 So, I've been involved with ICANN for, depending on how you look at it, prehistoric times would be 18 years, and I've been waiting all this time to get a chance to interview you, Chuck Combs. So, here are my ICANN dreams come true. I'm not really interviewing you, we're just talking, but what's the earliest mention you remember of this concept? The concept of ICANN? Yeah. Or the concept of, you know, domain name system. So, concept of ICANN, of course, came about after several years of discussions about the domain name system, because I was with Network Solutions, and we of course were the only registry and registrar at the time, you know that very well, and so I had gotten involved with the domain policy list, which Network Solutions hosted, and we were on it. Was on that list for a couple years probably, and that's how I was introduced to people, and I was the only one at the time from Network Solutions that participated in that list. Yes, we used to refer to you as a sacrificial lamb. Yeah, well, and I participated, I tried to avoid the emotional stuff, there was a lot of it as you know, and if I saw something that was inaccurate I tried to set it straight, but I was able to get to know people on the list, and then came about the green paper that you're familiar with, the beginning of 1998. The Ira Magazine and the Clinton Administration green paper. And that was followed with the white paper in mid that year, and so then the community came up with the internet forum for the white paper, and so I attended all those meetings. Were you at those meetings? No, those meetings were, you know, in those days we were still, you know, two cows in the middle of the dot-com boom, and I was busy with our shareware site and Ross, you know, Ross Rader who you know so well. I know well. You know, he was going to all of those meetings. So I went to all four of the internet forum for the white papers. One started in, the first one was in Reston, Virginia, and then in Geneva, and then in Singapore, and then they added one after the fact because Latin America wanted to have one. Oh, so you're now, so you were all before Santiago and Yokohama then when you were talking. Oh, this is before ICANN was formed. So this is, so then what's happening in parallel, you know, we were at the time, two cows lived inside of the largest independent ISP in Canada, and we were the largest web hosting company at the time, and therefore the largest seller of domain names, you know, network solutions, largest reseller. Ironically, our rep at the time was Richard Tindall, who's still around. Yes. You'd remember when Richard was. I know Richard what? Yeah, Richard's at Donuts, and you know, we were very involved in the early core stuff, if you remember that. I do. You know, we were all so frustrated with, you know, with only being able to sell, you know, com, net, and org, and having to fax documents back and forth to register and renew that, which I mean, you know, stop and think about that, by the way. Think of how archaic we were. Oh. It's like, you know, it's like we were all communicating in Morse code or something. And we were at the time looking to introduce those new names into the root, those seven new names, some of which came up, but what's most amazing about that period is how many people that are still here today, you know, I first met them, you know, it's Paul Stahura, and it's Hal Lobson, and it's Ken Stubbs, and it's Verner Straub, and on and on, there's a bunch that Anthony Vancouver-ing, there's a bunch I'm leaving out there that, you know, we would first meet at those core meetings. Do you, in any way, you guys would have stayed away from those, I would. We weren't involved in any of the core meetings. We were aware of what was going on. But we weren't involved in the core meetings themselves. Where I started meeting some of the people was at the Internet Forum for the White Paper meetings that led to the formation of ICANN at the end of 1998. So I met quite a few people, first of all, on that list, and then at those meetings in person, which was great, because we'd been interacting for a couple years, and to meet them in person was very useful. Yeah, you know, I think that highlights one of the unique elements of this process, where there are a lot of contentious issues, but because we are, you know, sort of all kind of in this little bubble for, you know, a week or so, three or four times a year, I think it really did facilitate a lot of things getting done. It did, and it was kind of interesting in those four meetings how it evolved. The country code, top of all the main representatives, were also very involved. Now at the time, very few country codes were much active. I mean, DE was, UK was kind of just starting out.ca in Canada, where I'm from, I mean, was irrelevant. It was incredibly hard to register names, as it was in most of the country codes at that time. And of course, .US wasn't. Didn't exist. Well, it existed, but it wasn't very much activity. So, the first meeting in Reston was kind of an introductory. Yeah, and you guys were hosting that meeting in Reston? No, we didn't host it. Yeah, obviously it was close to where network solutions was located, because we were in Herndon, which is right next door. And we didn't host it, but we participated. And then the Geneva meeting got a little more lively. And the CCs really wanted to have an active role, and so forth. When we got to Singapore, and all three of those meetings occurred in July of 98, when we got to Singapore. All three meetings were within the same month. Yeah, and we got to Singapore, and there was, started to be some gelling in terms of talking together and working together. Some of the early stages of people that have different interests coming together and talking. Well, I want to tease out of that. I mean, it's very interesting that right there, you had this very, very early attempt at globalization. And there's this neat, I don't want to date the filming too much, but here we are just at the end of the IANA transition. And there, at the very beginning, you had in Ira Magazine's green paper and white paper, this delicate balance between US birth and control and the recognition that it needed to be light touch and eventually global. So there you had, nothing's going to happen. We're going to have three meetings. They'll be in three different places around the world within a month. That's quite remarkable. It is. And then the Latin Americans just requested a meeting. And so one was then scheduled for Buenos Aires and Cabase, ISP in Argentina, hosted it. And then you're talking about globalization. That's the first meeting I attended where we had simultaneous translations. So in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. And that was my first experience at that. Of course, it's common at ICANN meetings and has been for years. But that was the first occurrence of that. Yeah. And again, just to sort of pull trivia out in the first meetings in the US, which I think were in 2000, that was the first ICANN meeting that. There was actually one in November of 1998 in Cambridge. A one-day meeting. They don't count that as one of the ICANN meetings. But this is after. No, you don't get the badge for that one. That's correct. It doesn't count. OK. But that was a one-day meeting in Cambridge that I attended. And that was after the first ICANN board was formed and Esther Dyson. Yeah. And Esther was the chair. And so that's probably where in those early US meetings and then globally, it was the Berkman Center that was doing the translation. And we had a young translator, Wendy Seltzer, who I remember. I mean, that's where I first met Wendy. And when they're still involved. No, exactly. That's why it's sort of fun to tease that stuff out. So now those things were happening in parallel. And it always felt like they were parallel processes. We were doing this stuff with core and trying to introduce new TLDs. And we would see that parallel process in some way. We would keep touch with it. But as a way to kind of stop us from doing what we were doing. And of course, it's never quite as nefarious as it feels in those days. So then now it formed. And what do you remember of those very, very early meetings? Well, the Singapore meeting was for the first official meeting for ICANN. And one of the things that was unique about Singapore was all the people from that part of the world were much more cautious about antagonistic conversations. Those of us in the West, we could debate and so forth. That was not as comfortable for them. When we got to Berlin, which was the second meeting, that was quite a contentious meeting. Well, I mean, you started, if I recall, that was the first meeting where you saw very early kind of what I would call US-EU tensions. And they'd really manifest through the CCs. It did. One of the things that we don't remember, much like with the history of the GAC and government's role with ICANN, the CCs in the very early days were completely resistant. You remember that they would come, but they wouldn't. It was a big thing when any country code would enter into even a light touch agreement with ICANN. Now that's pretty du regur for there to be some contractual relationship or a much deeper touch. And CCs are obviously deeply integrated, but back then, boy, that was... Deeply integrated, but not in a contractual sense. Well, there are some contractual touches. A few, pretty light compared to GTLDs. It's a different... And it comes down to their strong position and their sovereign entities and representing their government and their region and so forth. Which was really this manifestation of the balance between national and global, where you have the GTLDs and they truly are global in nature. And that leads to all of the difficulties in the IANA transition, because people really have a hard time with that concept of global. Whose law do you follow? Because it is global and the CCs, it's quite different in that regard. But it wasn't free of tension because you had a lot of country codes, especially in those days, that really operated almost outside of their national governments. I remember there were some very early battles inside of ICANN, where you had a guy who'd been doing it for years and country, which wanted something very, very different. There were quite a few of those. And in those early meetings as well, one of the things that I remember very clearly was how outside of the process governments were. Other than the ITU, which would shake their fists at us all the time. And they really became more visible a few years down the road. But yeah, there was very little government involvement. And then of course the concept of the government advisory committee came in, and that got started. And I think was Paul Toomey the first head of the GAC? He may have been. I'm trying to remember. I feel like there's one other name that's bouncing around my head, but Paul was obviously involved back then. And you see somebody like Christopher Wilkinson. He was very active from the EU at that time. And Christopher is still working with us on the transition and accountability issues that are going on. Yeah, so I mean one of the things that I remember really clearly from those early meetings was how outside the process the GAC was, there would be these meetings in a separate wing of the building and they'd be closed. And if you happen to walk into those meetings, you know, boy, it was like you'd walked into like a private board session or something. And be chased out. And be chased out very quickly, yes, exactly. But and do you recall really the ICANN board, the first board, had some strong discussions about how open they should be. There were many that were very uncomfortable doing business in front of an audience. And I mean think about where we are now. And they've just announced that they're even going to be more transparent as a board. And of course, that's evolved over time. They become much more transparent with at least the public meetings and the in-person meetings. Yeah, you mentioned transparency and that's been one of the things inside this process that has always bothered me in that, you know, I think it's right that people call for more transparency, of course, and more accountability. But I've always felt that ICANN was really held to a standard that's different, you know, you and I both work for public companies. And, you know, could you imagine if as public companies we had to be anywhere near as transparent as, you know, ICANN and its processes? Oh, it's very different world. And of course, we're dealing with laws in the U.S. and you in Canada with regard to securities and exchange commission and so forth that restrict it for public companies. But yeah, what a contrast with what ICANN has to do. It's very different than in the corporate world. Yeah, my takeaway from that is, you know, I don't think that there's enough appreciation for, you know, people will talk about more transparency. You know, I think we should and we should always keep raising the bar. But I think, you know, this really does in many ways serve as a model for other organizations. You know, it's something that I've always thought was very positive. And so, you know, back to those early meetings, you know, we had the CCs in their strange and evolving roles and, you know, we had the governments in their stranger evolving roles. And, you know, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't call out that, you know, we're really, really just now, today, 18 years later, 16 maybe if you think about the first formal government presence at those meetings, where we're seeing both governments and law enforcement formally, actively involved in policy development, which is a really cool development. In fact, just this week, the GAC involvement in the working group that I'm chairing has been just really pleasing to see. Oh, that's RDS? Yes. Well, I would say the same thing around privacy and proxy. You know, so I think it's really, really fun to watch the whole thing evolve. And what people forget really is how young multi-stakeholders a process is. People, you know, people will point out other processes that, you know, they'll say, oh, no, you know, here are these others like the IETF, for example, or a few others. But I've always been of a view, Chuck. You know, I wonder if you've thought much about this, that, you know, this is unique in that it's not monoculture. You know, I think it would be one thing if we were all a bunch of engineers or all a bunch of lawyers or all a bunch of government people or all a bunch of business people. But when you kind of mix those very, very different cultures and you layer on top of that completely different dimension people from all over the world in each of those different cultures. And all coming from different jurisdictions with different laws. You mentioned culture, the variances in culture, the differences in language. Oh, yeah. And people get frustrated with why things are kind of slow in the multi-stakeholder model, and yet you're combining all of these different elements. And it's important to recognize the complexity there and to deal with that in our process. Well, I think that there's something there that will be part of refinement over the next five or 10 years. And I think that we've been, you know, we're towards the end of an 18-year process in figuring out how to take all the inputs and, you know, turn them into a cake at the end. And it does take a long time. And you know, now I think we're going to have to figure out how to do that more efficiently and effectively. We do. And we're still going to deal with very complex issues that will be challenging. The RDS is one of those, you know, the history with who is. And I'm cautiously optimistic that we'll make some progress there. Now, you know, in the early days, you know, I referred earlier to you on the list as having to be, you know, a pincushion. You were this really nice guy who was putting a face on an organization and a lot of us struggled with. Do you remember the first time you had to deal with registrars like that? You know, now we come up with, you know, we split the baby and we take the registry and we create registrars out of whole cloth. I was right in the forefront of that because I was tasked with developing the firewall between the network solutions registry and the network solutions registrar. And I think we did a very good job of that. But of course, as would be expected, there was huge mistrust that we were favoring network solutions over the testbed registrars and then other registrars you came in shortly after that as two cows. And but, you know, that's another thing that we've come a long ways. I mean, we highly respect the registrar model and it's been very effective. And so there's a couple of interesting pieces there because I've always described the registrar model as being kind of artificial. So what I mean by that is that the natural place for competition was at the top level. And I do believe that if we would have had a world where in 98, 99, 2000, we would have had a competition at the top level. We'd have, you know, we'd have a very different picture today. My guess, you know, yours would be better than mine, that at the time of the split, Com was probably about 7 million names, 10 million names. Well, you know, I can't remember. I can remember back when we started charging for domain names back in, and that was September 1995. There were only 135,000 names in Com, Net, and Orr. Now, we didn't hit a million names in all three of those TLDs until the end of 96, I think. So probably somewhere in that 6, 7, 10. Because it did accelerate. And so, you know, I say registrars as regulatory arbitrage because it was kind of an artificial distinction. And what's interesting is what fell out of that. You know, we kind of invented the wholesale model of domain registration. If you remember all the testbed people, you know, they came out and they were selling retail just like network solutions. And we did that for a very simple reason. You know, we were an ISP. We were selling by far the most domain names in Canada. And, you know, we just felt that ISPs were the ones that sold domain names. And so all we tried to do was create a platform that made it easy for... Let me ask you a question. Were you the first, was Toukels the first? It kind of seems like they were in my mind, but you would know at first hand to actually do the reseller model. Yeah, oh yeah. And we did it, you know, it was ironic. We actually launched in org because what we were doing at the beginning was we believed that, you know, registrars didn't sell domain names, that ISPs did for registries at the time where there were no registrars. And we had this, you know, the software libraries, a huge valuation. We had mirrors all over the world. So we just wanted to make it easy for our mirrors who were all ISPs to register domain names and make a couple bucks along the way. Lucky for us, you know, dot-com boom busted just as this took off. So, you know, we jumped from one iceberg to another safely. But there's another bit in that that still has resonance into the GNSO today, which is in those days, we were in the, still in the early days of internet access, you know, at the time that ICANN started, overwhelmingly most people had dial-up access, not broadband. And the implication there is there was no web hosting industry. It was only ISPs. It was only with the advent of broadband where kind of cable companies and phone companies pushed all the independence out that a lot of those independent ISPs just jumped over to the other side of the pipe and became web hosting companies. And then you sell the web hosting industry, you know, so in the early days it was, you know, we used to say ISPs. Then we would say ISPs and web hosting companies. Then it was really web hosting companies. And what's interesting there is at a GNSO level, you know, you had the ISPC, which was really what would today, if we had started it today, be the reseller constituency. Because that was the reason those guys were in the room. You know, that kind of, that reason evolved to, well, they run networks. But, you know, that could be, you know, you could look at that in a few other places in the organization. And the other kind of early irony in the GNSO is the IPC. You know, it was a single-purpose organization to get the UDRP in, which was hugely successful. I mean, you'd remember Working Group C and all of that stuff. Yeah, and of course the UDRP way. I think it was the first policy that was adopted after ICANN was formed. And of course, you know, we're just now getting ready to review it for the first time. Yeah, you know, I mean, there's so much, I mean, what I take away from that, there's anachronisms in the GNSO process and structure that resonate today, just like you have something like the Electoral College in the United States, which exists because, you know, people had to ride on horse to carry results from place to place. And, you know, it's very hard to go back and kind of undo a bunch of those things. You know, I don't know that we ever will, but you have today, you know, that world has evolved so much that you have people today that simultaneously sit in four and five different constituencies. Yes. Legitimately. Yeah, you know. They do. And of course, that expanded with the introduction of new GTLDs. Oh, yeah. Greatly changed the landscape. The registry stakeholder group that I'm a part of is now made up of a lot of registries that are also registrars. And of course, that was prevented going back to network solutions because of the conflict of interest there. So we started one place and have come back to that place. Well, and I think you also are very happy that you're not a registrar today and are just. We are. But at the same time, we have great respect for our registrar customers. Oh, I know. You've always treated us with respect. Do you have a closing thought for us? Well, you know, I'm really happy where we're at. And especially like you and I have talked, we've come. For more, when you look at where we've come from, there's been tremendous progress. Now, we have a long ways to go, but I'm really happy that where we're at and how we got here and to see how, with all of our differences, when we've been able to make this progress, that's quite a statement. Well, I think I'd close with the fact that I really spent my whole I can time just wishing my hair was as good as yours. Thanks a lot, Chuck. Thank you.