 Well, I thank all of you. It's an incredible honor to be here with you today to talk about Internet governance, the Internet ecosystem, and where things might be headed. And it's a particular honor to be here at CSIS, and I thank Dr. James Lewis, or as I like to refer to him as Jim, because of the tremendous work that he's done in cybersecurity, certainly one of the leading global thinkers and conveners to pull together the report for the 44th presidency. And we all know how complex and contentious that topic can be, and I heard all the minds and cats in this city on that topic, was extremely impressive and it was masterfully done. And therefore, I'm honored to be here because I'm hoping that Jim and the center will begin to look at issues globally of Internet governance, as well as the role that ICANN and other players play in the future, because it's part of an unfolding saga that we humans are going through and developing. And it's a place that we've never been before. So great appreciation to Jim. And also, I want to start with a quote from one of my mentors, whom I treasured dearly. And this mentor would always remind me, if I ever thought that we were converging on the solution to a problem or a model or understanding something, he would always say, Rod, please remember, all of us are smarter than any of us. I don't know if any of you know who said that to me, but it was William F. Sharp, the Nobel Prize winner who sat on the board of Cat Software, our company for about five years, a brilliant man, and the father of indexing and finance, which has created the indexing that we track now and said, you should index invest because individuals are hard to beat the market. It's hard to beat the wisdom of crowds. And the same is true in Internet governance. And the same is true in this domain that we're in. And so we all need to help each other and work together on this problem. So today, I'm not going to have any grand solutions for you. I'm not going to have any bullet points that are going to solve the problems. We're going to explore the issue of Internet governance. We're going to explore where we are, a bit of where we've been, and so we can all begin to think, where might we wish to go in the future? It's also quite fitting that we're here at the Center for Strategic International Studies. Why? Well, why was the Center created? The Center was created to help the United States of America sustain and avoid a nuclear disaster. That was the original goal of the Center in this institution. So it was designed to avoid a nuclear disaster. Now, why is that relevant to the Internet? Well, as you know, part of the mythology of the Internet and part of the story that's told is that the Internet was designed to be this masterful, decentralized network that could not even be destroyed in nuclear war. But as one of the fathers of the Internet and the original co-authors of the Internet protocols in the room, I can maybe give you part of the broader story. That's Dr. Robert Kahn, of course, one of the original two authors of TCPIP or the Core Internet Protocol and the founding contract manager, DARPA, of the DARPA net that led to the Internet. It's an honor to have you and to be with you here today, Dr. Kahn. And the true story that Bob told me once is that it wasn't really, that wasn't really the reason the network was designed. That was just a great way to sell it to DoD. So because if you look at the Internet, the original design was done because hard disk space was so expensive. I think it was roughly a million dollars a megabyte or something like that. And researchers wanted to share that resource, those expensive hard disks across university campuses and other sites. And they needed to build a network that could reach across their networks so that they could share this precious resource called a hard disk. So the Internet was designed as a sharing platform for information. But part of one of the benefits of this decentralized design was that it was, in fact, able to withstand a nuclear attack. There's another way that it's related to the history of this institution and why CSIS is so relevant for where the Internet's going, which is what does the Internet have in common with the nuclear situation today? There's many things it does not have in common. And many people are drawing the wrong parallels. People are saying, well, if we're going to look at cyber deterrence or how we handle the Internet, let's go look at the nuclear arms race and deterrence and all the policies and the norms that developed. But in fact, they're quite dissimilar fundamentally because nuclear weapons are very expensive. There's relatively few of them held by very few centrally controlled parties, namely nation states and governments. They're pretty easy to identify by a site or with a Geiger counter. And so they're controlled, they're centralized. And I mean, who in this country can use them? The one person, right? The president of the United States. So nuclear weapons are extremely centralized. In addition, if we look at nuclear weapons, how often have they been used in the last 60 years? Zero times. Thank goodness. Okay, if we look at cyber and we look at the Internet, how often is the Internet used? Well, the domain name system that we work with, the domain name system alone has over one trillion transactions a day. If you look at cybersecurity, there are over one billion attempts to test what's open and vulnerable in cybersecurity globally per day. I actually think the number is probably closer to five to 10 billion per day. So the nuclear world is very different than the Internet and the cyber world. But here's what's similar. Some seeds of thoughts here. What's similar between this nuclear world is the proliferation of nuclear weapons led us to what recognition? Mad, right? Mutual assured destruction, right? And we used to have the fire drill, the drills in school jumping below our desk as though that would do something. But what did mutual assured destruction lead to? Peace and stability. Why? In game theory, there was no win. There was no win. And so the world and even hostile nations had to learn how to collaborate, even though they might not wish to collaborate. There might be some lessons there for us on the Internet and where we are today. So cyber is a very different phenomenon. We are moving even with the Internet to have in our economies totally based and dependent upon this Internet infrastructure. And clearly, we could lead to a cyber mutual assured destruction. Or at least countries and parties could shut down power grids, the electrical systems, the industrial complex, which actually then touches the water system. And so much that we know. So this thing is spreading incredibly. That observation reminds us of part of the reality of this new world, which is incredible interdependence. From those seeds of interdependence, we're born a set of processes within the Internet, which wasn't focused on the negative side of damage that could be done initially. It was shaped on the positive side of sharing, as people wanted to share information and expand this network. So it's very fitting we're here at CSIS that was born out of the nuclear problem and concern, which in ways was used to justify the investment in the DARPA net and the Internet itself, and which today in some very funny ways may actually have some parallels with some of the challenges we face and might inform us in how we seek to to move forward. Victor Hugo once said a stand can be made against any invasion by an army. But no stand can be made against the invasion of an idea. And the idea of the Internet has been absolutely irresistible and unstoppable since it's appeared. Why? Because it works. And because the benefits of plugging into this network are so great for the participants that they simply do not choose to use alternatives. And this network not only connects certainly every single person in this room today, and anyone who's watching this subsequently, because they're tied through an IP network into the broadcast and the television system, there's 1.7 billion users today at least on computers of the Internet. And there's 3.5 billion people in the world or more who have cell phones, almost all of which now touch IP networks. Because the browsers that we think of about it and the web we think of as the Internet, the web is not the Internet, it's an application on the Internet. The Internet is what is the Internet is a network of networks. It's another important thing to remember is people talk about, well, the Internet's an end-to-end network. Well, it's not an end-to-end network, it's a network amongst networks. And large companies and large ISPs have their own massive internets and they connect to each other. And it was that decentralized architecture in part which led to its phenomenal popularity. So it's irresistible and it's spreading. Now, it's even in the news this week it seems, right? So what's in the news this week? What's everyone so talking about? Google and China, right? What's happening in China? What's happening with Google? And many people have asked me to comment on this. Now, given that my role, given that my role as the president and CEO of ICANN, what do you think an appropriate response would be? I would offer that the appropriate response is quite simple. It's none of my business, okay? What these issues are. And that alone, that this story of how critical the Google and China issue is to many parties and why it doesn't engage us at ICANN will help you understand a little bit about ICANN's role in the internet ecosystem and the governance system. Because one way to look at the internet is to simplify it, okay? The engineers like to talk about seven layers, OSI layers, but none of those are absolute layers because all boundaries get blurred in technology and networking. So I like to simplify it and talk about the internet as a three layer cake. The bottom layer of that cake are the pipes and the plumbing. See the fiber optic lines, the copper lines, the cable lines, or the wireless, things that get messages and signals around. So pipes and plumbing, the bottom layer of the cake. The middle layer is traffic and routing. Okay? How do you get messages from point A to point B? The top layer is everything that resides on top of the internet. You think of it content, application and data. And the discussion about what it's alleged that China did and discussions about Google's experience are about that top layer of the cake, right? It's about the content and the application layer and the data layer. Okay? ICANN is not engaged in that layer. ICANN is engaged in the domain name system, which is a part of the middle layer of that cake. The middle layer of that cake is about traffic and routing. So if the internet is a network networks and we all want to be connected and we want to share messages from one another around the world or move information and move data files, how are those going to get around? Well, there had to be a way to connect the devices. And so the devices were identified with addresses that were numbers. Okay? When you think of like 168.198.155.10 or whatever the number might be. Those are internet addresses. That's how the devices talk. Now, we don't think about that most of the time, right? Because what do we think about? For on the web, we're thinking about domain names, right? And we type in a domain name, okay? By the way, there's about 200 million domain names in the world, 180 to 200 million domain names roughly present. Well, if everyone could just do any domain names they wanted, okay? And there was no coordination, right? Well, then there would be multiple CSIS dot orgs. Okay? And they could be pointing in many different directions, many different places, and no one would know which one's the right one. So to have to have cohesion and unity in that system, there has to be a coordination body to run a set of processes so that every name is unique and every address is unique to avoid confusion, to avoid conflict, to avoid redundancies. And it's a very subtle role, very subtle. And yet an important part of the overall process and one of the few quasi-centralized functions in the internet. Because everything else is decentralized. I mean, who do you have to ask permission to to buy a new cell phone and use a network? Or to go buy a PC and plug it in. You don't have to ask anybody's permission. Plug it in. You can add a switch, you can add a router, you can add a subnet. You can do whatever you want because it's decentralized. And that's why this system won. Other network architectures, and you can even think of the local area network experience, some of you might think of token rings or star networks. Those required a central administrator to manage them very carefully and how they grew and who got to use what. The internet didn't need that. All it needed was some integrity in the namespace and address space. So there wouldn't be, wouldn't be conflict. So ICANN is the body that was created over time to coordinate the domain names and addresses. Now of course ICANN is only 11 years old and the internet is roughly 40 years old if we look back to the dark internet. So where did it all start? Where did keeping the addresses and the name start? It started on a little three by five piece of paper card in that gentleman's pocket, Bob Kahn's. Okay? And Bob did that for a number of years when the dark internet was running until I guess the card got overfilled and he got tired of doing it. So he recruited Dr. John Postel to do that work for him. And Dr. John Postel at the time was in Los Angeles in fact in an office. He worked in an office right where ICANN still has offices a day. So he ran that function for years and the internet scaled and he had to develop a set of practices to resolve disputes because people would start fighting over domain names. All right? And he had to come up with very artful methods to let other people resolve those disputes and processes and come back to him with a joint solution if there was a disagreement somewhere in the world. And so he kept a list of all the addresses and he kept a list of the names. And what happened was then we're in a, you know, we happen to be in America but we're in the modern world. So what do you think happens when people had all these disputes over names? Well, eventually someone sued. And I believe he was at USC at that time at the Information Sciences Institute. They got hit with a lawsuit. How would you feel if you're a university and you're a nonprofit and businesses are suing you about internet domain names? You probably wouldn't be very amused. The second lawsuit was either filed or announced and USC said we're done. We're done. We don't need to be in the middle of this dogfight anymore. Ergo ICANN. Okay? ICANN was created to be the institution that would handle that incredibly difficult role of running a set of processes to manage domain names and manage internet addresses for the global internet so I could keep growing. And ICANN was created by the United States government who realized that this ecosystem was developing because the internet was so decentralized there were all these different parties already popping up. Not only the ISPs but parties allocating addresses and the regional internet registries came up and the registrar were different different parties involved. And so this ecosystem was growing up and the United States government after a lot of debate and discussion in the community of different models that could be put forward decided to create ICANN as a non-profit multi-stakeholder body to govern the name and addressing piece or coordinate that piece of the internet. And actually there's four functions in ICANN. There's the coordination of global domain names I mentioned there are roughly 180 million names. The coordination of network addresses there's about four billion potential addresses under IPv4 and there's roughly 300 trillion trillion addresses under IPv6 and ICANN has a role to allocate addresses at the central as a central authority. ICANN has a role as a coordinator to help coordinate the domain name system. The domain name system is what converts when you're sitting in a browser and if you type in a name let's just say you know gizmo.com whatever name you might type in gets translated to a network address and there's a set of software some of which resides on your computer or your phone some of which is at your ISP and some of which are what are called root server operators. That set of software and the databases of all these hundred million names and the addresses that they correspond to is called the domain name system. Okay that's the system that's exercised roughly a trillion times a day as we collectively humans look at about a hundred billion web pages a day many of which have many different embedded links so it leads to multiple DNS transactions domain name system transactions. We send tens of billions of emails tens of billions of SMS or short messages plus the internet's doing all of the kinds of transactions on supply side all kinds of network communications telephone calls fax messages so there's an enormous amount of transactions that are taking place the domain name system is that which you don't see that works in the background that connects the pieces. Was the domain name system developed by ICANN? No. No. It was designed by the internet engineering task force which has been around for over 25 years which develops the standards in the technology but it has to be operated mostly run by ISPs or in and other service providers and by the root zone operators but ICANN has a role in working with all of them and in driving the policies in the coordination globally. So that's the third thing ICANN does so it's names network addresses domain name system and finally we have a role as a publisher and a service entity for the internet standards the assignments of the protocol and parameters in the registries. So there's a lot of different internet devices and standards that have different capabilities so for example port 80 on your computer is generally used for HTTP in the web okay well that assignment is made by the IETF but someone has to publish a set of databases that hold that centrally for the world and different bodies could do it. IETF doesn't isn't a body at present okay IETF is still the internet engineering task force so it was a term in that that a body needed to hold that and publish it that's enough that's the force service that ICANN provides as an organization. So what is ICANN like and then we're going to talk more about the ecosystem with the different parties. In a way ICANN is like a how many people have heard of second life? Right? So ICANN is a little bit like a miniature island virtual nation state or city state in second life that's called domain named them okay and it's in charge of domain names and addresses and then it's funny because it is virtual so it kind of exists in this virtual place but then it contracts with people in the internet around the world all the country code registries countries are involved the other internet registries and the registrar's so it's also a contracting body but the internet's a very virtual place so it's really hard to say you know what's what's there I mean if Virginia will for describe to describe the internet what might she say and I think what she'd say is there's no there there okay it's everywhere and yet there's no there there because it's so decentralized it's so incredibly distributed it's also why a lot of people confuse ICANN as being in all of internet governance or internet governance when in fact ICANN is coordination and policy and some operations on names addresses the domain name system and the protocols and parameters but the issue is there's not much else in that they're there kind of virtual place there's not much else there you know except other policies at national levels and state levels in different places around the world that touch on on parts of the internet so when you look at the internet as a whole because it's so decentralized the only thing that was needed was that piece of three by five card telling everybody where everyone else was in case they wanted to contact in terms of a centralized coordinated resource so that's that's how ICANN ICANN was created and so when we begin to look at this thing there's there's very funny aspects that are happening because the internet keeps growing the adoption roughly a hundred million people a year are coming on to the internet so during our discussion for about an hour today eleven thousand human beings that have never touched or that have never used the internet before will be using the internet on computers for the first time in their life there'll be net additions this hour and everyone else who quit using it because they retired or they passed away or went off on an island or anything else they're replaced as well so the net eleven thousand added every single hour of every day just on the computer based internet network and considerably more on the telephone network so it keeps expanding as this massive network of network and as T.S. Eliot's Eliot wrote once between the idea and the reality and between the motion and the act falls the shadow and ICANN is a little bit like the shadow so we rest in the shadow we're not clearly understood by the wider internet and so I'll explain a little bit of how it works beyond the functions so as an organization we were created to be multi-stakeholder you know so what does that mean what it means is when the party sat down and said how do we get the different parties that have a stake in this game together they identified some major constituencies or major categories of constituencies one were though the people that are in the domain name business and so they decided to create the domain name supporting organization the DNSO which today became the DNSO or the generic name supporting organization because soon countries were involved and said well we don't really want to be with all those business folks over there you know we're country code operators so there was another group created called the country code names supporting organization and so that's the constituency of the operators of dot UK for the United Kingdom dot CA for Canada dot JO for Jordan dot JP for Japan and those operators were chosen by postel based upon their ability to be leaders in their community in collaboration and getting all these networks connected in the country so very often they are in the academic environment they were professors or they're running a lab or their system administrators at universities sometimes they were private companies sometimes they were government offices so we have the we have the names group generic name supporting organization we have a country code supporting organization of the countries but then we have addresses and network addresses were handed out by these group called regional internet registries today there's five of those around the world there's one here in North America Aaron there's one in Europe there's one in Asia Pacific there's one in Latin America and the most recent one is in Africa I can't allocates blocks of these IP addresses of which is about four billion in IPv4 we only have about 10% left by the way we ran past the 90% mark two weeks ago so we have less than we have about 380 million network addresses left dropping quite quickly depending upon which forecast model you use and how game theory plays out as it gets depleted you know it's probably somewhere between a 12 month and 36 month time frame that I can't has to allocate those that then go to the RIRs that then are allocating and distributing them through the system there's there's more than enough IPv6 addresses to last for the foreseeable future having said that the future is fundamentally unforeseeable on the internet because when when they came up with the standard for IPv4 everyone thought 4.3 billion internet addresses you know that should last at least a hundred years or some huge amount of time and of course the internet has faces exponential growth so there's those groups but that's not the and then under for example the generic name supporting organization there are multiple constituencies such as the registrar's constituency those that register domain names for you so and there's registries such as the dot com registry or the dot dot info or dot biz or dot tell and so there's such a different constituencies there and then there's other advisory groups the board so governments wanted to be involved I can needed governments involved so I can't create the government advisory committee that reports to the board of ICANN that now has over 90 members and most fortuitously the week before two days before I was elected as the CEO of ICANN China rejoined the government advisory committee for the first time since the year 2000 so China was back at the table and we value China as a partner because China has 300 million users of the internet okay and China is an important part of that global fabric of the domain name system and we have to keep everyone collaborating in that space to keep that system neutral to keep it keep it working and in December Russia joined as well and so effectively every significant every superpower at other top country in the world is now a member of the government advisory committee of ICANN which advises the board we also have the security and stability advisory committee which focuses on the security the domain name system and trying to develop different approaches and policies for buttressing that and the root server security and advise stability and advisory committee what we call our sack those advise the board the board of ICANN itself is a multi stakeholder body the board is elected by these different groups and constituencies inside of it so in some ways the board's a little bit like a multi camera all legislator it also has liaison seats from the IETF the internet engineering task force liaison from the root server community ICANN by the way incident is also one of the 13 route operators in the world today uh... and there's others spread around the united states and uh... and around the world uh... so I can't was credit is and I can't go through major to major structural reforms internally changing this internal constituency structure to evolve it uh... and the last one we're just going through right now it's called the gnsl or the generic name supporting organization restructuring and it was meant to create new constituencies as well and creating ways for non-commercial groups such as law enforcement so different kinds of communities could get formed that are not uh... businesses so to speak uh... in the domain name uh... business so major major change it was worked on for years and it comes up it's bottom up it's a bottom up process so to develop new policies in ICANN you have to introduce it down in these constituencies are in the policy process which like any legislative process tends to take a number of years to develop some things are quicker something takes years and years and years so many of you may know that the international domain names were introduced uh... in december and that means that because until the present time right if you want to use the internet would you have to type your domain name at at least the top level domain and what we think of is english or latin characters okay dot so so for china the symbol was dot cn okay or for russia dot r u even though their own language uh... serilic or chinese and their characters that use different keyboards and what this means is that those international users have had to switch their keyboard mode so anyway i'm ideas are an example they're very popular international domain names so the russian uh... federation will be introducing rf in their serilic language it's now been approved it took eleven years of technical work for i-e-t-f to develop the technical standards for that eleven years it took i-can seven years of policy work and a lot of you look at it and say well god why do you just introduce this as there's a lot of tiny subtle issues that impact this massive global internet that's both that's very stable and robust in many ways but also very sensitive to perturbation and we have to keep it running right because if the domain name system goes down you know what what happens to our connections and uh... there have been a tax last year major attacks on the domain name system and uh... cominsky a software engineer found a major vulnerability published which is led to innovations are many ways so multi-stakeholder uh... group it's evolved twice uh... and by the way what we have to do so the internet's growing and there's predicted to be another billion users on computers and probably another couple of a couple billion on cell phones so what we need to do to make that happen something really hard we all have to stay out of the way as it's happening on its own it's happening on its own so we have to stay out of the way and one of the things that i can and the rest of our ecosystem partners have to do is stay out of the way of the internet because the engineers know what they're doing in developing the standards in the itf moving that forward the asp asp's know how to run their networks they don't need someone else to tell them how to do their job uh... and so the system part of the delicate balance is developing enough policies and procedures for things to move forward without slowing the system down the other thing is you know this platform that we're becoming so dependent on it it's also asymmetrical which mentions is a great challenge because uh... you know if you look at the cyber field is one example it's generally stated that offense is about a thousand times easier than defense well as major major implications for all major nation states in the world because it means that small groups of cyber criminals and hackers can potentially uh... become terrorists towards their information assets and for the banking system the same thing that the most creative work in the world in terms of hacking is often uh... in uh... third world countries in many places where you have highly educated engineers and people who want to make money and see that it's it's easy to make a pretty good income maybe even get rich breaking into financial banking systems so it's it's uh... a very sensitive system so let's talk about the the virtual in the global so e-u commissioner redding recently said the real world and the virtual world are converging and what she said was the exponential increase of information the further development of social networks and the accelerated growth of online video traffic and the emergence of the internet things will progressively cause the online and the real world to become interlinked and that's happening everywhere now what are the problems do we face as a planet that are a bit like this internet challenge and the internet governance challenge well global warming it's a common resource you know uh... oxygen at a planet at certain temperatures kind of a common resource and the only way to solve global warming appears is global collaboration same is true of many of the environmental and ecosystem problems and so it's not the only thing we're dealing with where we're challenged to collaborate around the world is as we've never seen before so the other is if we look at the i can system i can't just one part of the ecosystem the other key parts we talked about where the internet engineering task force another key part is the isaac or the internet society which convenes groups around the world of internet users and others and helps does do capacity building and isaac operates the dot org registry uh... which generates profits and with that they help to fund the i-e-t-f and also a bit the w three w three c w three c is the worldwide web consortium which is a different standards group that governs the browser technology and standards and develops them now who's in charge so who's in charge of this this thing thank you know the answer right who's in charge haha i am okay uh... well i wrote a book about this and the book said the second chapter of the book was facetiously titled uh... uh... the president of the internet and uh... it was titled that because there's not one okay because the internet is so decentralized that everything is about collaboration and even i can in its role of uh... of helping to create the uh... the the the the root zone file of the internet each day okay uh... and updating the root zone file uh... entries uh... that's a collaborative process and those those changes the key changes re-delegations are approved by the multi-stakeholder board and those then propagate out through it serves but guess what that's a tiny little file i think someone told me today it's roughly a hundred nineteen kb and if my math is right here's how small a hundred nineteen kb file is if you take a dvd we all watch dvds is four point seven gigabytes you could put thirty eight million copies of the internet route zone on one dvd that you put in your dvr thirty eight million that's so it's one thirty eight millionth of it the root zone is tiny because all it is is a i should explain what the root zone is for a second uh... what the root zone is is and i'm gonna do an analogy of of the internet let's look at an aspen grove for a second how many people seen an aspen grove in colorado mountains here somewhere else how many roots system how many different trees is an aspen grove it's one tree so it's all interconnected looks like different trees get different tracks an aspen grove is one tree it's got one root system and then it's got these different trees that come up and they have lots of leaves so we'll do an analogy with the internet i can coordinates the route zone file it is actually just says the name of every tree and its address okay for dot com here's the network address today that's that aspen tree there okay we've got dot fr for france that trees called dot fr and it's got this address today about two hundred seventy it has to be precise to keep the internet working but it's kind of points to these two hundred seventy aspen trees in the grove each tree is a registry it's a registry it's like dot com or dot fr and the registry could register hundreds of thousands or millions uh... of names dot com has about eighty million that's the leaves on the dot com tree and those leaves then point to your servers your website or whatever they're they're uh... pointing to on the web that a user is creating if they're utilized so the root file is just that little piece on the bottom and i can as government governance process focuses on that the other thing i just want to mention briefly is the affirmation of commitment so if you look at i can is this governance body in a part of that system i mentioned isoc i mentioned it f w c three there's many other players the root zone operators the rir is it goes on and on and on no one's strictly in control but one party has to control the creation of the root for quality control to avoid the the the the conflict if if you look at the affirmation agreement and what i can say they're going over time the internet when it's created by doctor con and others was a one hundred percent u.s creation some ways it was funded as an american defense project for this network for information sharing it's arcing over time it's becoming one hundred percent global and that's how it's spreading and i'm talking about the physical network the pipes in the plumbing it's spreading out globally everywhere there's no country in the world i know of where the internet's not present it's it's in all countries and territories permeating it's going farther so it's going a hundred percent global and i can't was created the u.s. originally the u.s. ran the internet functions through darpa and then john postel was doing it in different parties doing different pieces but it and and control kept moving and becoming global and more global more i can as well has to move on that arc i can't has to swing on that arc from being a u.s. credit entity continually being more and more integrated with its global multi stakeholders it's this isn't philosophy it's in the contract that forms us and it's even in the affirmation of commitments the affirmation of commitments which was a new agreement with the government that said u.s. government saying well no longer report to you every year will report to the whole world and the affirmation in it said you have to be responsible to the global public interest the global public interest i can is following that arc in some sense uh... and and and and american having created has a very special role which a lot of parties question of course around the world because they wish they had that special role they want to see it share they want to see it change but a incredible value at a role the united states has played is creating an international multi-stakeholder organization and protecting it and allowing it to be multi-stakeholder allowing it to be international and run these collaboration processes so effectively and in the history of the root zone updates that i can's been involved in for eleven years there's one alleged instance that's not confirmed that the u.s. government once changed one entry uh... into the root zone which which uh... didn't happen but it's alleged so the united states created this thing given it to the world and created i can to embody that coordination piece been very successful the board of i can that elected me had fifteen members and uh... ten of those or eleven of those were from around the world and only four from the united states or more broadly with liaisons there were twenty one six from the united states fifteen from around the world so it's truly an international phenomenon and it has to keep in that neutral place which is why if you look at even again the cyber security problem i can has to stay neutral because when botnet attacks happen someone has to be focusing on protecting the domain name system globally because if that goes down we all get hurt and so it's a so it's a great collaborative effort and and it's important that we that we keep uh... that role and under the new affirmation agreement we committed is an organization to enhance our accountability account i answer transparency and have an international review group participate in doing those reviews as well as reviews of our security instability plans a separate review process reviews of our kids consumer choice in competition when i can was created in the commercial area of domain names there was one registry effectively okay and one registrar that had been effectively created by the u.s. government to a contract i can was created to create competition today there's two hundred seventy different distinct technical registries there's over fourteen major commercial operators anyone know how many registrar over nine hundred so the ecosystems gone from being you know one player one registrar when registry two nine hundred if we look at the future some of the questions you know that we need your help to think about you know and where we go how do we evolve this model and and because it's a it's a question the community is always asking internationally uh... because it started in the room as we talked about it it's moved to two different people smoothing i can and i can is continues to evolve and there are those who do not think that a multi-stakeholder model should should drive this collaboration they believe it should be a government one government or an internet international government organization and they feel that government should be fully in control the internet there's other people that are very concerned maybe even horrified at that prospect because the internet has been evolving so rapidly and has thrived on this multi uh... stakeholder environment where governments are a part of the process but don't control the whole process who knows what the right answer is we're in a new we're in a new virtual place in the world we're in it with a new problem set with a new challenge uh... in the in the technical level the size of this network uh... are our mutual dependence and what's its primary use it's commerce you know the primary use we talk about cyber problems cyber problems are very small compared to the incredible value add in the economy and the communications of of what's going on and by the way another governance group i want to mention it's critical in this picture is the internet governance forum which has provided a very important platform for sharing and debate and dialogue the u n has hosted that as a meeting as a platform but with many different parties uh... taking part we know we look at that the future as we internationalize as we change with id n since supporting the different language grips which is important in offering new services uh... and expanding around the world one of the questions is if you had a blank slate you know if we wipe the whiteboard clean knowing what we know today in two thousand ten instead of nineteen ninety nine how would we shape and form this organization so you can do the bank blank slate approach blank slate another approach would be the hundred mile an hour approach maybe a thousand mile an hour would be more appropriate the internet's flying down the street at a hundred miles an hour it's a card's going a hundred miles an hour the wheels are spinning how do you want to change the time how do you want to enhance it one you want to do is you want to keep it going right we want to keep it going okay and it is working and that's actually the miracle of it all is that this decentralized network is spreading everywhere it's connecting everyone and it's had virtually one hundred percent uptime for forty years with very isolated outages in subnetworks and pieces and the domain name system has had a hundred percent uptime since ICANN was created so the system's working so we shouldn't break that but where do we go and how do we continue to build the global buy-in that's necessary how do we make it fair and equitable how do we make it uh... uh... inclusive and also expansive and continue the richness of the policy process we don't know the answer we have to work on it together the ICANN community has just gone through another uh... revolution but there's a new in the affirmation was another big change as a result of the voice being heard internationally department of commerce who's been a fantastic partner to ICANN they created ICANN they've been very uh... supportive of ICANN's role uh... an assistant secretary Strickling and his new team are excellent they understand the internet they understand what we're trying to do and they're fully respectful of the role that they have uh... in dealing with ICANN that we have to remain an international body serving the world so we're very appreciative but where does that go because that relationship will go through an evolution it's gone through different contracts and agreements and the IANA contract the fundamental agreement that helped to create ICANN's uh... authorities names and addresses will expire in september of two thousand eleven that's very concerning to a lot of countries that's very concerning because you have a multi-stakeholder body that's that's signing decades long agreements and the underlying contract could be gone but of course what we hope is going to happen and it's not for me to say what's going to happen because on the one hand I represent a multi-stakeholder community in some fashion I represent as a CEO and president in another fashion we're a contractor to the US government uh... and uh... it's not for us to specify that contract but it needs to be a global dialogue all of your thoughts are needed and people around the world to think about how can this how can the model be improved in the next generation of the next step how do we enhance the buy-in how do we enhance the the responses how do we enhance the the investment in security one of the thing I want to mention is for example we're considering developing a DNS cert there's a lot of certs in the world for computer emergency uh... response teams and some people are saying all there needs to be a DNS cert well maybe we don't know we're not sure we think it could add value but it's got to go through the discussions in the stakeholder process so there's a lot of questions and as I said we I as I said when I when I I didn't have the answers uh... but we're all connected by this we're going to be connected by this network for the rest of our lives it's going to be what we leave for our children and our children's children and the beauty is we get to help design and shape it's stewardship as it goes forward for the next decade or two so it's going to be an exciting time of evolution and uh... I thank you all very much for this and I hope we just keep one thing in mind and that is one world one internet and everyone connected thank you very much but ron maybe you can tell us laid out a really good overview of what's going on what's your agenda for the next year? what do you think the big issues are? what is it you want to see accomplished in your first year as the head? sure uh... we've got a very full strategic plans and one of the most important things are these international domain names because other countries and people wanted to do that without switching keyboard modes we just approved Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia last week we've got twelve more applications of the pipeline we just signed a new arrangement UNESCO we're hoping to get a lot more countries and languages coming in so that's a strategic priority uh... ICANN was created to create competition and also new top-level domains and uh... a very controversially important topic or what we call generic top-level domains and there's many different economic interests around that we're running a process to introduce those and we have a whole set of security stability issues the domain names uh... a sec uh... system which you actually advocated I think very strongly in your report Jim uh... we will be going live with in a few months we're actually in test mode on the route of the stealth route that's already got a digitally signed secure system Rod you look like you're holding up pretty well uh... congratulations thank you we're all rooting for you thank you very much can you give us a couple of thoughts about how ICANN and how all of us balance quality control and other governance imperatives with imperative to stay out of the way sure uh... you know the first part of quality control you know I worry about as a CEO coming in was the IANA function okay because I mean that's the IANA I'm sorry I'm using an acronym it's it's one of the capabilities that we do updating the internet route zone every day okay and that has a zero tolerance for error because if you make an error in that some part of the world gets left out of the domain name system okay and they can't be accessed by the rest of the system until you fix that problem which we haven't you know uh... thank goodness uh... is is not a recurring event so the IANA function is a top priority and making sure we have an IANA excellence effort and uh... and I've been looking very hard at the resiliency and what we could do to enhance the resiliency of that function in decentralizing operations because that's got to be absolutely rock solid we've also got we've got TQM activities in many different areas whether it's the new GTLD program for example for the top level domains a separate office that you know got a Chinese wall separate whole TQM effort around that international domain names you know after the seven years of work we finally got the policy approvals we now got the application processing shop up so there's nuts and bolts back in Lee that we're working on and uh... quality across the board the key is keeping the internet going and making that the main name system uh... make sure that it's running Phil Corwin uh... like every new CEO you like the one two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue you inherit a heritage from predecessor controversies and benefits and uh... after a short honeymoon you own it and it's uh... it's yours certainly the biggest controversy going on on ICANN since June 2008 has been the new GTLD proposal without asking you whether you would have done anything differently up to now uh... came out of the sole meeting with at least the perception of not a firm promise from ICANN that uh... the application period is perceivable open the beginning of next year it's likely that new ones will be added uh... by the end of the year do you think that you expect to see new GTLDs introduced to the root zone by the end of twenty eleven perhaps more important uh... drill down a little bit what are the most important potential benefits for the internet users and what are some of the risks and what is ICANN doing to address those risks? sure so Phil if I sum that up talking about new GTLD timing issues and you know what does that look like and what might the benefits be of new offerings that are out there clearly huge priority for ICANN something that's worked on for years the first is I have not and we have not committed any dates right now because of the bottom up process in the fact that the way ICANN in this ecosystem works the board is this sort of multi-cameral legislator later has to do the final approvals and we have six different threads that are running now uh... through uh... iteration processes to get to the point where the new applications could be received which is one of the reasons uh... for the new generic top-level domains an example would be uh... people have talked about it dot new york you know or dot paris uh... and many brand owners and others might add new top-level domains and i'm not advocating specific domains are just mentioning examples uh... so what work my company's ceo is to run those processes with our team very effectively they're open to public comment they're open to board comment revision and changes so i i have no specific time frame estimate because that'd be like uh... uh... assistant secretary strickler someone saying when congress is going to get something approved but i don't know i don't know when the board is going to prove it i know that we can deliver the information they need and support the public process now what's the benefit of these new top-level domains well those benefits uh... can be very that the newest top-level domain we've added uh... is dot post and that's for the international postal system they intend to help people have unique uh... internet uh... names and addresses that can get linked to their physical world addresses and also do financial services globally in a unique secured top-level domain so uh... most of the top-level domains you can go and join dot com or you know or dot net or another uh... domain and you don't have to commit security standards dot post will only let national postal systems join so they're gonna have a high-secure domain look at some new services that innovation is with what we think is going to come fill and we don't know how it's gonna come in which ones that might come from but the history of the internet is if you open up systems and you set up fair rules most parties are good and then you have to start structuring the incentive structures in the processes to try to stop behaviors that are that are not beneficial so we'll see uh... great question again if we go back to the three-layer cake uh... we're kind of at the at the traffic at the traffic piece in the middle those meetings depend upon high high bandwidth in the pipes and plumbing and good better applications uh... in services being developed at the top level so we're not directly engaged in that although presumably the people offering services uh... will have domain names are going to use so we'll see thank you sure absolutely uh... jonathan's of the association for competitive technology what uh... why are you talking to this audience is the question that comes in my head what what is it agenda here in washington what is it the people that aren't regulars and i can't meetings what message do they need to get in what process do they need to become engaged in uh... to advance the objectives or to begin to answer the question excellent well i'm here because i'm honored to be invited by uh... jim lewis great thinker in this space i can say that that we i can and i think other members of the internet ecosystem would like to see more thoughts and where we go in the future i can as a part of that system will be facing a major new con contract renewal with the u.s. government department of commerce in about two years time and so jim and others were talking about rod you know what's gonna happen i said well really that's not something where we will be part of the discussion but a lot of thinking is needed and and and generally the department of commerce opens up to thoughts and ideas in the u.s. government does but it helps to have very smart people thinking about these issues where do we need to evolve in this ecosystem in the future and we thought that having those thought processes here through csis which is a nonpartisan or bipartisan and international group now uh... having evolved out of its original uh... american mission was one good place to have uh... excellent place to have that dialogue start uh... but we hope that these kind of conversations will help happen other capitals around the world as well so we'd like the policy wants strategist technologist to think about where should the system be going because again we don't have the answers you know it's we're all evolving into this new space and things are flying very quickly i know i'm totally good i'm open i'm i'm i'm open my back into later so i'm great terrific and then maybe we'll ask it thanks uh... derrick cogburn from american university um... school of international service and uh... the internet governance project uh... just one thought um... i wonder if you could say a little bit about how you're looking at the multi-stakeholder arrangements around the internet governance forum so you could say a little bit about just to make sure that this audience is aware of that but just your thoughts on how that has evolved how useful it's been for the kinds of issues that you're raising sure well and i'm still learning about the internet governance forum uh... i had the you know i should explain you know i have my background was a high-tech you know ceo and then about 15 years in policy was mostly environmental policy uh... and then some diplomacy uh... in track two diplomatic work and then cyber security so i'm new to internet governance i had the great opportunity to attend the i gf meeting in egypt which was wonderful and what it what really struck me was the richness of the dialogues and how many different sessions there were whether it was on child pornography concerns and law enforcement and nonprofits coming together or cyber security concerns or online video conferencing or void or capacity building in the development where what really struck me was this incredible richness and i think that what's so unique and important about the i gf uh... as a un-sponsored multi-stakeholder dialogue platform is it's not decisional okay so i mean we've come to an ican party we've had brilliant people like phil and others you know haggling over where policy lines are going to be drawn and and and things are going to end up there's not that same issue at i gf because it's really concepts ideas information sharing uh to help shape uh policies long-term in the future so it creates i think a very different kind of environment than the ican means we have a similar number we'll be in nirobi in about a month well that uh roughly somewhere between 700 and a thousand people roughly talking about policies and where we go specifically in names and addresses and dns and things that touch that so i think they're very complimentary and we would very much like to see the i gf continue as a multi-stakeholder platform i already have it right thank you for a very enlightening uh talk clearly uh communication is one of your talents thank you thank you bob i wanted to ask a question about the global public interest that you mentioned and specifically who gets to decide and what that really is uh if you had been at the uh any of the two world summits uh you probably know there was quite a bit of discussion there there's quite a bit of discussion there about the role of ican many of the countries even raised questions about its legitimacy sure uh there is still a lot of question about it around the world and and the question of how you deal with things going forward how do you reconcile the notion of the global public interest as you stated in the context of all of this i call it discord among some countries in the world about the role of ican and its legitimacy sure thank you so you know was global public interest and how do you measure how you try to get there you know i'm not a policy walk and i'm not an attorney fortunately we have a lot of brilliant brilliant members from those constituencies in our ican community but as soon as we were working on the affirmation agreement and uh that language came in it was introduced by commerce i looked it up in wikipedia okay and what i found immediately was there's many different definitions of public interest some parties will say you know it's about the economic public what's in the best interest of the public from an economic standpoint and that leads to a certain set of decisions others would say it has to it has to have other social factors included equity and justice and this and that so any of these terms of course can be quite expansive and i think that's a discussion debate that we're very open to and we hope is going to take place across the ecosystem forums what does that mean about who gets to decide well it's a bottom up process and again everything they can get resolved in the policy process in the constituencies in ican will come from them in a clear constituency and go up to the board for approval generally if the board does not see a conflict between those guidelines and the rest of the bylaws and the other body of policies that have been approved then they'll approve it they may debate it if on the other hand you have a situation like we have right now on some what's called vertical integration issues of how should registrars and registries which are different businesses be able to buy or sell each other across invest etc the questions coming up with new gtlds that it could restructure the industry and the community split there was a huge debate in soul and literally drew the hands in the room after a two-hour debate and it was 50 50 okay and we try to get the room to budge and move and there and and what it was is different views on an economic interest and in that kind of a case and many of the participants at the table had an economic stake so they were interested in their business interests and they were representing those which is their appropriate role the board's role when they'll review that in part lack of a recommendation from the community needs to think about what's in the public interest so not what side a or side b saying what seems to be in the global public interest this elusive concept that we've all got to work on but it's something that uh we're all going to school on and we'll look forward to to your input on as well bob peach ugly from brookings just like to follow up that question what would you say would be the major foreign criticisms of the u.s dominance of ican presently okay a number of key criticisms i mean one is simply if else not equitable okay so one country has created the system and they have a right to review the review the the root file every day why don't we get to do that so it's kind of a sense of equity secondly there's there's a concern of vulnerability some some kind of user concerned that i mean you know god forbid countries go to war okay the countries do go to war well they're concerned about well could united states or a party take them out of the internet that's a very commonly voiced concern i've heard repeatedly in capitals around the world and then i try to explain well you know first thing is you know your overall internet's not dependent upon the root file but you know your domain names are below you know your country code those but but you could talk to your isp's and have them at it right back in because this thing about this little tiny file we talked about that's 119 kb well if someone doesn't like that one that we ship out and it goes to the root servers well the isps can you could could change it and use a different one in fact that's been done okay it's called forking the root or duplicating the root and there's clearly countries that are running tests on that some even say some countries are using those that's one of the reasons buying is so important and why the rules kind of is very virtual so that's a second complaint is the sense of vulnerability of hey our country could be taken out of the internet route and that's vulnerability that that that's not acceptable to us i think a lot of it is just the the perception of we want to we want to be a deeper part of the process we appreciate having a voice in this whole thing but there's a sense of that that's an important control or power point in the internet which in fact it's really quite virtual and it's driven up to this bottom up process and another complaint would be that the process for determining the country code operators is based upon the community of users in a country not just the government so the government's one voice and we also look at what's industry using and saying what are the universities saying because one of the the philosophies that the engineers brought the the whole philosophy the itf was on openness on standards and collaboration and roughly equality but with a meritocracy in terms of policy so if you're smart you could contribute more those values have persisted so inside countries we seek to ensure that the operators of the top-level country domain are really serving the interests of the public interests of the users governments have an issue with that sometimes most governments are fine with that okay but some governments feel like no we really want to control that ourselves you know we we want to run that or we want to control it and and so that's a that's probably a third third major concern that we have and there's there's others I think we're down there I'll ask you a noble and dairy consultant but not nearly so technically proficient that I could ask an intelligent question but I will risk sharing my thoughts as I was listening to you in the form of an analogy that I used to consolidate my understanding conceptually as you went through the various steps of your of your talk and you started with the hard drive in the beginning I can see that what you were saying afterwards as analogous to a big bang with a creator Dr. Khan and others in intelligent design creating the DARPA net then networks analogous to galaxies and networks of networks universes perhaps parallel universes as there are astrophysics there then I conceived of the pipes and plumbing as similar to mass the messages and routing similar to energy and the applications and data similar to the information and and logic that orders the universe and on a light final note the internet leader you're very good it's certainly beautiful prose you use to describe the network so thank you I'm Sharon McLoone I'm a reporter with a trade publication called intellectual property watch and you had mentioned in your talk that there are less than 10 percent of the ipv4 addresses left and rapidly dwindling yes and I wondered in your assessment what's the global adoption right now how's it going of the ipv6 and what is i can doing to encourage it sure well in part you know what do we do to encourage it we we continue to try to promote and educate ultimately it's up to the pipes and plumbing layer to choose what they want to do because they're the consumers of those network addresses and they have to make the decision so we're an advocate we try to educate we've set up all the capability the distribution channel works so there's there's no obstacle for anybody who has a need for ipv6 addresses to get them the registries already get them in each of the regions around the world and they're ready to shovel them out in trillion number chunks no problem so there's no distribution channel issues the adoption issues are very interesting most the routers and switches out there that have been sold in the last three years can either run in an ipv4 mode or what's called a dual stack mode where they also support ipv6 so four and six but you use a little more resources it's a little bit slower so there's some overhead costs to network operators and so until you run out there's not that much incentive because addresses are i'm going to call them effectively free they're not quite free because you have to be a member of an rar to get these you know huge allocations but you might be a member paying 30 000 dollars a year you know and getting you know 100 million names a year so i mean it's you know they're less than a penny each in an ipv6 it'll it'll be even lower so they're almost free so it's really about upgrading the software in the global networking infrastructure and changing administration processes and retraining people the other thing is happening is you know what does mankind do when we have scarcity in a resource that's needed prices will go up so now there's secondary trading we don't we charge nothing for addresses we have some very minuscule services 800 000 a year is what i can get from the global rar's for all the you know internet addresses that that we allocate and that doesn't even cover our costs of operation of running the staff and the systems and the people to support the addressing business and i actually don't want to comment on one quick thing is why are addresses and names handled together because some people have asked that and as john postel said domain names are worth a lot of money okay and there's a lot of you know economic interest in those address addresses are just a public service and they need to be protected and keep keep be maintained is like a free public service or you're going to start restricting access to the internet okay so part of the philosophy was keep the addresses free whatever you do and if you need to support operations there's there's a domain name business that can do that so uh we'll see how the the app take is quite slow it's certainly below two or three percent i think of all all systems in the world that support ipv6 we i can run an ipv6 most of the registries around the world we're gonna when dns sec comes out mid this year we're gonna have a big education push for isps and companies and others to try to upgrade dns sec and ipv6 at the same time but you know i think it'll it'll tend to solve itself as uh addresses get to get depleted well this has been a remarkable session in two ways the first way is of course i think it's the only session we've ever had at csis where we've had both the creator and the profit thank you thank all of you very much we're a lot of to be here we're calling the state we're calling the state thank you thank you that's a 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