 So, we are here because I read some columns by Mr. Krovitz in the Wall Street Journal that were quite interesting on the topic of Internet Governance in general and some inside baseball about ICANN and the transfer of control in specific and we struck up a bit of a conversation and thought it might be nice to have an informal conversation right now about these topics and we thought the best way to start might be a little bit to each say how we came to these topics, what brought us into this zone and then a little bit just sort of an overview and then let the conversation evolve from there and if you're watching through YouTube you have an opportunity to enter comments into a chat box that we might even have a chance to see and as we do this we will be sorting out various tech especially audio issues as we go so please be patient with us and with that I think I'm going to try to turn it over to Gordon and Gordon feel free to introduce yourself and we'll see if we can get the various mics and such up and running. Oh, Gordon I think you have to unmute yourself, I'm sorry, you click down. I should do it. Alright, yes, we hear you now. Thank you, I was getting a lot of echo before I'm sorry. Thank you Jonathan for organizing this, I've been looking forward to it. The issue of internet governance is a great one, a fun one, one that's going to be with us for some time. I thought I would set the stage a little bit for my own interest in this topic by going back well before the internet to my own early experience with a multilateral system of governance as it relates to freedom of expression going back to the early 1980s when I was a young journalist of the Wall Street Journal and at that time to me the similar issue at that time was a UN agency called UNESCO was doing its best to create what I called a new world information order which was basically a system to use the UN to legitimize censorship and suppression of free speech obviously in the free the pre-internet era but during the Cold War and during a time when governments were very aggressive in trying to legitimize censorship a time that I think in some ways is similar to today in any case as a journalist reporting UNESCO I had a fantastic story I wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal and the day before a congressman from New York a Democrat from New York was coming to Paris to investigate some of what I had reported it was a mysterious fire at UNESCO headquarters in Paris all the files were disappeared shortly thereafter the US Britain and Singapore all left UNESCO for some time but that is why I am focused in part on this issue and in part because of the miracle of the permissionless largely unregulated internet that we have all come to know and love and the question I think before us is are there risks now to the internet that did not exist before the Obama administration's decision to make an adjustment to the governance of ICANN and IANA which we'll talk about today. Wonderful I've unmuted my microphone you may need to remute yours depending on how the sound turns out and that's a very helpful introduction to hear I guess for my part I came to this when I was a teenager I used my parents credit card to sign on to the CompuServe information service which was one of the pay by the minute or by the hour services CompuServe run by H&R Block on their mainframes when they weren't crunching tax return information and found a whole world opened up through that 300 Bod modem text only of course and after about six weeks the bills came in my parents told me I had to sign off and I sent my apologies to the CompuServe forum for TI99 computers that I was participating in and I got back and offered to be an assistant sysop or system operator in exchange for free time and the course of several years from there was a sysop and several forums a shout out to any former sysops out there today and over the course of those years I they actually kept track of the billing if I were to have been billed and I ran up over a quarter of a million dollars and that was when money still meant something in connect fees over that time and it was from there that I saw the internet really take over and at the time we thought it was going to be CompuServe versus the source versus Prodigy who would win and out of left field came the internet in part because as Gordon was describing it had the sort of permission less over the course of those years I actually wasn't billing by the minute and that worked out wonderfully for the world and for the internet not so well for CompuServe I became fascinated by internet governance and in particular in ICANN domain names and that sort of thing as I was teaching on these issues I taught a class at Harvard one of the first classes I ever taught in 1997 in which one David Clark who is teaches at MIT came over as a guest and described the way that the domain name system is managed and it was so jaw-dropping how informal it seemed I couldn't believe it worked and neither could the students and it was around that time that the informal ways were being supplanted by much more formal ones and I in the Berkman Center actually had a very modest role in being around as ICANN was coming together I confess I ended up with perhaps a bit of a hangover on internet governance issues within a few years of going to meeting after meeting around the world arguing about the proper governance of what ICANN does and at some point I realized ICANN does domain names and the internet is so much more than that that actually what ICANN is doing may not bear as much on the digital future of anybody watching this podcast whether individually or as part of a company that it wasn't clear to me it mattered all that much whether Google chooses to list you on a search for bicycles if you're a bicycle shop it's far more important to you than whether you get bike shop dot bicycles or not or under what circumstances you might pay to renew the domain name so that was sort of the place I came from and it's it's just very interesting I should pass it back to you Gordon but I think we agree on a lot including on the kind of world we want to see online and maybe just happen to have a real different view on how much ICANN matters and therefore how much this backstop by which the US is perceived to ultimately bear responsibility for ICANN how much that backstop matters back over to you thank you Jonathan and I am grateful as a user of the internet for all the ICANN meetings you endure from everybody I've known who has gone to them they do seem a wee bit tedious I'll never get those hours back the analogy that I might try out on you and see what you think about this is if you're an admiral in the US Navy and you're watching US naval ships protect the open ocean for free trade to keep those networks open the networks of trade open during peacetime it's also quite boring and nothing happens and that's good and the analogy that I can I think is with the role that the US has had light and benign as it has been it has been a bit like the US Navy protecting the international sea lands and the risk to that happy world is what happens at the US Navy is not protecting sea lands we're to extend the analogy the Commerce Department does not have ultimate veto authority over ICANN and maybe more importantly the root zone and the naming of the domains and the websites of the addresses and keeping that directory honest and accurate and non political so the so I completely understand the people who say role of ICANN has been kind of clerical and passive and I think that's true but what I would say to that is we have had a multi-stakeholder management of the internet where engineers and developers and network operators and the entrepreneurs who of course have built the internet have been able to operate largely freely in terms of the global internet different countries of course as we know have had a different point of view toward their domestic internet we happen to be speaking on June 4th the Chinese devote enormous amount of resources to closing off their internet people don't know in China many of the history of Tiananmen Square for example that I think is largely because the internet has been apolitical because of the US role in making sure that it has been apolitical so there are hypotheticals that you know I think are at the very least worth discussing that I think are very hard to defend against without the US having the kind of role that it currently has so the alternative to the US role to me is not that all governments get out of a role of the internet instead it's that all governments not just the US government will have some role some greater role they'll join the multi-stakeholders and there are within the rules of ICANN there are ways that governments if they want to can adjust the existing rules to give a majority of countries authority over ICANN and the root zone that I think we would all find highly troubling and what for the first time give countries like China and Russia the opportunity to affect the internet outside their own countries including for those of us in the US used to being able to go to freeukrain.org or remember Tiananmen Square dot org and those are the kinds of issues that I think that I'm concerned about it's a reason I've been writing about this issue and I don't think the Commerce Department or the management of ICANN or anybody else yet has answers to the questions of what if countries certain countries focus on using inherent powers and authority within ICANN and the naming authority to extend censorship and suppress the freedom that we've had on the internet. Got it well that helps us maybe focus the conversation a little bit and I I should say I've studied internet censorship for quite a while in 2000 did the first co-authored the first study of internet censorship in China in particular what websites were blocked and which weren't followed up quickly with Saudi Arabia turns out the thing in common they're like the very first thing you're gonna filter if your authoritarian regime looking to filter something is a Baptist church. Baptist churches have their websites taken off as the first line of attack and I guess I'd like to unpack a little bit more because I found myself doing this as I moved from somebody I think very much holding the kind of views you've just expressed 15 years ago to somebody not seeing this as a problem in fact seeing the most recent move of the Commerce Department getting out of this is a very useful thing to the extent that it matters at all and it is let's unspool the worst-case scenario here you've kind of hinted at it it would be that Russia or China or name your sort of regime that doesn't embrace free speech or the rule of law manages to quash the domain name of a particular website by having taken control of I can but let me I mean that that maybe is what you're suggesting I should let you fill that in a little bit more and then I'll take a crack at explaining from my point of view how plausible or not I think that is and why great so first let's establish that a majority of governments in the world if they could censor the global Internet certainly would we had yes the way they would put it is if they could make it conform to their local law the way that they get to say how cigarettes are labeled even if those are shipped from North Carolina why shouldn't they get to say how the bits are shaped that that you're right would be the argument of many governments of course including our own when it comes to the speech or behavior expressed in bits that our own government doesn't like such as gambling right so we saw a couple of years ago the meeting of the international telecommunications union of both taken 89 to 55 essentially to split the global Internet into one where the majority of those countries would be the beneficiary of a treaty that was created by the ITU at that meeting that in effect legitimized domestic Internet censorship in a way that those countries Russia China Iran many others that you well know and have written about when they looked for the legitimacy for their censorship that UN agency can bring so let's say for argument's sake that the roughly 90 countries in the world that are in favor of that sort of thing roughly 50 around the world that are not so the idea of any kind of majority vote and government control I think we both agree would be trouble so there are scenarios under which the rather ornate maybe even Byzantine rules of ICANN can be manipulated by governments focused on doing that to give first governments much more control over ICANN than they have previously had one of those would be to move from a consensus view among the subgroup within ICANN that is of governments yes I think the word you were looking for on the procedures of ICANN is Baroque they're very Baroque the procedures I'll share why it just it really doesn't concern me in the hierarchy of many many things to be concerned about about the health and openness and freedom of the internet first we should note that ICANN is as much as it it tries to express itself as an international consensus-based etc organization for very understandable purposes it is a California nonprofit it's a 501c3 governed under the laws of the state of California and nobody's talking about changing that I'm sorry to interrupt you that actually is one of the questions that came up in congressional testimony and I think the head of ICANN's answer was he has no plans to shift from California I've spoken to him about it I don't think he does have plans to shift from California but he immediately said but of course I'm not really in charge of ICANN if I try to change kind of coffee being served in the cafeteria I get a lot of pushback from the multi-stakeholder community so yeah yeah yeah absolutely so but I agree with what his testimony appears to have been that there's been no push for that but he is not a dictator it is community oriented which means that it's actually hard to get anything done such as change the coffee in the cafeteria which means a change as drastic as that would probably be quite hard to put through and to put it through would require action by the board it has a board of trustees which is decidedly not governmental there's a governmental advisory committee which was a way of trying to get the governments to have a place because they all had their designated liaisons to the Internet and decided that ICANN was kind of the best manifestation the tangible manifestation of the operating internet that they could find and those liaisons needed a place to confer and thank the kind gentleman from whatever country for that wonderful statement and that's what this advisory committee does but this is just sort of one of two points I wanted to make the first is as a matter of sort of corporate non-profit governance there are already some pretty decent things in place I'd be hard-pressed to think of what more could be in place even hypothetically that prevent any great transformation of ICANN is suddenly coming under the heel of X number of governments that want to control it but there's a second point that maybe is a little more fundamental which is let us suppose that somehow name your bad entity for these purposes government X that really want censorship basically maybe like the FIFA soccer scandal just writes a big check to the ICANN president I should just be clear this is entirely hypothetical this is not suggesting this is happening that says if you'll if you and the rest of the board will buy off the whole board to you and the board will all vote the way like buying off a ref for a soccer game what's the worst they can do and it turns out there the worst they can do through a fairly genius and quiet way of which this is all organized is next to nothing if for example I wanted to make sure that free Tibet org went away if I control ICANN the only way to do that is to threaten the registry that runs dot org that happens to be something called the public interest registry itself a separate non- profit incorporated in the United States it in turn is kind of a wholly owned subsidiary of the internet society on whose board I served and I see Kaled Kuba has put in a comment on our side screen Kaled was a fellow board member of the internet society although he now appears to be in an ITU meeting Kaled if it's a hostage situation just let us know through the chat window but you would have to threaten dot org with being entirely delisted from this file you mentioned called the root file so that when people try to visit any dot org not just free Tibet they couldn't go anywhere that is such a crude tool it would be truly beyond conception of ICANN attempting to use it and even if it did suppose it actually tried to pull the plug and take dot org out of the root zone at that point internet service providers around the world who consult the root zone voluntarily for information about where to find org names if they get back an answer that says I got nothing I forgot where all the dot orgs are they would buy just a special tweak in their own respective files keep happily consulting the public interest registry for the dot orgs it turns out and maybe this is the case in many organizations where if you run the organization you're more aware of your powerlessness than your power it's actually really hard for me to game out in the chess how even Vladimir Putin running ICANN could actually get rid of free Tibet dot org in this kind of censorship sort of way that we're talking about well as as you know there is you the word Baroque I think is quite after this as well there's a Baroque structure of who controls the registries etc I am not saying that it would be a simple matter to make a dramatic shift in the open nature of the internet but it is a conceivable matter and in exchange for what so you know Bill Clinton and during his administration the concept of a multi-stakeholder internet was invented has come out against the transfer citing the enthusiasm of other governments to find ways to undermine the open internet what benefit is there to the internet or to free speech or to some of the American values that have been spread through the internet to countries that don't have them to making this change if it's not broke I don't know why we're trying to fix it yes and in that sense I I have no inside knowledge but I suspect that the sleepy hallways of the Department of Commerce were not expecting their announcement of this planned quote transfer of control or really a lapsing of a cooperative agreement with ICANN to have any of the pushback the reaction that it has had I guess I should know that I remember back in 1998 when all of this was getting started there was a real sensitivity to wait a minute is this just US imperialism is the US still going to be somehow trying to run the internet through ICANN and the proper appropriate answer especially to get it off the ground given that there was potential chaos looming in the Department of Commerce had stepped in with almost zero legal authority in particular to do it had it was trying to kind of heard all the cats along and the answer was look we'll have a we're going to be in the mix to make sure this thing gets up and running and that there's confidence in it it's basically a confidence-building measure and then fly little bird fly you will be a community stakeholder driven organization and I the judgment was okay it's it's ready to fly is in fact not a whole lot the Commerce Department could really do if it were mortified at the way ICANN were conducting its affairs in part because it had very little original authority under any statute done to where does the Department of Commerce get the authority to have regulated at all and the answer I think is nowhere the original framework for creating ICANN was called the white paper it was published in the federal register as a statement of policy it was not even it was not a regulatory thing at all so it was really just to say this is now what's the actual plus all optics it's all optics and in some ways I think you and I are just having a different take on what are the optics that for commerce to announce with a press release that okay you know bird has grown up it's left the nest have fun ICANN I think you were reading that as a signal to the adversaries of a free and open internet that it's open season let the you know hunting begin of this vulnerable ICANN and to me I think it indicates something quite different which is a vote of confidence in ICANN so that some of the alternative schemes of governance that have been tried at times that would bear some of the characteristics that worry you including much more heavy-handed government involvement this is a way of saying to those in the middle trying to figure out which path to take who don't want any government including the US and maybe these days especially the US to have a thumb on the scale to be able to more comfortably support ICANN I think your history of the creation of ICANN and the point of view in 1998 is entirely accurate I think there was sort of an intent over time to find some new governance for it what I would say however is that a lot has changed in the world since 1998 the enormous resources of countries like China and Russia the understanding that authoritarian regimes have of the potential threat to their legitimacy of various parts of the internet social media and others has grown exponentially since then and we have through the ITU and through ICANN itself recently some evidence of the enthusiasm that some of those authoritarian governments have to look for ways to mock up the open internet that we both you know would like to protect so I think you are right that I am quite concerned that when one looks at the importance of closing the internet censoring the internet undermining the open internet to a large number of authoritarian governments around the world including some with very sophisticated technical tools and diplomatic and financial and not can use the word bribery tools but bribery has been known to happen elsewhere that over time those pressures can only grow and can only become more of a danger and I see very little to no benefit to a change in the current system when Congress pushed back after the announcement by the Commerce Department Congress asked for a couple things and asked for a copy of the legal opinion the Commerce Department says that it is done it says that the Commerce Department can give up the authority over ICANN without congressional action for which you realize by the way my view on that is it never had any authority to give up to begin with but anyway go ahead but you know I think just as the US government can't transfer land in the West to somebody without congressional action you know the Constitution is pretty clear that things having to do with commerce have to go through Congress and I think the last time this came up in 2000 by the Commerce Department said it would have to be heavily lawyer to determine and there are as any you know this legislation that's passed the House that says no transfer of ICANN without congressional approval hasn't passed both houses but it's a real issue reflecting concern about the downside potential downside of this shift and I would say more broadly you know less legally more politically if there are so few risks and if there is some benefit to doing this let's have an open debate about it let Congress vote on it that's the way our politics are supposed to work rather than the executive branch unilaterally making a decision that obviously has the potential to affect enormous amount of commerce as we all know the internet represents so if we have an open debate about it if the people who are running ICANN can come up with bulletproof ways to protect the open internet then that will be a different scenario but right now the Commerce Department when it made its announcement tasked ICANN with coming up with some way to keep these bad scenarios from happening the leadership of ICANN is very focused on this I know you're a former trustee I think of the internet society the internet society lists serve on ICANN governance is it reads a little bit like no computer scientists trying to become political theorists it's a little bit like watching political theorists try to try to write code it's very complicated and difficult and I don't know of any institution in the history of the world that has managed to be a multi-stakeholder organization and run the way the internet is run without becoming a multilateral that is government led operational organization that's that I think is my concern which I think is shared widely but I do agree with you that I think you know one of our major points of difference is that I see very little to no benefit of the US giving up this control it's not as if there'll be no government control that might be more appealing it's that there's going to be controlled by a lot of governments many of which have values quite different from ours yes I think it's really a question of how much of this is control and ownership and when we use metaphors of as if giving up federal parkland or something for another purpose that's actual territory that you either own or you kind of don't and when you think of control you think of one of the more florid metaphors was this is like Jimmy Carter giving back the Panama Canal which not to start another conversation that doesn't appear to have gone horribly awry as best I can tell but control over the canal would mean well who gets to say what ships shall pass through it and in this case I don't think we're talking about ownership like of a piece of land you and I both celebrate the unowned nature of the internet and I don't think we're talking about control of the sort that is a blockage that could in turn express censorship the closest we see from at an icon is its implementation of a only in some domains like dot-com and org a global trademark dispute resolution policy if some entity has McDonald's dot-com and it's not McDonald's the hamburger people they can do a summary proceeding and there are all sorts of issues maybe with that but I've seen no movement to extend beyond the dispute over the domain name to a dispute over that to which the domain name points and more and more domain names don't matter nearly as much again as something like the search engine and of course quite properly none of us is talking about how to govern search engines in some common multi-stakeholder way we all get to debate over what the top hit for governance should be and it's not between some multi-stakeholder group or governments that will decide in that case it's one or two private companies and the market share for Google in Europe as we know from the right to forget debate something like 93% and that is that's a canal not run by Panama but run by Google that has far more impact on the world as far as shaping the information people experience then again these sort of very to me implausible situations in which domain names could be affected so I think what sounds maybe to you like naivete on my part oh I think that if the US removes its exceptional role on paper with ICANN it's nuts to think that that vacuum won't be filled by other states I guess by my lights it's not even a vacuum there's not a lot of power being expressed there and the optics of it what otherwise looks like a surrender or a retreat in fact are quite positive and healthy optics to keep the multi-stakeholder model that's what we've got right now up and running and rolling rather than imagining somehow that the governments are going to be able under law or fact come in and do something so I see one person in our comments tree I'm just looking at the most recent one asked what does the summary proceeding process for trademark issues involved as ICANN possess a way to enforce the ruling afterwards or does it delegate to other organizations the quick answer to that and you can look this up Molly it's the uniform dispute resolution process the UDRP and the enforcement happens really at the registry level the entity that runs org or calm will have agreed with ICANN that it will respect the principles of this procedure and then somebody who doesn't like the way a domain name is assigned has to pay some money to fund the proceeding they can do it all over sort of email it doesn't have to show up anywhere and whoever has the domain name assigned who is being challenged has to come back with something or if they fail to that might not look so good and there are a number of dispute resolution providers oddly enough they get to be selected by the plaintiff ish character you can see I'm not that fond of the UDRP in some ways and then if the UDRP results in a win for the challenger the registry can just reassign the name and that takes care of that so it's one of the few areas of internet governance where the judgments can be self enforcing because the dispute is solely over a piece of virtual property rather than say somebody stole my money I want it back now you got to go find the money somewhere it's not in the realm of the digital Gordon I should throw it back over to you you just gave a fantastic answer to you know a fairly detailed question so let me just come back to what is otherwise a narrow question of whether the contract relating to ICANN and the naming authority is property and control and therefore requires congressional action this is not debated by many people you could you go to the rest of YouTube and you probably will not see two people debating this issue no you'll see two cats debating it you very well may the the you are right the federal land analogy is a real property analogy the better analogy is a contract to run traffic control at a government airport to run a souvenir stand at a national park and those have to be delegated authorities from Congress to the executive branch or an agency in order for the executive branch to be able to do that and there's been no such delegated authority I'd say close but not quite in my view and the way to understand my thinking on it is I remember back in 1997 there had been the back in the real sands of time the National Science Foundation wrote checks to smart engineers to experiment with networking and the experiment turned out to be the internet and some would say that jury is still out the experiment is running and the checks were to fund their research and to help the hard costs that kind of thing and as best I can tell the total US government investment through these means in developing the internet is less than yahoo got in its initial IPO back in the late 90s I mean it's kind of very good investment for what we got on a return as a kind of public around the world on this and one of the agreements again run through the National Science Foundation was to fund just the ministerial recording of who had what name in particular in something like dot com back in the day before this happened you didn't have to pay to register dot com you could have as many as you wanted and they were free it was just assumed that nobody would want a whole bunch of them because isn't one enough for you and this is how back in the day you could have journalist Joshua quittner register McDonald's dot com before it even occurred to the multinational hamburger company that they might want it I mean it was a weird time okay so you end up with the company called network solutions that had won the bid to do this ministerial registration paid for by the government they had a genius entrepreneurial idea which was instead of the government really paying us to do it why don't we collect the fees to maintain this database from the users registering the names and the government doesn't have to pay us anything the government said okay great we won't pay you any more money and there was a cooperative agreement for the network solutions to charge $70 for a two-year rental of a name great idea to have it be rented not owned and after that thirty five dollars a year to keep renting this name as if it were something that like they had to hose down every so often or dust off or who knows what I mean most of the money that went to network solutions was to fund the infrastructure to know when to send you the bill and to chase you if you didn't pay it so it was kind of one of these circular things and this was a five-year agreement started in 1992 so the question was as we near the end of 1997 what if the agreement expires and we haven't figured out yet what's going to be the new system and the real wedge that the Commerce Department had to even get into this was on this agreement with network solutions expiring and I was part of those being I wonder what will happen this could be a crisis the Internet could shut down the day after the contract expires but then I realized you know what it is a little bit like municipal garbage collection where step one is your taxes pay for the city garbage truck to come along every week then step two like in some more rural areas there's no city garbage collection your taxes don't pay for that sorry instead you pay directly to the garbage collection firm and in fact network solution said you know what if the contract expires no biggie we'll just keep doing what we're doing gratis which is to say charging people thirty five dollars a year for their names and nothing would have changed in fact if the contract had expired so this gets back to your observation about the nature of the contract to me the thing that I can is doing which is to say entering into arrangements with registries by which the root file will point to those registries to say where dot org answers can be found to questions like where is isaac dot org what they're doing was not something the U.S. government itself ever did is not something that if I were to start doing it tomorrow myself anybody would prevent me from doing and that's why to me it's nothing that requires any sort of real scrutiny by the government to figure out who's allowed to do it the answer is anyone's allowed to do it it just so happens that I can does it and everybody pays attention to them because of the fidelity with which it's been doing its job and the fact that if you listen to I can's answers to the question of where is dot org you'll find the dot org sites you're looking for I predict before we get to the end of this issue whenever that is when the card I can't contract expires in 2015 or as the Commerce Department more recently has said it could be kept going for another four years an hour 2019 and a new president and maybe a different point of view will have to say I do predict that this interesting legal issue will end up getting aired in some detail I the difference between the early innocent days that you I'm sure quite accurately described and today is that I can is now hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue of the contract with I can if we're not good I can is meaningful in an economic way the registries of course are become quite but if I just should say if that contract evaporated tomorrow if some some judge somehow decided that things hadn't been signed properly and in fact the contract was dead letter I can would be worth and have that ridiculously large income flow that it has it would still have it nothing would change because by that contract no meaningful thing is being given to I can and doesn't already have except legitimacy and in 2014 it does turn out as an optical matter legitimacy is now conferred by favoring no government rather than by being perceived as sheltered under the US government for reasons of course we both and everybody watching probably no I think two small points one the contract is worth a lot to I can if I can didn't have it renewed it would be economically significant which would be the legal issue before separation of powers lawyers and whatever court it would end up in I think it's a good it's a real issue and and without getting into the minutiae of Washington politics when I first began reporting on this question I asked the Commerce Department for its legal opinion saying that it had the authority unilaterally to give up the contract and the Commerce Department says they do have such a legal agreement but they haven't shared it Congress has now asked for a Congress is doing its own yes it's a whole new stream of work for lawyers that I know we're all grateful to have to have happened so of course asking the executive branch for its legal opinions no matter how modest the topic is probably right now and always a somewhat sensitive issue absolutely and under our separation of power system it should be but I think this is going to be a good issue to yes the to be resolved and all I would say about government says I think we don't have the choice of the involvement of zero governments if there were a way to have the internet operate with zero government involvement that would be to me quite different I think our choice is either the benign light defensive that is protective stewardship of the U.S. that we've had since the beginning of the Internet or the involvement of all other governments with an outcome that I think is hard to predict except in one way which is the internet will not become more open the pressures will be for it to become more close now I know we should probably wrap up so I can't help but want to end on a separate sort of provocation which is this great stewardship of the government and in particular the U.S. government that I know you're counting upon and rely upon I'm just trying to predict how much of that stewardship you'd like to see in the provision of network services and isn't it good stewardship of the government to have those net neutrality rules that's an excellent provocation Jonathan as you I think you and I are on different sides of but what some call the net neutrality argument which I call the government regulation are see now the government stewardship I'm sorry regulation is terrible absolutely down any you and I are on kind of different sides of this issue I think we probably have more in common in terms of the way we would like the internet to operate I do come back to my first point which is that in the history of the world when governments get involved in something like information and freedom of expression that tends to lead to bad outcomes the United States is of course imperfect but it's been a great steward of the internet so far and you know I come back to the very broke what's not fixed well maybe this can be to be continued and we can pick up on the net neutrality front or one of many other topics of course my meadow kind of thought is to the extent that those listening out there do have energies or curiosity about the future of the internet and wanting to study it I guess my thought and this is indeed where we I think continue to differ is the action is happening generally not anywhere near I can it's happening on issues and debates around that neutrality issues and debates around things like the right to forget which in turn is the thin edge of the wedge about control over the shape of the information we see over the more that we move away from search engines that then present us options and we pick one and more to a Siri like model where we're just being advised by a digital concierge about what we want many subtle ways that that can influence how we understand and perceive the world and nearly all of that is undeniably in private hands right now and it's the kind of thing that I think Gordon may may puzzle or be an interesting challenge for you to work through because it will end up if there is to be a change and if we have worries about it these would be interventions into private firms rather than into this sort of more in co-it internet space I see in our comments stream one of our commenters says this isn't the kind of debate I'm used to it's actually pleasant and I agree with that and I think that's a good reason to consider possibly another chapter and Gordon I just want to thank you for being game to pick this up as we had not intentionally but very different and somewhat dueling columns on this yours in the Wall Street Journal mind in the New Republic but I hope we'll have a chance to take it up on other topics I look forward to it Jonathan it's been a lot of fun thank you okay farewell to those listening and to posterity since I believe this will be archived as well