straightforward, very, you know, no big surprise, is the organization financially healthy. So in the very early days, peculiarly it was organized with no funding model. And so the first year or two years were a little bit difficult, sort of raising money by contributions and so forth. But after a while, there was a funding model. There was money coming in, we went from several million to 10, 20 million a year, and that felt pretty good. You can run an organization that size. Now we're up to much bigger numbers, but I can't imagine any reason we couldn't have been on our own five, 10 years earlier. Was it a matter, is the reason that we weren't on our own earlier, does it have to do as much with politics and the administrations going from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration to the Obama administration? How much variance was there in our interactions with each of those administrations? So I'm pausing because there certainly were big changes there. And at the same time, when you interact with the U.S. government, it's one thing to be interacting at the White House level, another thing to be interacting at the Cabinet level, another thing to be interacting at the sub-Cabinet level, and things change rather. And at the newspapers, you don't see below the Cabinet level if you see that. So I don't know exactly. Certainly a lot of things had to be lined up. Ira Magaziner was very important in the structuring of ICANN. He goes away. Is there the same kind of focus and insight later in years and not so much in the intention level? ICANN wasn't a top-level priority in the same way that it had been in its formation. Since you brought him up, how do you view Magaziner and his concept? Your buddy, Vint Cerf, is often referred to as the father of the Internet. Is it fair to characterize Magaziner as the father of ICANN? Probably that's fair, actually. Nobody's ever suggested that, and I don't know how he would feel about it. We talked to him and he felt pretty good about it. I see. In fairness, and Vint does get called father of the Internet or sometimes more appropriately a co-father or one of the fathers along with Bob Kahn. But for the Internet, for ICANN, for all these things, there's a lot of people involved. And there's a lot of people, or maybe several people, if not a lot of people, who play very, very key roles and who don't ever get much mention, but they're there. So Magaziner undoubtedly played, I wasn't directly involved, I wasn't involved at all, actually during that particular period of time. Magaziner obviously played a pivotal role in getting things going. But I don't think it's due just to him alone. Based on the things that you have brought up that stuck in your mind, it sounds like for the most part there was pretty broad buy-in to the idea, to the concept that the management of the DNS should be privatized. That was true from the very beginning. You realize that as the Internet grew up the DNS was a piece of this, and it was done privately within a university, within a research group that was doing research on other Internet stuff, and it was a clerical detail that grew and grew and grew. So eventually it became problematic to have such a weighty operation being operated as an appendage out of a back pocket, if you will, of one of the researchers, John Postell, in a university, and he was working at the University of Southern California, and lawsuits were being threatened, and the university said, well, we don't want to be in this business. And so there was a multi-year period, I don't know exactly, but I think it was probably from 94 onward, roughly, where discussions were taking place about what this evolution was going to look like. And by the time ICANN was formed, there had been several steps leading up to that. In the course of researching this project, something occurred to me. The Internet evolved in a post-Watergate era. You guys were part of the 60s and 70s, the sort of anti-authority, anti-government era. I'm generalizing, obviously. But I wondered after talking with a lot of you early pioneers in the Internet, how much of that influenced what we have today, even to a point where you may not have been recognized, may not have recognized that you were choosing a course that was popular at the time? I was actually working, I was a government employee working for DARPA from mid-71 to mid-74. So I'm sitting in Washington, and we're right in the middle of a lot of very advanced researching, and we're building the ARPANET and then the Internet. And meanwhile, Watergate's taking place right outside. I mean, if you look out the window, I can see the Capitol. I went to hearings and watched Sam Irvin, Grill, John Dean. And I knew what our work ethic was. I knew what our morals were about the way we handle things. We handle government money. We had a fair amount of authority. And we were very careful about what we did. And meanwhile, we just look out the window and we see this total chaos and a completely different mindset of how top-level officials were behaving. So we saw actually both sides of it and at least I just speak for myself, the good side of government acting in a very upright way to foster the creation of the technology and the distribution of this technology and make it widely available and to keep the government out of people's business and to keep us out of having too heavy a hand. And then at the same time, all of this is going on outside. And the Vietnam War was underway. So it was a lot of disparate factors were going on all the time. But you guys were not... John Postell wasn't exactly a suit and tie kind of chap. Not exactly. No, as John was... So John and Vint and I were among others, three of the graduate students at the first node on the ARPANET at UCLA. And we all worked really closely together. John was famous for having long hair, long beard and for dressing like a hippie. T-shirt, blue jeans and barefoot or very lightweight. I had an experience where I was working at DARPA and giving some advice to an Air Force site in Oklahoma about how to connect their machines to the ARPANET to run a technical test. And after a couple of visits, I said, I've got to get John down here. So I called up John. I said, you know, meet me in Oklahoma City. And the question that I had in my mind, which I didn't tell anybody at the time, was for what reason was John going to be refused entrance to the officers' club for lunch? Was he, in fact? And I knew that in order to get on an airplane, he didn't have to have shoes. So we get past that point. This is real. I mean, you know, this is 1971 and we're in our 20s and he did not get into the officers' club and it turned out to be for blue jeans. But we got into the non-commissioned office club and the food was just as good as in the officers' club so it all worked out. I read a magazine or told us a similar story about trying to get pastel into some government buildings. Oh, boy. Wearing a long robe and the beard and the whole thing. He said it was in fact problematic. Really? Just another little... I had a long hair and a beard too, actually, in those days. You wouldn't know it to look at me now. And I reported to work at DARPA, you know, as a program manager with serious responsibility, wearing a suit and tie every day, but with long hair and a beard. And I was not philosophically committed to it. I was fully prepared to, you know, cut it all off. And what I discovered was an exact reversal that people took one look at me but my credibility went up. He can't be here for his looks. He must know what he's talking about. But all of this kind of filters into the question that I was asking. And that is, you're concerned about authority. Everybody was concerned about authority at that time. I'm just wondering if that concern about authority and you constantly and accurately refer to the government relationship with ICANN as being a light touch. I'm wondering what that time, what that generational influence did in terms of leading to what we had. Yeah. It's an interesting juxtaposition because there was another thing that had the same shape to it for entirely different reasons, which was the network, the ARPANET and the internet, were built very specifically and purposefully with as little control inside the network and maximum flexibility at the edges. So that's an anti-establishment view if you want to look at it like that. The telephone system that AT&T and other phone companies around the world were running were the exact opposite, of course. They were 100% control. You couldn't have any addition to the service that was provided unless they chose to do it. They were very, very slow and bureaucratic about making any changes because they didn't need to unless it was 100% guaranteed revenue and so forth. It used to be illegal, absolutely illegal to attach your own device to the telephone system and then there were some court cases. And so even things like an answering machine were a big deal. Whereas today, you know, you can whip up any kind of thing you want on software or hardware and just plug it in and it becomes a device and now we get the internet of things where we get tons and tons of devices that are going to populate everything. So that anti-authority position which you were asking about from point of view of a political thing was also an architectural and technical aspect that was deeply understood. Interesting. Let me ask you one final thing and I should have asked you this earlier when we were on this subject. Was there an attempt by the U.S. government to influence that decision by ICANN? I believe there was. It was... First of all, let me say about XXX is that it was a very messy thing. I've looked at several pieces of it. I wasn't involved in the initiation of it which several years took place but I think it was a very messy thing. The initiation of it which several years took place I did find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to cast the deciding vote after we had an adverse ruling from the independent review panel and it was the very first independent review panel activity. They ruled against us. They said we had denied XXX and we shouldn't have and we still have the legal authority to reject their advice and it was an enormously bad precedent for us to be in the position of rejecting that. Strickling and others thought that the advice from the IRP was not very solid and wasn't reasoned very well but I am told in very strong words that one of the prior assistant secretaries not Strickling had tried to convince ICANN not to permit XXX. That's another case. A lot of stuff and I'm sure I don't know all of it where those interactions were just not all that visible. Which again speaks to the validity of an independent. You bet. Dr. Stephen Crocker, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you, Brad.