 Ira Magaziner, thank you for joining us. Ira was from 1993 to 1998, a senior advisor for policy development for President Clinton. Vince Surf is always referred to as the father of the Internet. Someone once said, well, if Vince Surf is the father of the Internet, Ira Magaziner is the father of ICANN. Well, I suppose that's true in a way. It was an idea that I conceived of and then helped put into effect. How did it come about? You say that so simply, I conceived of it. Well, if I could provide some context. In 1995, President Clinton approached me and said, would you coordinate a team that could help set a plan for what I would do if I to be re-elected to help keep the good economy going that we felt start? And I formed a high-level team at the White House and among certain cabinet agencies. And what I understood was that long-term growth really depended upon technology waves. In other words, major technology advances that then play out into economic progress. And we did an analysis that said, look, there are three major technological advances that have taken place, one being the Internet, the second being the sequencing of the human genome, and the third being renewable energy that could lead to long-term growth. And we decided the Internet was the ripest one to really accelerate economic growth, that the U.S. had been a leader in developing Internet and related technologies, and that what was lacking was a policy framework, a global policy framework that could be implemented that could allow the Internet to take off. So we spent 1995-96 developing a paper on what would be required to make the Internet successful. And it included what we saw, I mean, it included efforts to deal with copyright issues, deal with digital signatures, deal with privacy issues, issues of censorship, issues of coordination, technical coordination, and so on. And what we found was that in a way, there were a lot of people who wanted to invest in the Internet. There was a lot of potential to technology, but it seemed very uncertain to them as to whether it was robust enough to handle all that investment that they wanted to put in. So for example, as you know, the Internet is coordinated by a series of servers. One of my first days of looking at this, I went to a couple of the universities where the servers were in the basements, and I could walk in, I could just pull the plug. I mean, there was no security, there was nothing. I also found out, as I was trying to put together the policy paper of what needed to be done, that there were 53 lawsuits at that time challenging the validity of the Internet routing system in courts all around the world. And at that time, the IANA, the numbering system, was coordinated by John Postell at the University of Southern California out of an office that was treacherous to walk in. I mean, it was a small office you walk in and there were piles of paper everywhere and so on. And I gather that at an early Internet society meeting when there were only a thousand people on the Internet, somebody said, hey, we need somebody to keep track of the addresses and he raised his hand and there it was. And then on the other hand, you had Network Solutions, a company, and he did what he did under a DARPA contract, Defense Department contract, that worked solutions which coordinated the main name system of a company in Virginia under the U.S. Commerce Department contract. And the two of them didn't really get along very well. And there were all these lawsuits challenging his authority, University of Southern California was being sued, Commerce Department was being sued, and so on. So there was a very uncertain legal environment. I also was visited by people from the European Union and elsewhere who said we are concerned that this is really a U.S. government-controlled entity and we think your Defense Department and CIA and so on are controlling it and we're nervous about signing up to that. Members of Congress visiting saying this is ours, we invented it, we should keep it fueled by lobbyists who wanted to make sure that we kept it in a certain way. So there were a lot of these issues and then there was, I forget the exact name, the Moral League of something or other talking about all the Internet pornography and we had to censor the Internet. And then there were moves in Europe and in Canada and elsewhere to put a bit tax on every bit of transmission in the Internet. There was moves in the intellectual, among the international trade community to put up tariffs, there was debates going on about intellectual property protection and so on. So there were all these uncertainties that existed that were holding back what we thought could be a potentially huge economic vehicle for growth globally. So what we set about to do in an initial paper we wrote was to decide how to address each of these issues and we came up with policy prescriptions which then would require global negotiations to get signed up globally for this. And the ICANN piece was one piece of that. I had to handle the technical coordination and a lot of the lawsuits were about that. There were people with so-called alternate solutions and so on. And the USC people wanted to get out from underneath the lawsuits they had and they wanted the government to protect them and the government didn't want to do it and so on. So basically what we did is we issued a paper in 1996 after Clinton got elected which talked about how to deal with each of these issues. And we went and negotiated a treaty at the international trade body to keep the Internet free of tariffs. We set up legislation to get the Internet of Tax Freedom Act which would allow for no taxation on Internet sales. We got an international convention on digital signatures so that they would be recognized and negotiated that. We negotiated the copyright agreements, the global copyright agreements that could protect Internet investments and a variety of other measures that were all done in 1997 and 1998. With ICANN, that represented in some ways the thorniest problem because the Internet society felt that they should have control of that. There were other bodies, the International Telecommunications Union, where after 10 years of rejecting the Internet protocols all of a sudden decided they should take control of the Internet once it started to take off. And they had the weight of the UN behind them. And you had various other groups that all had conflicting ideas. And of course the people bringing the lawsuits. So what I thought about was that we need to do something new here, that if the UN takes this over, it will take way too long. I mean the UN and also even the European Union wanted to have government set standards for the Internet. But yet the UN would seem like a natural place to go, right? And I respect the UN, but it's way too slow moving for something like the Internet, way too bureaucratic. It takes 10 years to get something past the ITU. The Internet was very fast-moving technology. And what we had to do was, the very essence of the Internet was a decentralized medium where the creativity of everybody could create new standards, create new technologies, create new everything. And the last thing you wanted to do was make that all have to go through some bureaucracy to get approved, right? And that's the only way that the UN agencies can work. And they also have 100-some people at the table, right? So it would have been crippling for the Internet to have that happen. On the other hand, if you had the sort of anarchy that was going on where the Internet Society claimed this, USC had this, John Postel, this, that, and all these lawsuits. And that gave no protection, it was kind of like a wild west environment that people didn't want to invest into. And then you had various corporate interest groups who wanted to control things and so on. So it seemed to me that the best way to do this was that you needed something that could move faster than a UN bureaucracy. With all the different stakeholders in the Internet, you needed something that would be stakeholder base and more democratic in its approach so that people had the buy-in to it. You needed something that would be recognized by governments. And this was very important because that would protect against the lawsuits. So you had to get the US, the EU, the Japanese, the Australians, others to recognize it. Yeah, you had to get a lot of buy-in. But you had to begin with that framework. And so we conceived of something that was the first of its kind. And when I first proposed it to people, they said, well, that's dangerous to do something that's never been done before because you don't have the precedence. But we felt it was the only way that we could really create something that could stand the test of time. So you were then thrust into a position of getting acceptance. Exactly. So we basically went through a green paper and a white paper process, as you know. But in a way equally as important was I set out around the world talking to different governments and different associations and stakeholders, corporate groups, trade associations that had an interest in internet commerce and so on. And basically tried to persuade them of this kind of structure, an organization that would be apolitical, made up of technical people. But stakeholder-based, everybody would have a say. Governments wouldn't run it, but they would have an advisory role, and importantly, they would recognize it. And that you could put that together in a way that could move faster than a global UN body, but still have structure to it. And importantly, enough resources we had to make sure of getting money to it so it could defend lawsuits and so on. And enough research and infrastructure to build the stake or the model, defend lawsuits and so on, and be recognized by governments. So that was the task. Let me ask you this though. It's very unusual, the whole concept of ICANN, the bottom up philosophy of policy being formed from the bottom and working its way up to the very unique. How'd you come up with that? Why that system? Well, it seemed to fit the internet. It seemed to fit what the internet was. I mean, to some extent, I grew up in the United States in the late 60s, early 70s, when in college, in that period, when there was a lot of emphasis on student movements that were democratic and so on, and I was involved in some of them. And it struck me that with something like the internet where you want to preserve the kind of creative chaos of the internet, that that kind of model could work. And in fact, it was the only thing that could probably work. And so even though, when I first proposed it to people in the cabinet in the US and elsewhere, they thought it was crazy that you could never get somewhere like that to work. You need something that's more top down, button down, organized, they would say. And I would say the last thing the internet needs is bureaucracy. And it's going to be much better if it's stakeholder-based and bottoms up rather than top down. Even though there'll be lots of meetings and lots of debates and everything else, people will be brought into it, and you'll actually wind up succeeding faster than if you try to do these big multi-government bureaucratic processes. And that, I think, turned out to be true. Was your model on Bill Clinton's mind, or was he into other areas? No, he was into other areas. I think the internet was still a relatively new thing. And frankly, when he asked me to put together something to say, well, what can I work on in my second term? There was a list of things that the cabinet came up with, all of which we put aside. They were more conventional. And when I came back to the meeting and said, what I want to do is put a framework in place to let the internet take off, I think a lot of the cabinet people who sometimes can be turf-oriented, and we're looking at this guy sitting in the White House, what's he going to do? When I said that, they said, I think, breathe this. I release the internet. OK, what the hell's that? I don't care. I'll let him go do that. And I think President Clinton saw the potential of it, but he wasn't really where he was focused. How about the Hill, Weimer? What was the reaction on the Hill? If any. So in the beginning, we weren't up on the Hill, although we got delegations coming to us. Once we started to develop policy, we managed, actually, to develop bipartisan coalitions. For example, in the four major bills that we did on digital signatures, internet tax, freedom, copyright protection, and so on. I have Republican and Democratic sponsors in both. And in a period in 97, 98, when we were in the middle of the whole impeachment and Winsky thing, and very little was moving in the Congress, all of our bills passed with bipartisan majorities up around 70 votes. And I learned my lesson doing health care reform before, that you needed to build bipartisan coalitions early. And we did that. And so our bills passed. And I remember President Clinton asked me, at one point, do you want me to put the stuff you're doing in the State of the Union speech? And I said, no, because if you put it in the State of the Union speech, the Republicans are going to oppose it. I said, let's just care into the radar, do this quietly, and work on these coalitions. So you were more than content that it wasn't out there. We didn't want it. And I mean, we weren't hiding anything, but we weren't looking for the public. You didn't want to draw fire. Yeah, exactly. So there were people, Republicans like Spencer Abraham, who co-sponsored the digital signature on Hatch, who was involved with the copyright Chris Cox on the tax piece, and so on. So we had bipartisan support along with, obviously, the Democrats. So we managed to get those legislation through, and then also on the treaty negotiations. I mean, I spent a lot of time in Brussels and among the individual countries. And we were worried a bit about the Brussels bureaucracy linking up with the Geneva bureaucracy. And one of the things we did, the president of the EU in any given year, can't overrule the bureaucracy on something. And the presidency was with Luxembourg. We were trying to get the key agreement with the EU. And so I went to Luxembourg, which people in the state department said, what are you doing that for? And I said, well, look, they actually could overrule the bureaucracy. And so I spent a couple of days there. And for them, the internet was a great thing for their own economy. So they basically bought in. And it actually turned out that when we had the final meeting on the negotiation, the president of Luxembourg, who was the president of the EU, overruled the bureaucracy and agreed to the treaty. So we had a lot of effort to kind of go out to countries. I went to France, where they had the Minitel. And there was a lot of resistance in France to the Minitel. And I purposely, the first day I was there, I did an interview with Le Monde at the airport. And before I went to see the French government, I said, look, in five or 10 years, there's going to be over a billion people on the internet. If 40 million Frenchmen are missing, nobody's going to notice. And you're going to wind up behind. So that got quoted, and obviously they weren't very happy when they met with me. But it had its impact. And I think they realized that they couldn't go with their own if the internet was going to take off globally. And so they basically eventually gave up the Minitel for the internet. Let me ask you this, Ira. Back then, back in 1998, was there any idea, did you conceive that the internet would end up being whether it is today? It's interesting, because we put out a paper called The Emerging Digital Economy. And it projected that what we call the internet economy could grow at 10 times the rate of the regular economy. And the day after we put it out as a publication of the US government, the internet bubble began. I mean, anybody who was under 30 that nobody used a computer could raise $1 million to start a company. And the internet grew at 300% or 400% a year, then it collapsed. But if you look at the trend line over 20 years, it grew at about 10 times the rate of the regular economy, about 35% a year. And so we did see that could happen. But I remember, I used to say, for example, that there could be a billion people on the internet in 10 years. And people would laugh and say, you're a big thinker, you're crazy. Actually, I was conservative. It was actually more than that by the time of time. And we used to talk about how much commerce there could be on the internet if we set it up right. And we underestimated, if anything. Even though people at the time thought we were being grandiose and we were overestimating. So yeah, I think we saw the potential. We saw the potential for, certainly economically, if we get electronic commerce moving. But also, we saw the political and democratizing influence that the internet can have, and also that it could be a force for international cooperation. Did you get pushback in those early days over this idea of having a non-governmental entity take over the DNS or manage the DNS? Sure. I mean, there were people within the administration opposing it. The Japanese government initially didn't like it. The EU didn't like it. And certainly, members of Congress didn't like it. But what about within the administration itself? Yeah, there were people in the administration who thought that, I think some of you had said, this is a hippie-like thing you're trying to do here. And it's not proper governance and so on and so forth. And I just kept coming back at them and saying, look, you don't understand the internet. And the internet, by its nature, is a rebellious entity. It finds its route around an attempt to control it. And its real power is that it mobilizes a vast number of people to do things, which then can be adopted in a horizontal way. It's not something that has to get approvals all up the chain. And regulation is the worst thing you can do. What you need is an orderly process. You need an orderly framework, a legal framework. But the worst thing you could do is take away its democratizing strength. So I prevailed in the arguments. And I think there were others with me out. It wasn't just me. But we prevailed in the administration and then eventually convinced other governments that this was the way to go. Let me follow up on that. So in 1998, I believe it was 1998, prior to ICANN, the meeting that you had in Reston, where the white paper was under discussion, I've heard it characterized. Ira Magaziner basically, the white paper was there and he walked away basically saying, you guys work it out. Is that an oversimplification of what occurred in that meeting? A little bit. I went away, but I kept a close watch and made sure that it would get worked out. And I think, again, if I had tried to impose from my office in the White House exactly what was going to happen, that would have been antithetical to exactly what I was saying should happen. So I'm curious, did that ever happen? So ICANN's formed, right? So ICANN's there and functional. Did you ever have to hold back and say, was there ever an attempt by anybody, any of the executive cabinet departments or the Hill or anyone else to try and get involved? Yeah, but what I had done is we had two events at the White House where we announced the internet policy. And we had bipartisan representation there, even during the impeachment. And enough stakeholders there so that they were part of it, including I had the Secretary of the Treasury come. I had Secretary of Commerce come. I had the others come that were relevant. And so that everybody was brought into it. So the exclusivity was the buffer. Yeah, and the president was there and so on and so forth. And then we had the leaders in Congress who had participated on both sides of the aisle. So they were all there kind of blessing the approach twice. And so the opposition didn't really have anywhere to go politically. So it sounds like you were pretty confident that people were going to buy into the model. It doesn't sound like you had much in doubt that the model would take off. I wasn't sure in the beginning. I think by then I felt like we could sell it. But in the beginning, no, I wasn't confident. But I think I believed it was the right approach. And there were a lot of battles that took place in my office with different interest groups. I mean, there were hundreds and hundreds of interest groups, as you can imagine. And they all had their own thing. And they all had some. Do you think history validated your faith? Well, it's always hard to tell what the counterfactual is. I think so, and I'll tell you why. But if you look at all the growth of the internet that's taken place, not just the number of users, but the number of languages, Wi-Fi, mobile, everything, you never read a story about the internet breaking down technically and not being able to handle it. And unlike the 53 lawsuits paralyzing things, you don't see that happening now. You don't see people holding back on their investments because they don't have faith in the security of the internet or the legal sound basis of the internet. So I think you've had something which has grown at amazing speed. Any democratic process in ICANN as one of them is messy. I mean, that's what they are, is messy. So ICANN has had its bumps along the way, and it's had its frictions, and it's had its fights, and it's everything else. But that's democracy. But on balance, it's like the dog that didn't bark in the old Sherlock Holmes. I mean, the internet has worked. It's scaled up. It's done everything you would want it to do technically. It's not broken down in lawsuits or political disputes that have paralyzed it. And it's handled tremendous technological innovation all along the way at a rapid speed. Now, would that have happened if we never did what we did? You never know. The important thing is it did happen. And so the internet is what it is today. So at the very least, we didn't screw it up. Let me ask you this. What do you think, either during your time when you were involved with ICANN, or after that period, what do you think was the greatest risk to ICANN? I think the greatest risk all along has probably been the risk that governments would come in and try to take control in a way that was beyond what was appropriate. And I think the other great risk is that, and I've said this to ICANN over the years, is that ICANN itself would become too much of a powerful bureaucracy itself. In other words, that it would accumulate too much money and too much power and so on, so that it kind of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. This is interesting. So expand on that a bit. So your concern was that it would become its own bureaucracy. Yeah, its own bureaucracy and its own power center. In other words, it was set up to be democratic and, to some extent, a bit messy in its processes. And if somebody came in, especially as one of the benefits as you know is that the price of domain names came down significantly with competition, which was part of what we wanted to achieve. But we financed ICANN independently, because we didn't want it to depend on governments and so on by taking a little cut out of the domain names. Now as the internet exploded, ICANN got a lot of money as a result. And one of the things I've said to them over the years is you've got to be careful here. You don't want to start staying in first-class hotels and flying your own planes around the world and doing all this kind of stuff, because people will start to resent it. And secondly, you don't want to get so full of yourself that you start feeling like you can dictate things and you don't have to listen to the grassroots and you don't have to, you know. You got to keep the sort of creative flow here and not make it bureaucratic. And as you become bigger, there'll be a risk of that. So I think that was a risk. And I think ICANN has sometimes gotten closer to that than I'd like, but it's usually pulled back, mainly because the community has forced it to pull back. During this most recent debate around the decoupling from the US government, there were some serious tensions among different parts of the community, and the ICANN board and so on, and I tried to help out where I could. They asked me to help out. But with all that, and there have been governments who've tried to come in, including the US government, and do more than they should, but with all that, it's basically worked, I think. I mean, it's, as I said, been messy, but it's worked. And the proof is in the result. I mean, the internet functions tremendously. Is it problematic for you that it seems like almost every year, ICANN was called up to the Hill on either the House side or the Senate side to go to hearings? No, I think it's American democracy. I think it's appropriate for, you know, we have a congressional branch, it's appropriate for them to make inquiries and so on, and I think ICANN should hold itself back. But does it make ICANN look subservient to the US government when viewed from the outside? It did before, but remember, in the original white paper, we proposed that the US government give up the contract back in, I forget it was, 2000 or something. We proposed it within a couple of years and had the US election gone, I was gonna say a different way. Which election? 2000. I'm hesitating because it's still unclear how that election actually went. But any event, in 2000, when the administration shifted, if it had not shifted, if Al Gore had been elected president, I think what happened recently would have happened in 2000 and or thereabouts during those years. And that's what we'd originally planned. So this is interesting. So what I'm hearing you tell me is the transition, because what you hear, and you heard the same verbiage that I did surrounding the IANA stewardship transition, you kept hearing about maturation, ICANN has matured. What you seem to be saying is it was mature enough back then that could have occurred and the reason it didn't happen earlier was political. I think so. I think it could have been, I don't know what the right year is, but I think after three, four years, it probably could have matured enough. I think, but in any event, it's fine. I mean, it happened. And I think it's important that it happened. And that's why, when I left the White House, people reached out to me to say, well, would you get involved if I can? And I thought it was inappropriate actually, because I had helped set up a lot of these things related to the internet. And I also had offers to get involved with internet companies and so on, because I knew the industry quite well, obviously. And even though I could have made a lot of money doing that, I thought it was inappropriate, because when you've helped set something up and you've been in charge of helping regulate it and so on, while in Washington, I don't think you should profit on that by going into it after you leave. So I stayed away from ICANN, other than coming to an occasional celebration or if somebody wanted my advice. You know what you sound like? Forgive the oversimplification, but you almost sound like a father whose child has grown and you're stepping back. Well, I thought it was appropriate to step back after the reasons I said. And I think when I was asked by the community or by the ICANN board to be of help on something, I did, but only if I was asked. Two and a half year period between when Strickling announced the desire to make the transition happen and when it actually happened. In that period, did you ever think it's not gonna fly? Oh, yes, I actually thought it might not fly. And I think the administration was serious about it and would make it happen on their side, but I thought there was a definite possibility that the Congress would stall it and as a result of interest group pressure and money. And in Washington, the best way to kill something is to delay it. You know what you say is not I'm against it, but you say I gotta study it more, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And if it had been delayed too long into the election process or into now the new administration, I'm not sure that it would have happened. That's right, because the Trump campaign actually issued a press release saying they opposed the transition. That's right. And so when they asked me to get involved and I agreed to be on a technical advisory committee and help do some, I don't wanna call them, negotiations among different parts of the community and the board and so on, I was happy to do it. And in a way, I was sort of a non-threatening voice from the past, kind of neutral party who could come in and be there for a while to kind of help with discussions, but nobody saw me as any kind of threat of anything. And so hopefully I was helpful to them in doing it. But the main thing I kept emphasizing to them is you gotta get this done quickly. You can't let the time run out on you, you can't let the clock run out. And I think they came very close to losing it. What were your interactions like with Postel? Well, I can give you one story. I mean, initially he was very suspicious of me because I was the government. And I don't know if you knew John, but he was a guy with a big scruffy beard and sandals and the government came to town. But we got friendly and I invited him to the White House and because of the way he looked at me, about four hours to get him past security. But I took him to lunch in the senior White House lunch room and you had all these kind of very self-important cabinet office, the secretaries and others having lunch. And I was sitting there with Postel and they were all kind of looking over at this guy with sandals and a robe. And I thought to myself, you know, 100 years from now, nobody's gonna remember any of these cabinet secretaries. But they are gonna remember John Postel as one of the founders of the internet. And- Did Postel himself think that? If he did, he never said it to me. I mean, I thought he was a very kind of humble guy. He was, and I was very honored when they invited me to come speak at his funeral and I got a proclamation from the president to give to his family. But, and I think I remember saying that, although it's tragic that he's passed, it's actually fitting that he's one of the first in the internet founder generation to go to heaven. So now he can help keep the addresses for everybody when they come, you know what I'm saying? Let me ask you this. I heard one story and I want you to elaborate on it. Tell me how much of it is fiction, how much of it is truth. That at one point John had reassigned one of the roots and that you had threatened to send marshals in to deal with this. Actually, you're conflating two different stories. Okay. And I'll tell you each one. I did get a call. I was actually in Davos at one of those Davos conferences. And I got a call from, let's just say, national security, by the way, saying that they had observed that the internet was being rerouted and they were concerned about it and they weren't sure who was doing it or what. And I thought to myself, there's actually only one person who can probably do that successfully. So I made a call to John and then he was sort of evasive. It was about midnight in Switzerland so it was early afternoon in California. But it became clear to me that he had actually done this on purpose because I think he was protesting some things that we might be thinking of doing. And so I called the president of USC and said, look, we're gonna come down and you like a ton of breaks if you don't get this in order. He called John and so on and we got it sorted out. I had alerted the White House. The president was in a White House dinner or something and said, look, I don't think we're gonna have to do anything here, but just in case. So this went up to the level of the president? Yeah, well, the president's chief of staff, yeah. And but then John said, okay, I'll put it back to normal. And he did. The other case that I thought you were getting at is that we did have an issue with network solutions at one point where they were walking at actually turning over some of the control that was needed to ICANN. And in that case, I did make a threat that we were gonna send federal marshals to seize the A-Route server. And that worked pretty well to get them to agree. It did the trick. It did the trick, yeah. So you raised an interesting thing when you were talking about Postel. Because of the timeframe that this occurred, there was a lot of distrust in government. Absolutely. I mean, we were talking the post-watergate. Especially in the internet community. It's a very kind of laissez-faire community, a very kind of. And that was at the route based on what you've previously told us. Those feelings sound like they were very much at the route, forgive the pun, or at the, in the foundation of ICANN. I think ICANN was one of the reasons why it was a model that could work is that a lot of the parts of the community at the internet society and elsewhere that were, let's say, more anarchistic in their tendencies saw this as preferable to having the government take over something. Although at one point, some people from ISOC had gone to the ITU to try to forge an alliance with them of some sort where ISOC, and that wasn't gonna go anywhere. It had to kind of beat that back. But yeah, I think ICANN did, it was a tent in which we could gather all the forces in the sense that a lot of the more anti-government people in the internet community could say, okay, well, there's not the government taking over. A lot of the governments could say, well, okay, we get this, but we'll have a seat at the table, we'll be there with the advisory board, and we'll see what's going on, and if we don't like it, we can always do something different. And so it was a tent in which we could gather together what were a very disparate group of forces, because then you have the corporate communities and the corporate communities were very divided too. I mean, the internet gaming people were an entirely different affair than the high-tech community. It was developing technology at the time, the Netscapes and the Microsofts and so on, and they were very different than the big commercial enterprises that were concerned about trademark protection on the internet and so on. So you had, even within the business community, you had dozens of interest group factions that you had to kind of weave together. And there was a set of organizations in Washington, lobbying trade groups, dozens of them, that we had to kind of keep on board with everything we were doing. And remember, it wasn't just ICANN, we were doing the Tech Freedom Act, we were doing the digital things, we were doing the privacy, we were doing encryption, which was a whole separate thing, because that brought in the whole NSA and the security community and had to handle encryption. And so we had to balance all these organizations' concerns on all these issues, and we managed in a two-year period to get it all done, get the framework put in place. So it was a kind of exciting time, you know, and after I had kind of dredged through failure in trying to put healthcare reform in place at the White House, it was kind of exhilarating to be able to take this and knowing that this was gonna be equally as important in many ways, equally as complex and global, but it worked. You know, when I asked Vince Cerf, I said, how would you characterize historically ICANN's relationship with the U.S. government? What he said to me was, I think it was difficult and problematic and not necessarily supportive. How would you react to that? I think if he's talking about the government writ large, I think that's correct. I think, I don't know if he was talking specifically about what we did, but Vince and I worked together pretty well, I think, and I was very supportive when he became head of ICANN. Well, so elaborate, how was it problematic? How was the relationship between the USG and ICANN problematic? I'm sorry, you're talking about afterwards. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking of the time I was there. No, after its formation, after 1998, ICANN is formed, his characterization was... Yes, I'm sorry. So afterwards formed, yeah. I was thinking of the period before we came into doing what we were doing. There were bills going through the Congress to censor the internet, to set standards for the internet. We beat all that back. But I see what you're saying. After ICANN was formed and I was out of it, I left the White House. And then you had the Bush White House. I think you had a number of people there that were more traditional in their view of government control of things. And so I think ICANN did have a lot of difficulty trying to keep itself alive and existing during that period when there was that more controlling and security-oriented group of people in the White House. Now, Vint would be more able to tell you about that because I was gone and that wasn't involved then. But I know that was true. Let me ask you this, Ira. You had mentioned your concerns about the affluence, if you will, of ICANN as its revenues increase and the potential dangers there. In the early stages, the White Paper didn't lay out a funding model. It left that to the community. Well, actually, we had in mind putting a small surcharge. Was that in the White Paper? Can't recall it was in the White Paper, but I know it was what we had planned. I mean, I have it in our planning documents. But was it for the community itself to figure out how that would work or? Well, the details of it, yes. But what we said is, look, you need your own revenue source. If you're dependent upon governments for revenue, you're not gonna get anywhere. And you can't be out with a tin cup collecting in Times Square. So you need a sustainable source of revenue. If, and I remember the memo I wrote saying, if the internet takes off the way we all think it can, and if, I think, I can't remember it was like $50 or $75 just to register the main name then. I said, if you bring that cost down, price down, which we expect you will. And then you take 50 cents off the top of each one and say, that could give you a sustainable revenue model. Another alternative is you could do something with commerce. There's a very, very small, almost minuscule charge. But I think we always envisioned that the domain names would be the best way to do it. And we discussed it at that time. We didn't impose it. It wasn't up to us to impose it. It was up to ICANN to develop it. But that was in the planning documents. Ira, in closing, is there anything that the US government, the executive branch, should have done differently in either the formation or nurturing of ICANN? Well, look, I think in the formation, I mean, obviously, I was involved. I think we did the best we could. Could we have done things better, maybe? But it worked. When you look at the four separate bills through Congress, three separate treaties, the formation of ICANN all done in two years, that's pretty good by government speed. So I think, and the framework that we put in place in all those areas has stood the test of time. So I think I feel pretty good about what we have a little accomplished. I think Scott Cook once said, in a speech he made, I made the world safe for the internet, essentially. But I think, so I feel pretty good about that. I also think that the Obama administration, Larry Strickland, and so on, did an excellent job in bringing the final step here of internationalizing ICANN. I think he had just the right touch of putting it out there, getting support within the administration for it, relating to the community, letting them develop it, and working with them, but sort of nudging a little bit here and there. I think he was masterful in doing it, and I credit him as I do Steve Crocker and others that were involved with having it happen. Let me ask you a question that I posed to Steve Crocker. Was the stewardship transition a result of a bunch of things coming together at the right time? You had Strickland, head of NTIA, Fadi Shahadi, ICANN CEO, and them interacting against the backdrop of the Snowden revelations. How important was this nexus of those three things, or was it not? You know, I can't say, I wasn't close enough to it. I think, certainly I think Fadi and Strickland and Steve and the others did a very good job with this, and I think there are a lot of, you know, the committees that I interacted with, the people that worked on those committees, I think did a very good job, and so I think there was a confluence of events. I think having the Obama administration there with a sophisticated understanding of the internet and of the need for it to be global in order for it to flourish, I think was very important. So I credit the White House for what it did in supporting Strickland and the Commerce Secretary and so on. So I think, you know, it happened, it worked, and that's the ultimate proof exactly, you know, who did what to who, I don't know, but it happened and it worked and the timing was right, so, and I'm glad it happened. I think the internet is poised now to continue to transform the world in very positive ways and I'm happy that I had some small role to play in it back in the late 90s. With that, I'll say thank you very much, Iver Magazine, I appreciate you talking to us. My pleasure.