 With me is Karen Rose, one of the early employees of NTIA during Hot Cans formation. Karen, tell us about those early days, if you will. Sure. Well, I originally started on the DNS issues in 1996 at the Federal Communications Commission and at the time a lot of stakeholders had been coming to the FCC as the telecommunications regulator to talk about DNS and internet issues. But with the framework for global electronic commerce that was issued by the White House, the presidential directive put the responsibility for DNS issues with the Commerce Department. So in 1997 I moved over to the Commerce Department to work under Becky Burr and continued there until 2002. We hear a lot of talk about the White Paper. What is the White Paper? Well, I think it's really important to understand that the White Paper was not created out of whole cloth. The White Paper was really the culmination of what had been quite frankly years of discussion among stakeholders about what should be done with the internet identifier system after the internet was transitioning from an academic and research network to a real platform for commerce and for the public. So for example, by the time we had issued our first request for comments about DNS issues in 1997 and then issued the Green Paper in 1998, there were a number of efforts already underway within the community addressing these issues. For example, Aaron, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, had been established as a non-profit organization to deal with the numbering resource issues for North America. So that was one model as a non-profit. The International Ad Hoc Committee or IAHC had been discussing how to introduce new top level domains and what system of governance should look like. The trademark community had been discussing with organizations like WIPO about how to handle trademark disputes. Civil Society and academia were also discussing what should be the role of civil society and the rights for individuals in domain names. So all of this had already been in discussion by the time we issued again our request for comments in 1997 and then in 1998 the Green Paper, which itself generated from the community over 1,100 comments around the world. So we were really working with, when we were creating the White Paper, great ideas coming from the stakeholder community that were already coming up from this bottom up process. So our first role in government was really to listen, to listen to the community. That bottom up process, I interviewed Ira Magaziner from the White House and I was saying what sort of acceptance did you get and he said actually we got a lot of pushback because it was so unusual because so many people had never heard of it. Was that the case? Is that your recollection? Yeah, for government especially it was a rather novel and unique process. Coming from the internet community side however it was not terribly unique. You know the internet community had always been defined by a process of discussion and debate and open bottom up decision making. For some parties, for some in business, for some in the trademark community and for some in government however it was outside traditional processes of policy making. So I think there was a bit of a culture clash and different people, different stakeholders learning how to work with with one another. But ultimately I think it came together. We also interviewed Paul Toomey and I remember him saying as one of the first leaders of the GAC, the governmental advisory committee, I wrote to every ministry of communications in the world I heard back from 36. Does that speak to the difficulty of governments, all governments in so many societies they are the last word, they are the last voice, they are the voice. In the internet governments have a voice but they are not the voice. Was that a hard concept for them to grasp? I think initially for a number of international parties and stakeholders it was. On the other hand there were a number of countries as well who were also looking at the internet and also had believed that the private sector really needed to continue to take the lead in this area. So we had a patchwork of different views on what the role of government should be from across the globe. And quite frankly I don't think that is too different from from other issues that governments tend to consider on a global and international basis. What's your most vivid memory of those early days when is there one experience or one thing that you guys had to overcome that comes to your mind? For me there were a couple of really defining moments when I thought you know this is really going to happen. The first of which I think was the signing of amendment 11 to the cooperative agreement between network solutions and the US government which I can had participated with us in negotiating. This was really the agreement that fundamentally opened up competition for domain name registration and and developed a testbed to test the shared registry registrar system. So that signing was really fundamental. A couple months later then of course there was the MOU with ICANN that was signed where we recognized ICANN as the new corporation identified in the white paper to carry this out. And then finally for me I would have to say was the actual launch of the shared registry registrar registration shared registration system which opened up competition in domain name registration. It was a real fundamental moment. At the time that you were the primary point of contact between NTIA and ICANN you were I think five or six years out of college. Were you thinking what have I got myself into or were you intrigued by this sort of unusual new model? Well for me by the time Becky was leaving NTIA and and I took up the portfolio from her I had already been working on the issues in government for four and a half years. So it was something that I was always already well steeped in. And even before that quite frankly I had a lot of experience with the online community. In high school I was very involved in online services such as D-Dial and bulletin board systems. So you were a member of the community before there was a community. Yeah pretty much and then you know and in university I was experimenting with things like Gopher and GopherNet and the early web. So even by the time I got to the government in 1996 I had a really good handle I think on on what the ethos of the community was and what it meant to be part of the internet community as well as formally studying telecommunications science in graduate school. And this was one of the reasons in 96 when I joined the FCC that I had volunteered to take up this portfolio which had left a lot of people scratching their head. You negotiated the first contract for IANA services between ICANN and the Department of Commerce February 2000. Who else was involved in these negotiations? Well it was you know the primary parties were the Department of Commerce and ICANN in that and there were lawyers from both sides from different parts of the Commerce Department and from ICANN negotiating this agreement. This contract was important but for the lay person who doesn't know our world the internet governance world I think it's fully understood. Give us a sort of 50,000 foot perspective on this. Yeah well one thing that's interesting to note is that the IANA contract was originally not envisioned. The original plan was that the USC-ISI the University of Southern California who had performed these as a part of a research contract with the Defense Department they would transfer the personnel over to ICANN and then ICANN would go off and perform the IANA functions. And they had actually signed an agreement to that effect. However there were still concerns on the part of USC-ISI with respect to legal exposure. There had been a number of lawsuits and USC had already been sued because somebody wanted to enter a new TLD in the root. So USC felt that they really wanted to have another government contract that succeeded the DARPA contract. So they could say look we're just doing this under government remit you know don't don't sue us USC if you want to talk to somebody talk to the US government sue them. ICANN itself also was very fragile at the time. You know it hadn't fully developed consensus. It was an experiment and there was also concern there about litigation coming to ICANN. If ICANN had to deal with litigation as its primary action of business rather than building itself as a community the process wouldn't go anywhere. So by having the government contract ICANN could also say you know go talk to the US government and of course the US government had a lot more lawyers and legal resources to defend itself in a lawsuit than did ICANN or USC. And finally the third point was as that backstop as kind of an insurance policy. It was an experiment. It was still in development at the time. Consensus was still being built. So we felt that if the experiment didn't work there would still be a tether where the US government could then go and assign the IANA functions to another organization to perform. But of course that was the worst case scenario and we're very glad it never happened. The IANA stewardship transition occurred a couple of years ago. There was a belief back then that it would occur much sooner. Correct. That's right. Yes I think in the white paper we had hoped that by 2000 which was when a lot of these government contracts were coming to their natural end that by that time the process could be wrapped up and we could go about other business. As we know it didn't quite happen that way. And I think one of the reasons is this is such was such a tremendously growing space. And there were so many different interests involved in the stakeholder community kept sort of changing and kept evolving that it did take a bit longer to get everything to sufficient stability. Was the greater challenge to get people to understand what the internet space was to quote Ibram Magazine or how it worked its way around obstacles or was the greater challenge to get governments to get conventional authorities to realize that this unique system that was being set up was almost necessary. I think it was all of that quite frankly. Again from a government perspective as you indicated this was not the normal course that governments traditionally interacted with one another or solved problems or solved issues. So it was definitely unique and novel on that score. But also the different parts of the community interacting with each other getting the technical community to interact with trademark owners with civil society. Almost like everybody was speaking a different language. Everybody was speaking a different language and had different expectations about what the ground rules should look like. So it really was a process of building trust quite frankly and then building and having people I think experiment with processes to go through the motion of actually working to build consensus on policies and processes together. You know that finally everyone was at a level you know to say okay we can work with this and we can take this forward. But especially given the tremendous growth of the internet doing all that at the same time took a little bit longer than anticipated. I'm curious you're here in Barcelona it's celebrating the 20th year anniversary of ICANN. What goes through your head when you're here now and you see all the sessions and all the people and in the context of what you're seeing at its earliest days. Well it's gotten a lot bigger. I can tell you that. But some of the processes are very familiar. You know after walking into an ICANN meeting being away still very familiar things that I recognize. I used to be the US GAC representative and I spent time in that meeting. I was involved with the root server committee before and went to one of their meetings today. So we see a lot of the same processes undergoing. Things have gotten bigger and what's great is I think there's a level of trust and respect among stakeholders now that was very fragile. From group to group. Is that what you mean? From group to group. I mean back in the back in the original early years again it was it was really difficult to get different stakeholders to understand each other's language whether it was the technical community or the business community. And now after 20 years I think people are pretty familiar with how each other work and they've created a new system of how to get along in a place like ICANN. It's interesting. Fadi Shahadi who was the CEO of ICANN at the time of the IANA stewardship transition told us we did a non-camera interview with him. He told us at one point he said you know there were times when I had doubts I didn't think the community could come to consensus where where we would meet this goal. For you with someone with knowledge but you're looking from the outside what were your perceptions if any? Well again I mean I guess as a person who like to think of herself as coming from the early internet community you know all of the discussion and back and forth didn't seem terribly strange to me from that perspective. This sort of bottom-up world which is is messy. You know there were there were times when things looked a little more fragile than stable but I think the community kept working together and people really dedicated to the process kept working together to you know make sure that that that it came to a conclusion in terms of the U.S. government involvement. And one of the things that really strikes me now coming into ICANN after being away for a while is people now are really discussing the issues of ICANN more rather than the legitimacy of ICANN itself. Interesting. Yeah for many years I think the real focus was on ICANN legitimacy and now it seems that that's kind of subsided and the real focus is on what are the issues at hand and how do we solve it. It's almost like you're saying okay the experiments ended we've been validated now let's get on to the work of the day. Now let's now let's get to work yeah. Interesting. What is the thing in those early days that is either the most misunderstood or simply people don't know about it in the development of ICANN? Well I think there's a lot of focus that's been put on the agreements whether it's been the white paper or the MOU or the IANA functions contract but I think the fundamental thing about making this work is trust and it was really the building of trust among the different stakeholders whether it was government or business or otherwise building trust in each other and trust in the system that people will come to places like ICANN in good faith and contribute and work on solutions. Again not that that's always going to be an easy process but it's a process that'll produce the best results. To this day I have people say to me well ICANN is basically a regulator and I'll say no ICANN is only authority the parameters of its authority are set by contracts. Yeah I would really characterize ICANN as an administrator not a regulator and in fact when we were writing the white paper in the policy you know we specifically said we're not setting out to encourage an overall system for internet governance or for DNS governance it's really an administrator and you know one of the reasons why it works is because you know people come here and they trust that ICANN is going to be able to provide the services that need to be provided for the internet and that this is the place to have the discussions to develop the policies which ICANN will then administer. Let me ask you this the official articles of incorporation for ICANN the initial draft were filed with Secretary of State's office in California September 30th. There were various amendments after that but that was the initial filing. Very soon thereafter John Postell unexpectedly died. How big of a wrench in the works was that? It was really devastating devastating on a personal level you know and losing someone that was so instrumental to the community. It was really up to the community to really carry this forward but you know not relying on someone who had some moral authority within the community was was obviously a devastating blow. When you and Becky were working together what was the biggest issue that you felt like you had to overcome was it one merely of acceptance? I couldn't give you one there seemed like there there was an issue sort of every day whether it was you know governments really concerned about CCTLD administration whether it was John's redirection of the route whether it was you know another lawsuit over over trademarks. There was something every day that seemed to emerge which which kept it really exciting I have to say and and kept it going but I couldn't really name just one to be honest. Okay that's fine Karen Rose thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us we appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity.