 Peter Dengate Thrush, you served as chairman of the board from 2007 to 2011 during the Bush and Obama administrations. How would you characterize the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government during that period? I think ICANN has always done very well by having the relationship that it's had with the U.S. government. And I've often said this to others and thought about it. If ICANN had been set up or if the internet had been invented in any other country, one can imagine there would have been a very difficult relationship with the government. But in fact, being in the United States in general with the laws that are available and the government has actually, I think, been a good thing for ICANN. Interested in your thoughts, to that point, it would have been easy, it strikes me. Everybody is aware that the internet sort of arose from U.S. government research. It would have been very easy for the U.S. government, the USG, to say, okay, throughout this development of this thing called the internet, we're going to preserve control over the domain name system, the DNS. They didn't. They went out of their way to say, we want to transition this to the private sector. Why do you think that is? I think you have to go back even earlier, because there was first of all no such thing as a domain name system when the internet first started. And so we had packet switching programs working for quite a long time before Mr. Mokka-Patrus gave us the domain name system. And so you couldn't have made the split in that way. And nothing to remember, I guess, is that there were many alternatives to the internet being tested and tried, including at a very high level. The International Telecommunications Union and other governments were pushing a completely different set of protocols than what eventually became the internet. So I think we are lucky that the, first of all, the approach that the inventors took as well as the US government that mostly employed them was that this was probably because they didn't realize how successful it was going to be, but also because there was a pattern of, if you like, openness about that sort of technology that was going to be made available for the community, for industry to use. And as a result, we've done, I think, very well out of it. You said that we're kind of fortunate that the internet was invented in the US in response to my first question. I'll elaborate on that for you. Well, of course, the whole internet wasn't invented in the US, but some of the key technology, Vint and Bob Khan doing the TCPIP protocols, probably the key bit. But there are other building blocks before them, a lot of it down in the US. I think the reason why it's useful that was in the US was because, first of all, it's, you know, this is not just my own bias being an English speaker. But I think speaking, coming from an English speaking background, I mean, that it was widespread adoption was assisted. I think coming from a country which had reasonably strong laws, strong enforcement of law, strong observance of the rule of law, all meant that people were confident in building institutions and trusting to contracts, for example, which is how we control most of the behavior, et cetera, on the internet, or on the domain name system, were all controlled by the contracts. So having a jurisdiction that understood contracts and where they could be enforced, I think made a big difference. It was during your tenure that the JPA, the Joint Project Agreement, was replaced or succeeded by the affirmation of commitments. First of all, explain to me what the JPA was and, secondly, why this succession was important. Well, actually, I think the ending of the JPA was probably the most significant thing of my term. A lot of other things happened in that time. A lot of people can't give me credit for working on IDNs or restructuring ICANN or the new GTLD program. But in fact, I think one of the most significant steps was that transition. So you need to understand, I think, when we started, there were three major agreements that ICANN was involved in. And the first one was the IANA contract, actually managing the database that tells the internet domain name system and the IP addressing system where things are. So that was quite important. The other one was when the US government wanted to encourage the internet community to build a structure that in the end became ICANN, when ICANN emerged one of several proposals as to how to carry out the principles of the white paper and the green paper, there was a memorandum of understanding signed between the US government and this new body called ICANN, which basically said, look, if you do all these things, we will transition control of this IANA system to this body. But you've got to prove yourselves. And we were a startup starting from scratch. And so the joint project agreement was originally the memorandum of understanding. And what that required ICANN to do was build safe and stable relationships with all of the key players in the internet infrastructure. And it started off having relationships with almost none of them. And through a variety of political, diplomatic, contractual, ad-cooperative sort of moves, ICANN has become the place where, for example, my background in the CCTLDs, the CCTLDs signed up and said, yes, we want an organization where we can come and talk about the internet connectivity issues. We'll talk about our issues at home, but we need a global place to come when the monopoly in relation to the generic names was being broken up. Originally, it was only one registrar. You had to buy all .com net and org names from one store. And so one of our first exercises was to bring some competition to that. That required a setting up a stable contract that registrars could sign up to and then rules that allowed them to access the registries. So each of these was a massive sort of exercise, creating the concept of registrars and then creating the framework for them to exist and then bringing them into ICANN. So the MOU said, you need to do all these things. And once you've got all these things in place and you've got a safe and stable structure, we will transition the IANA function to you because you will be ready. So much of my time at ICANN was spent trying to live up to that obligation, create an ICANN that was doing all the things that an ICANN should do and was trusted by the rest of the community to do them. And so when I was chair, I reached the conclusion with support from the board that we had got to that point. We didn't get there quickly or easily, but the memorandum of understanding which had transitioned itself by this stage to the joint project agreement was coming to an end. And we said, well, let's see whether or not we can make that the end. It was originally only supposed to last for two years and by now it was sort of seven or eight years, nine years old. I thought, and I think the board thought, that we had actually completed the obligations of the original MOU. And so the first thing we did was put together the previous committee set up by the CEO, the President's Strategy Committee, and we repurposed that, got in some new people and set about on a project that was actually helped triggered or named by Meredith Hatwell Baker, who was one of the chief contact at the US government that we were dealing with at NTIA. So she had written us a letter because we'd had some preliminary conversations about ending that particular relationship. And in the course of that letter, she said that what ICANN needed to do was improve its institutional confidence. And so we gave that to the President's Strategy Committee and said, what do we do to improve institutional confidence in ICANN? And that committee then went all around the world, interviewed community members outside people. We had a number of high-profile meetings and asked the community, what do you think's wrong with ICANN? How do we improve it? And what are particularly the things that will give you confidence that ICANN can stand alone without this particular relationship with the US government? It was very important because under the Joint Prejudic Agreement, ICANN was effectively subject to a lot of Department of Commerce control. Let me interrupt for just a second. Was that control ever exercised? Yes, it was. In an administrative kind of way, what it provided was a series of targets that ICANN had to keep meeting. I mentioned a couple of contracts with the CCTLDs, contracts with the address organisations, relationships with business, relationships with government. So all of these things had to be done. But the key requirement was that the Department of Commerce would, first of all, there was a regular reporting requirement. So there was a master-servant relationship set up in that structure, which we started to feel was no longer appropriate. And the need to change all that. So that was how it was exercised. And probably the most galling, if you like, or the most obvious feature of this control was... Well, there are two aspects. First of all, when the Department of Commerce was requiring a testimony in Senate or House hearings, the US government itself, in those institutions, made it quite clear that the Department of Commerce had the power to go and do things and tell ICANN what to do. And remember, ICANN is positioning itself as the administrative and coordinating body for the internet, for the world. And so this particular relationship with the US government was becoming difficult to sell. To sell internationally. To sell internationally, yes. Say, what we're trying to do is build the institutional confidence of ICANN in the world, that the world is going to trust ICANN to manage all these particular things, set up these contracts, and run them fairly. And so that kind of obvious influence on television were the Senate or the American political organizations having hearings, telling the Department of Commerce what to get ICANN to do. So let me ask you this, Peter, did... I understand that. I understand that you've got the US government over here telling the Hill, Capitol Hill, we've got final say on this, we've got control on this. And at the same time that you're trying to sell the independence of the organization internationally, did the USG, did the US government know or care about your difficulties in selling ICANN's independence internationally? Was it never a point of discussion? I think so, but only in, if you think of the sort of concentric circles of influence and knowledge that surround anything, the NTIA officials were very much aware of that. And they were being subjected to it because particularly US business who wanted a particular result on the internet in relation to the domain name system would come and lobby them. For example, trademark lobbyists who wanted the rules relating to trademark infringement and domain name and things. And we had a lot of problems with cyber squatters and so forth. Instead of going through an ICANN process to achieve their results, or sometimes having gone through an ICANN process and not being happy with the result, they would then go and lobby the Department of Commerce and say, well, if you're controlling these guys, you tell them to do this. And so the Department of Commerce were very aware of this. And the next layer out at state, when, and I had this happen as well, sitting next to heads of state and ministers from other countries, we would be abused for sometimes quite long periods over a formal dinner by foreign officials saying, why is the US government got its hands in this process? And the particular sticking point, which I guess we've come to, was actually a very small thing, but in diplomacy with national symbols, some of these things have a high degree of friction and create a lot more heat than that. And one of those was the management of the CCTLD. So you've got countries have what they regard as their own place on the internet. So for New Zealand, it's .NZ. For France, it's .FR. Brazil has .BR and these are large entities and they've built up a lot of registrations and that's how the internet is run in those particular countries. But any changes to that used to have to require the approval of a relatively low level Department of Commerce staff person. And so it looked from the outside as if the national internet system in Brazil or France or New Zealand or any other country was actually at the end of the day subject to US government control. And so the signaling was much worse than the reality. The interesting thing here is during the IANA stewardship transition, the argument was made repeatedly by ICANN that look, it's hard for us to say that all governments have equal say when the US government actually has this function. You seem to be validating that from quite a ways back. Oh, certainly. It's certainly a very real problem. But let's finish the JPA point. Because that was like, there's a two step process here. The first is the ending the joint project agreement which was ICANN's agreement with the Department of Commerce. And so we had this process where we said, we think we've finished. We think we've done all the things that are in the JPA. We went around the world and had the President's Strategy Committee ask everybody and the issues that they raised were capture. They don't want the system able to be taken over and a very number of other things. So we thought we could perform those. Then we had a period living up to that. And when the time came, we said, no, we are not gonna sign an extension of that. So then we went into negotiations and it was at the Sydney meeting 2009 where we had the session with the Department of Commerce and said, look, we're not gonna do this anymore. We're not gonna sit in this master-servant relationship. We're not gonna be reporting to you. And I didn't mention the other thing. I mentioned the Senate and the other hearings. The Department of Commerce itself used to say, we're gonna have a hearing into how good ICANN is or not. And we wanted that to stop. We didn't want ICANN's performance to be being reviewed against a set of criteria created by the US government, by the US government. And so the brilliance of the Affirmation of Commitments was that all that stopped. And what the Affirmation of Commitments said was the community is gonna review ICANN, not the US government. When you were having this conversation with commerce and you're like, okay, we want this to stop. And you were advancing what later became the AOC or conceptually the AOC. What came back at you from commerce and the US government? Mostly very helpful. And this is another reason why- They weren't resistant to the idea. They wanted to do the right thing. And I give them a lot of credit always. And it was never, we had different views, but it was never adversarial. And it was always, this was the original plan. Can we do it? I have to say earlier administrations that I dealt with were, and possibly rightly so, were of the view that ICANN was not ready in their turn. And I'm thinking back to the three years before the 2009 meeting when we started raising these conversations. And I can probably had a lot of work to do, but as I say, we thought by 2009, we'd got to the point where we no longer needed to report to the Department of Commerce should not be having hearings reviewing ICANN's progress and maintaining this sort of control. So the AOC, the ending of the JPA and creating the AOC was a major milestone of ICANN saying we're going to stand on our own now. We're going to be subject to full review, but it's going to be reviewed by the entire community against a whole series of targets. And the Department of Commerce is going to have a role in doing that review as part of the community. And that's what set the scene then for the second one, which was the transition of the end of the bargain. If ICANN gets itself into be a major global, safe, stable manager repository for these internet functions, then the last thing to go would be the IANA functions coming into ICANN. How did the affirmation of commitments both conceptually before they were drawn and when they were signed go over on Capitol Hill? Well, you'd have to ask them. I'm sure you heard that. I think, I don't think everybody understood it quite frankly, but I think it was sufficiently clear that first of all, the Department of Commerce had a continuing role in that process. And that was, I think, was one of the worries. Is there a link? Do we have a way into this process? Because it's relatively arcane. And is it what are the goals and what are the principles? And they are, I think, principles that could be relatively easily explained and sold in a political process. If they're about openness, they're about transparency, they're about accountability, responsibility. So I think in the end, it was a little bit of explaining and not a hard, but not a hard sell. The main takeaway I'm getting, what I'm hearing you say is while ICANN may have advanced the concept of an AOC, commerce certainly wasn't resistant. I mean, they were receptive to the idea and actually collaborated in moving it forward. Well, is that a correct interpretation? Absolutely, the idea of the AOC came out of a particular set of conversations with them. And we go back now and can't quite remember who actually said what at the time. But it was clear we wanted to end a process where the Department of Commerce was investigating and managing and reporting on ICANN to some process there where the community was doing it. And so that was the shift. The Department of Commerce didn't want to be able to suddenly have no relationship to have none of these things that were there before. And neither did we. But it was, so in other words, the Department of Commerce moving out of the role where it did these things and creating a structure where the community did them. And that was the psychological and political and important shift. When you think back about your tenure as chair, you've already said that the AOC, this transition from the JPA to the succeeding AOC was a major point in terms of defining the USG's relationship with ICANN. Yes. Were there other points during your tenure? We had input from the USG in a number of ways through the GAC on issues, but we also had other conversations. I suppose the obvious one is XXX, where one of the early applications under these very limited rounds for a new top level domain. But it was before the new G program actually began, right? Well before, yes. This was one of the old, remember there were two small rounds of new GTLDs. Part of the ICANN DNA was to come up with a process for new GTLDs. The first one was, we added seven. And then the second round, there was the idea of the sponsored. If there could be a community that had its own particular GTLD, that community could sponsor. So they're called sponsored GTLDs. And the XXX one, I think, came out of that, where there was a, people thought the adult content industry could be defined and could have a place on the internet for adult content. Now, pornography is legal in many countries, but it still created a huge amount of excitement from people who are opposed to adult content. And so there are some strong lobbyists in this country and in the United States. And they put a lot of pressure on their congressman and their thing to try and go back down that control route that we talked about and put pressure on the Department of Commerce to put pressure on ICANN. To block it. To block it. And I have to say, I was- And what form did that pressure take? Well, I was never, as a board member, through that process and eventually as chair, I was never aware of any process. There'd been accusations by people and there was quite a major case, the case went for tribunal, eventually found that ICANN should have granted it in the first place and sent it back for reconsideration and the board did grant it. And so I know as a result of that that there were allegations made that there was pressure put on individual, so I'm unaware of any of that. And to me it was always a relatively straightforward, have they, as far as this applicant is concerned, has it met the conditions? And I was one of a minority on the board who thought that the applicant had met the conditions and was ready to let them go. So the issue for us was that we had a meeting just before the final vote to actually admit triple X at the San Francisco meeting and we had a visit from the assistant secretary of the Department of Commerce, Larry Strickling, with whom we have a very good relationship. And he said he wanted to talk to us, talk to the senior leadership about this decision that was coming up. And so we convened a meeting that morning. From memory it was my vice chair, the CEO and legal counsel met with Larry Strickling and I don't want to characterize that as other than a discussion. Certainly the Department of Commerce didn't say that we should do anything or not do anything. There were some questions asked about our processes and whether we thought through what might happen with the consequences of a decision going either way. And we said that we had and the meeting came to an end. But was the mere presence of the assistant secretary in itself, was his mere presence in saying proceed with caution on this, was that in itself a form of light pressure or interest or was it meant to influence? It may have been, but it was a part of the many, many submissions that we were receiving. If you like it was perhaps the last one and it was not everybody would have had quite that access to the key decision makers. It wasn't to the whole board. So, but then we have a very long and healthy working relationship with the Department of Commerce so it was not unusual to have a more special meeting with their representative say than say another government. But it was different. It would have been harder for another government to have had that meeting at that time. Throughout the process of ICANN's genesis, it's alteration, the maturation of ICANN is often mentioned in relationship specifically to the IANA transition. The US government testified on the Hill and said repeatedly, we waited until ICANN was mature. Well, we wanted it to be mature enough. It was a maturation process. I'm wondering what that sort of verbiage uttered by the DOC, the Department of Commerce, meant to the hierarchy of ICANN. Was there a sense in ICANN of resentment that they're saying that we're already mature or was there an acknowledgement? Yeah, we've got a ways to go. Well, you have to understand I was off the board by the time that actually happened. But at any point, I mean it was still an issue during your tenure, maturation, right? Yes, I think the most important signal that I can recall or that I certainly encouraged was that after the signing of the Affirmation of Commitments, we no longer heard anyone talk about the ICANN experiment. For a long time, all through those early years, it was the ICANN experiment. Interesting. It's the first global multi-stakeholder body. It's the first body ever of its kind to take control and manage and coordinate this incredible, what's turned out to be the most, you know, the operating system for the planet. It's never been done before. And it was always regarded with some concern. It's the only place where governments don't have a dominant role. They have an equal role in providing input to the policies. It's not controlled by trademark owners or business constituency. So the genius of ICANN was creating the structure that took all these forces. Many of them, great disparities of power. Governments have a great deal more power than a CCTLD operator or a great deal more power than a single trademark owner or a woman who's being stalked and wants protection, et cetera. So there's a huge variety of issues. And what I think we've done well at ICANN and can always be improved is we've got the power structure right. So those forces are held in a reasonably useful way to produce useful results. Clearly the IANA stewardship transition happened after you left the board. But you're still a member of the ICANN community. How would you define the most challenging elements of that transition? Well, there's a number of aspects. The first thing was, again, this concept of accountability and responsibility, which we embedded in the most important of the first of the reviews under the AOC, that there had to be whoever was running this thing or managing, coordinating, we use different verbs, whoever was performing these functions had to have the trust of the community. They had to be accountable. They had to have transparency where transparency is needed. And there had to be methods of redress for people who'd been or thought they'd been, you know, damaged in the process. So it was another exercise that we started with the President's Strategy Committee. It was the result of the accountability and review teams, by which time there'd been two of these going through and saying, well, how is ICANN accountable? And to whom is it accountable? So there was a sense that this was probably the last chance to really focus. Once the transition has occurred, people thought it would gotta be much harder to shift views at ICANN about accountability. I don't agree with that. I don't agree with some of the black and white conversations that went on. This is the only chance we'll ever have to improve ICANN. I think it was a major chance and people were right to take advantage of it, but ICANN will continue to improve. There are continuing to be accountability mechanisms and all these things will, I think, keep growing. So getting the accountability and the transparency of process and redress for grievances, et cetera, getting those right was important. And then proving that they could handle the technical structure and then having an escape route. If all of this work doesn't work, what's plan B? And I think those were the issues that the community grappled with. And I think in the end came up quite good solutions. Let me ask you this. It's been stated many times that that transition fully to the private sector was envisioned to occur within a couple of years. Yes. Took much longer than that. Yes. Why? Well, partly because every year we got bigger. Every year the internet was just growing at an enormous speed. I think when we started this idea, I was involved from 1998 onwards, there were many fewer people on the internet. There was not. So what was happening as ICANN was growing and trying to become the body to manage these things, the size of the job was getting exponentially bigger every day. So that's one thing. It sounds like you're seeing almost the goals were being moved. I think they were the same goals, manage these things, get them right, do them, but the number of people and the players and the scale was going up. The targets were the same, but there was just more of it. So I think that's one thing. The other thing was, and you get different views about this, there are people who had vested interests in the status quo and change is always difficult. There's people with an interest to are fighting to keep it, but there's also the inertia of people who don't really understand and don't care and you have to move them. There was no real opposition to it. It was just getting it right. There was opposition to it on the Hill, even in its final days. I mean, sorry, when you say opposition to it, I mean to sort of ICANN the concept. Ah, forgive me, as opposed to the transition itself. But by extension, that was at play with the IANA stewardship transition and it came out in the testimony and the verbiage on Capitol Hill. What was your reaction at that point? I think it's the same. Well, first of all, there's a lot of misunderstanding about what it was all about. And there were a number of politicians who, being politicians, tried to take advantage for political purposes and in the course of that said some things that really suited perhaps their audience rather than had much grounding in sort of technical internet structures or relationships. So it's good to put some of that aside, I think. But other than that, there was a misunderstanding, I think, a general misunderstanding that somehow the US government had some really powerful control over the internet. And it doesn't, it didn't. If it had, the internet would have grown very differently. It would have grown somewhere else because the reason why it's grown so well is because it hasn't had that kind of central top-down control. The ability to innovate at the edge and for people to add things without permission, permissionless innovation has been why it's been successful. But there was still some sense from people who didn't understand that it must be like another company or another technology where somebody owns it and can control it. So I think a lot of the exercise was just getting through to that, that look, what we're talking about is the last relatively low-level technical function. It's important and somebody has to do it. But look, these guys have actually been doing it for the last 15 years. They've done it without a problem. Why don't we let them sort of carry on doing it? And I think once people got over that, it was a lot easier. I'm wondering as a citizen, not a U.S. citizen, but as a citizen of New Zealand, did that give you a lens that was beneficial? Obviously it was different, but was it perhaps beneficial or maybe irrelevant in viewing ICANN's relationship with the U.S. government? I think it probably did. I think, first of all, New Zealanders have a very robust view about the government. It's very clear in New Zealand to New Zealanders that the government works for New Zealanders. And we tend to have a view that that government is best, which governs least. We want the government to do things that we specify. So we come, I think, with a relatively robust view to government and keeping government in check, but using governments where it's helpful. And so we tend to approach this problem in the same kind of a way. And I think the other thing was the U.S., to people living in the U.S., the U.S. is so huge, there's so much going on. There's a tendency, or there's no need to actually look outside the United States to find out how other people are solving often similar problems. So I think there was a little bit of being able to come in from the outside slightly and say, look, just because this has grown up this way, just because it's been done that way, doesn't mean to say we have to keep doing it. And let's try this new global multi-stakeholder body instead, instead of a government department controlling a corporation. Let's try and open it up to the world. And if it doesn't work, we can do something else. And I think that's the other thing about New Zealand. Being so small, we've always been ready to try things because if it doesn't work, it's easier to pivot. It's easier to pivot. Peter, is there anything else that we've not touched on that you think is particularly relevant when we discuss ICANN's historic relationship with the U.S. government? I think it's probably good to close off on the point that all of the accountability and transparency kind of issues that were in the AOC have survived and have migrated now into the bylaws. And so what's happened, because there's an enormous issue that this might be the last chance, let's get it right, I was criticized because I saw the AOC as a temporary device for getting to this point and said so at a meeting of the European Parliament at some stage, the Committee of the European Parliament. And people thought, does that mean that those principles are temporary and they aren't? No, those principles have survived and they've migrated into the bylaws. And so those have got stronger. What we've done away with is the vehicle that we use to carry them there. So I think that's very important that we've used this process. You're saying the embodiment of those in the bylaws actually acts as more reinforcement than standalone in the AOC. They're now in a much stronger place than the AOC. The AOC was still a contract. Now they're in the DNA of ICANN. So it's going to be much harder to, and that's where they should be, these obligations of accountability and transparency. And again, they can be changed by the community. So I think that's important. And I think the other thing that's important is to say thank you to Larry Strickling and Fiona Alexander. I haven't mentioned Fiona, but she's been there through most of this providing an enormous amount of cohesiveness to all of this process. Larry Strickling being the Assistant Secretary of Department of Commerce and Fiona being one of the people on his staff who worked with ICANN. Exactly. And I think there's a whole lot of reasons why they decided that it was appropriate to do the last step of this process. And we've talked through it. Having decided that ICANN was mature enough and was internationally acceptable enough and was internationally strong enough to handle that final transition. So I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. Earlier administrations had said, basically this will never happen, or given the impression that that was the view. And a lot of people said, the US will never give up its particular relationship to that IANA file. And so I think the community owes them a vote of thanks and an acknowledgement that there were other options, but I think they chose the right one and then they stood by it and they pushed it and they defended it. Peter Dengue Thrush, you were thanking them and I wanna thank you for taking the time to talk to us, very much appreciate it. Thank you, Peter. Thank you.