 Stuart Lynn, ICANN's second CEO, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. My pleasure. As I mentioned, you were the organization's second ICANN CEO following Mike Roberts preceding Paul Toomey. In January 2001, in the board announcement about your appointment, you were quoted as saying, I'm honored to have been chosen for such a unique and challenging position, and I look forward to working with all the members of the internet community around the world to achieve ICANN's technical mission. That's what you said when you were appointed to the position. What did you find when you actually started working at ICANN? That it was a lot tougher than it sounded. Those were good words, and they were words full of intent, and it sort of took a lot of hard work, not just by me, but by a lot of great people, to make it possible for ICANN to achieve its mission. Stuart, you weren't from the ICANN community. Did you have a steep learning curve? I had a very steep learning curve. I had some great teachers, Louis Tutan and Andrew McLaughlin, and of course the board as a whole, so I had some great teachers, but I didn't come from a background that was deeply immersed in ICANN and so forth. I mean, I was a big use of the internet and part of it, but not of ICANN itself. How did you get the job? How did I get the job? Well, I've often wondered that myself, but I was invited to apply, and I suspect that the reason I got the job had a lot to do with Mike Roberts, who was my predecessor as a CEO, but Mike and I had worked together for years in the university, in the academic community. Mike knew me well and knew what kinds of things I'd accomplished, and I think he was very influential in that. I think there was a sense that universities are crazy places with a lot of vociferous people with very different points of view, and that might have been a good training ground for ICANN. To some extent it was, but not as much. When you came in at the beginning of your term, you were there for two years, what did you see as your number one challenge? Well, because my number one challenge when I came in was learning about all the different communities, all the different interests. The whole ICANN ecosystem was something that I knew something of, or parts of it, but I had a lot to learn. But then it became very clear, at least to me, that the biggest challenge was what does it take to make this work, because it appeared to me that it was very fractious at the time, which is not surprising. I mean, it was incredible how far the founding parents of ICANN have made it come in a couple of years before ICANN came on, and the concepts that they put together. But it still appeared to me that it was not working, and that troubled me very much during the first year of my tenure. Stuart, that's interesting. You say it wasn't working. The perception now, many people are unfamiliar with ICANN's earliest stages. You were one of many of the founders of ICANN, the initial people who were there during its early stages, who seemed to express its future wasn't at all guaranteed, and it was very uncertain. Absolutely. I mean, there were enough entities, individuals, the criticisms were, if you look at the early blogs and so forth, the criticisms were loud and continuous. But in spite of that, there were always people, good people, the board of ICANN, not the staff of course, but people out in the community who I think really wanted ICANN to succeed in spite of its dangers, and were willing to put their shoulder to the wheel to help make that happen. I'm talking of people like Vince Cerf, of course, who was chair of the board when I was there, wonderful chair, and people on the board, and outside of the board. And then there was always the question of, if not ICANN, what? If you take ICANN away, how are you going to put Humpty Dumpty together in a way that would really work? I mean, everybody who had a special interest would see their role as being critical and key and the most important, but it was how do you put the communities a whole together? And there was nothing else on the table that I could remember, whether it's any positive proposal of what it should be other than ICANN, except possibly the ITU. In other words, it's easy to see the problems, particularly in those early days, but what's the alternative? Exactly. I mean, the problems were obvious. We were trying to literally put Humpty Dumpty together. We had lots of pieces that were not in sync with each other, and that in a way was the beauty of ICANN as well. It was a place for bringing those pieces together, but it was going to take a lot of hard work over several years to make that happen. Was there a sense on your part or among your colleagues at ICANN at that point, hey, we're trying something that has never been done. We're trying an international organization where governments have a voice, but they don't have final decision making, where it's a bottom up sort of policy development model. Was there that sense that we're trying something brand new? Absolutely. I mean, it was before me, obviously, and even going back to John Postel, there was always that sense, this hadn't been done before. This was needed a different kind of way of looking at things. It wasn't so much that we were going to run the governments. We were always conscious of the fact that we had to be aligned with how governments felt about ICANN, that we couldn't go 90 degrees orthogonal to that, and that's why we had the GAC, and I presume still has the GAC, because it was such an important influence on us. We had to work hard to bring cohesion among all the different groups. One year after your term as CEO began in February of 2002, you posted an open letter to the internet community, and I'd like you to elaborate on a few points that you made in that document. You said, and I quote, ICANN is overburdened with process and at the same time underfunded and understaffed. That was right. We were expected to do an enormous amount, and we had a staff of about 19 people at the time trying to deal with this world of special interests out there, as well as operational issues like the IANA. We expected to do more than could be done with a staff that small. On the other hand, what was drummed into me is, don't expect ICANN to grow, because the community is only interested in keeping it small. Really? Oh, yeah. Why? I suspect they didn't want ICANN to be too powerful, at least at that time. There was the question of funding. There was always the question of funding. We were beggars. We never knew what CCTLDs were willing to contribute. Our sources of funding were always uncertain. ICANN was started off initially with a loan that we then did pay off, but it was always uncertain. Every year, hat in hand, we had to go to the community and beg for the next year. I look at ICANN today. I'm both impressed and amazed about how large it's grown. That was inconceivable at the time I was a CEO. It was on no one's radar. No one's radar. No. Well, maybe I can't answer for everybody, but that was my impression. You also said in this open letter to the community that you had done a year after you had started, and let me quote directly, ICANN in its current form has not become the effective steward of the global internet's naming and address allocation systems as conceived by its founders. Perhaps even more importantly, the passage of time has not increased the confidence that it can meet its original expectations and hopes. That sounds pretty dire. Well, it seemed pretty dire at the time. I don't remember the exact details of what led me to that conclusion, but I do remember that both from discussions within the staff and discussions outside, it was far from clear that ICANN could survive in its present mode of operation. One of the things that I felt needed to be done was to find a way to bring the community into the decision process of what ICANN should be. I put that document out, and of course that document had a lot of internal discussion with the staff and certain members of the board. One of the main purposes was to stir things up, was to get an important dialogue going, because otherwise it was always kind of uncertain about what ICANN should be and what it should do. If it's going to be effective, then ICANN needs some cement between its building blocks that would help it really survive into the future. ICANN has always seemed to have, since its earliest days, always trying to define itself and its relationship with governments generally, the U.S. government specifically. You sort of touched on that point in your letter. You said, ICANN is at a crossroads. The process of relocating functions from the U.S. government to ICANN is stalled. I believe that ICANN's ability to make further progress is blocked by its structural weakness to put it bluntly, on its present course, ICANN cannot accomplish its assigned mission. A new path, a new and reformed structure, is required. What came back at you after you wrote those words? Well it was first discussed with the board, and the board was very, most of the board at least, was very supportive. Certain of the constituencies, as expected, and in fact welcomed, had their own vocal opinions. What was put out was a straw man. It wasn't saying this is what it should be. It was a straw man to say use this as a starting point to discuss and find out what ICANN should be. Some of the organizations took it as a final blueprint, and it was probably a failing on my part that I didn't make it clear that it was a straw man intended to provoke discussion, not a final answer. So you were actually trying to poke people into aggressive and detailed conversation. Just having discussions on blogs or in rooms and private rooms and writing memos wasn't going to do it. It needed to be a very open discussion. And subsequently the board took on the challenge. Alejandro Peasanti did a brilliant job of chairing a board committee to help bring that constituency involvement together and to help define what ICANN should be going forward. So what was the toughest part of your job at that time? The toughest part of course was, I mean there were two toughest parts. The travel was tough. People think of travel as being this great big wonderful thing, but as far as the job was concerned, it was trying to find a path to bring constituencies together and putting the interests of the internet as a whole ahead of parochial interests. What do you mean? Well, you're asking me to go back 18 years. Right. Right. I'm not 18. I guess what I'm asking you is are you saying everybody had a self-interest, but there was not any interest about ICANN itself? It was varied. As I mentioned earlier, some people, I'll call them the royalty of the internet, did have the interest of putting the internet first and accepting that ICANN had an important role to play in that. But there were enough noisemakers who, I don't want to accuse them of not putting the internet first. They had their own view, and they probably should, of what constituted putting the internet first. But that view tended to reflect their own interests more than it did, understanding that there was a much broader set of constituencies out there than just what they saw. It sounds like in doing the background when I was researching for this interview, it sounds like your correspondent, your letter, your open letter, had the desired effect. It sounds like it did. It was successful. It certainly provoked a reaction and some very strong reactions. I think people thought at the time that maybe I didn't want those strong reactions. In fact, there were exactly what was wanted because it created discussions that need to be aired in order to create a path going forward. Let's go there for just a minute. Talk to me about the so-called program of reform that followed your letter. I don't care about the exact details, but where did that want to take the organization? Well, it wanted to take the organization to where it had a firm foundation moving forward. The details of what happened, some of the recommendations, I think, or statements in the straw document were adopted. I mean, I know I personally felt that there needs to be a clearer role for the CCTLDs, which were part of that time, what's now the GNSO and the CCTLD, SO were part of a single organization, and its input was largely dominated by the generic domain registers. I felt strongly that the CCNSO, it was more than a strawman, needed to have its own voice independently, get access to the board with its own recommendations, because their needs and their role in relation to ICANN was very different than that of the generic domain name. And after that point, that had not been a consideration? No. No. Well, whether it was considered, I don't know. It wasn't implemented in fact. In fact, the concept came up right out here in this patio. I invited some of the CCTLD folks out here, Teresa Swinehart came out, and we had some free-ranging discussions about what should it look like and help put it together. And that was its birth. That was its birth, yes. So that, and there was a serious question as well as what should be the future of the at-large community. Carl Bildt, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, had kindly chaired a committee to make recommendations as to how the rest of the internet community, the users and everyone out there, should be involved and came up with some recommendations. And there were serious questions about how should we construct voting constituencies, that can elect at-large members to be part of ICANN, and it was an impossible problem. And so we made some recommendations of putting an advisory committee together instead of an SO, and that was one of the things that came out as well. There was felt a need to have routes into ICANN and into the board for individuals or groups who felt they hadn't been heard. We put forward this Ombudsman program as well to help make that happen. So that was the beginning of ICANN's Ombudsman program? I believe so. Yes, it was, as I recall. Stuart, in your case for reform, you called for, and it's quite surprised me, you called for more direct governmental involvement with a third of ICANN board members named by the GAC or governments. That kind of surprised me when I read that. That surprised me that I said that. I think what was in my mind going back was, again, I want to provoke, there needed to be a clearer understanding of what the role of governments was going to be, or should be, going forward. And I think I felt, and Louis and some of the rest of us felt, the best way to get that answered was to put something extreme out there and let the chips fall, let it sort itself out. It sounds like a lot of what you were involved with was trying to prompt, aggress a conversation, idea, push things along. Get them in the open, get them discussed. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to back off entirely. The straw man was put together with some sense of things that needed to be at least examined and maybe even happened. But it wasn't intended to be a final document and a final answer. What was the most rewarding part of your term? Oh, working with some fantastic people. I mean, it was so good to work with people from all around the world and staff who were dedicated to making not just ICANN work but making the internet work the way it should. I mean, it sounds pretty idealistic. Well, it was. I mean, you had so many communities involved from the technical side, to the business side, to the government side, to the user side, so many stakeholders. But what was so rewarding was seeing this kind of passionate interest in the internet and it being successful. Yeah, I mean, some, and rightly so, had financial interests involved. Well, good. That's part of the way it works. We need that. We're users, we're technical people who put their life into designing the underpinnings of the internet and making sure that we're wanting an open internet that was going to be available to the community as a whole. So that was the most rewarding experience and it's just seeing so many people working with so many people who are absolutely dedicated to the future of the internet. Was there ever a time during your term when you thought this thing, this ICANN experiment, it's not going to work? Because of the kinds of people I just mentioned, I never thought it was not going to work. I always thought it had a very difficult road. And I thought the notion, I don't know if I have a voice for this, but I felt at the time that the notion of the ultimate control moving from the US government to ICANN in the community as a whole was going to take a lot longer than I think people were hoping. And in fact, if I were to be quite honest, in those early days, there was some benefit to the US government having the role that it did, it sort of protected ICANN from some things that could have happened that should not have happened. The model of ICANN, this Ira Magaziner who was the... Right. In a sense, when I interviewed him, I said, in a sense, you could be considered the way Vend is considered the father of the internet, you might well be considered the father of ICANN. Sounds like you agree. Absolutely. Yeah. It was one of the good things to come out of that administration. And with due credit to the Bush administration, well, not just the administration, but the Senate and the Congress, there were always senators and congressmen who liked to posture, and a good way to posture was to attack ICANN, but the reality was that no one wanted ICANN to fail in the US government. I don't say no one, but no one we came in contact with. Was there a viable threat from the UN generally, ITU? It was always viable because in the end, if the governments got together and the US government agreed, they could have taken over responsibility. I used to ask, how could you give responsibility to the internet to an organization that can't put a delete button on a telephone? So I have to redial the whole number if I make a mistake. They were a very capable organization. They did good work and so forth, but I never felt, and I don't think anyone intimately involved with the internet really felt that they were right for this kind of emerging internet the way it was rather than the kind of almost top down nature of the telephone community. I'm interested in your personal feeling. Do you feel like you helped build and create something that had never been seen before, something that was totally unique, that to a large degree helped shape the future of the internet? Or was this just a two-year gig for you? It was not a two-year gig for me. There were a lot better two-year gigs I could have chosen. There were far less demanding and strenuous and less strain on my health. No, I really hoped I could do something useful within the community to help catalyze change that was needed. And I'll leave it to others, to judges, to whether I achieve that. But let me make it perfectly clear, nothing that gets done in ICANN or anywhere is because the CEO of ICANN wants it to happen. It takes a village to build ICANN and to make its role to help fulfill its role. Let's deal with that for a second. That's an important point in most traditional organizations. The CEO is the final word, not in ICANN. Not in ICANN, no, not at all. And of course, the board plays a very strong role and the community plays a huge role. ICANN is not a typical top-down organization. I remember Vint and I had a meeting with the then Secretary of Commerce under President Bush, and I don't remember his name. And it was clear he came from a business background, he was very successful, he was a very capable individual. It was clear he didn't understand the internet and why it was something very different than organizations that he had been involved with before. It was not a top-down organization. He did make one comment that I think he was right, and I remember at the time he said, you know, you're too small to accomplish anything useful. And you need to be much larger to make an imprint, to make a difference. Which flies in the face of the conventional wisdom you laid out earlier that was being put on us at the time. But he was right, and I think one of the good things is to see that ICANN has grown to where it can be effective in the way that it was originally conceived to be. You said you'll leave it up to others to judge what you accomplished. Sure. I'm going to throw that back at you and ask you to give me a self-appraisal. Do you feel good about what you were able to accomplish during that two-year stint? I do. When I came in, I had already retired for the second time, and I was very surprised that I was even pulled back into the saddle. But one of the things that went through my mind is that you're old enough, you're in a position, your career doesn't matter. You can just do whatever you think is right, help make things happen. And if it works, fine. If the community thinks it works fine, if they don't, hey, I've got a nice place to retire to, so no big deal. So when I left, I felt that I had accomplished something useful, mostly about the change in ICANN. There are other things that went on all the way through besides this big revolutionary organization. And in two years, I felt I accomplished what I could accomplish. When you left as CEO and Paul Toomey was coming in as your successor, did you give him any special advice or counsel? I don't remember. You should ask him that. What I do remember is I was so happy that Paul was my successor. Paul had chaired the GAC during my term. He did it brilliantly. I felt that ICANN needed someone had more experience and understanding of governments than I did in order to move forward to the next step. And I was so happy to see Paul come in and take over. And he did a great job. I may have been the catalyst in the reorganization of ICANN. He was among many other things the catalyst in developing a funding model for ICANN that enabled it to grow to accomplish its objectives. Is it overly simplistic to ask you for your single best memory of your term in that two-year period? Uh-oh. This may be different than you expect. It's where I was on 9-11. ICANN had held a meeting in Montevideo in Uruguay on the 10th of September was the board meeting. That evening, Teresa Swinart and I were flying to Santiago in Chile and to meet with the Nick there, Patricio Poblete and his associates. And we flew the flight. I think it was the rugby team, the Uruguayan rugby team had flown that ended up stranded in the Andes. So, some trepidation. So, on the flight over, I had a tooth fallout or a cap of a tooth fallout, maybe the altitude. So when we landed, I asked Patricio, I said, is there a dentist that you recommend around here? So, he said, sure, we'll go in the morning. So in the morning we went to this dentist that he recommended. And I was sitting in the chair and his cell phone rang. And he's talking apparently to his wife, and she was saying what was happening on 9-11. He started telling me. I said, how did my chair. And his wife kept ringing for the next half hour, updating him. And I was going, nuts, not knowing. It turned out that he and his wife had been scheduled to fly to New York that evening and we're scheduled to have dinner in the World Trade Center, the restaurant at the top. Of course they, but I was going nuts, so that we were stranded in Chile in Santiago for the next week, which is a lovely place to be stranded. Because our traffic had been suspended. Suspended, yes. And I remember the newspapers made hay out of the fact that I was there and they called, they talked about El Jefe del Internet, the head of the internet. I said, come on, there's no head of the internet. So that's my most vivid memory. But since you mentioned 9-11, Becky Burr, who is a current ICANN board member, said, and you and I had talked about this prior to the cameras rolling, Becky Burr had said that 9-11 marked a major change in the relationship of ICANN and the US government. When we were talking about this earlier, you said, you felt there was almost a bigger change between administrations, US presidential administrations. Well, there was change, but I think the change, well, there were probably two changes. I mean, one was the change working with a different administration, although a number of the staff were still the same. And I mentioned the Secretary of Commerce meeting, for example. I don't think that would have gone the same way with the previous administration. But maybe the security focus certainly changed. There was a lot of emphasis on when you're gonna implement DNS second, getting involved with Homeland Security and their understandable concern about security. But I will put the change more overall, I think, to the change of administration. Okay. Stuart Lynn, ICANN's second CEO from 2001 to 2003. Thank you again for taking the time to talk to me. My pleasure. Thank you for coming out.