 Esther Dyson, ICANN's first board chair from 1998 to 2000. Esther, what were the biggest challenges you've faced in those early years? Well, the biggest challenges were kind of everything. First of all, we were created with this immaculate conception behind which were the Europeans and the Americans, but in theory we were this upswelling of the internet community. Immaculate conception, I don't quite know what you mean. Yeah, well, the idea was nobody was supposed to be the hand that made it happen, it was supposed to be the will of the internet community. So it was honestly a polite fiction and everybody knew that, some people grumbled about it, some didn't, but in theory there was no one to look to. In practice it would have been John Postel who had previously run the IANA function and all the stuff that became ICANN, but he died completely unmisterously and unfortunately of complications after heart surgery. So instead of the guy widely considered sort of the saint of the internet, I mean, he was a real guy and irascible like all of them, but there was this Saint John, the thing was actually, if you like, instantiated by a lawyer called Joe Sims who I hope you also talked to who, I'm very, very fond of him, but he was sort of the wrong person for this job. He was a corporate litigator if you'd successfully sued Coca-Cola and stuff like that, but not exactly your spirit of the internet guy. So let's jump back to Postel for a second. So did his kind of sudden and unexpected death reshape ICANN cause problems? Yeah, it certainly did. It reduced the legitimacy we had in the eyes of the quote internet community. Put it this way, Joe Sims wasn't a puppeteer, but at the same time he was writing the legal documents that instantiated this basic idea that there should be an internet coalition of all parties that would set up a regulatory body, whether the rules would have been much different, certainly the sense of who was doing it was completely different, and Joe was a lawyer. So it sounds like, Esther, you're challenging the very concept of an internet community. Yes, I am. I mean, the community definitely exists, but it's not actively engaged the way, on the one hand, corporations or registries and registrars and lawyers. It's the usual problem with democracy in whatever form. It's kind of messy. It's messy, but more than that, the special interests are at the table because they're representing special interests and they're paid to do that. The general public interest, nobody is being paid by the public to represent the public interest, and it's a problem we have in democracy writ large as well. The special interests always spend more time in Congress or in the Russian Duma or wherever you want than sort of your average person whose job is living their life so they don't have time and they don't have money to go to these meetings and speak. So there's always going to be some kind of intermediary body which may or may not actually represent their interests. And in our case, we had some of the so-called at-large were being paid by network solutions. You touched on a point I want to follow up on, Esther. In 2002, you told a publication at Wharton Business School, we had engineers who thought ICANN was a plot to give certain companies control of the Internet. U.S. congressmen figuring it was a plot to give foreigners control. Public interest people... Dirty foreigners, dirty foreigners. Excuse me. Public interest people saying it should be run by a group of wise men and people from Latin America and Africa who just assumed they would be left out again. Now, you said that, you gave Wharton that quote about four years after the formation of ICANN. Upon reflection all these years later, is it still an accurate perception? Well, I mean now a lot of time has changed, but at the time, yes, everybody thought it was a plot by somebody else to rest control from their hands. In a sense, the genius of the U.S. government was to create something that was sort of to protect this vacuum of power by giving ICANN very little power. The great thing about it was the less it did, the better it was. He who governs least governs best. The challenge is, of course, everybody wanted to come into the vacuum and fill it with their own particular interests. So how did you handle that, that very point right there? We tried to do very little, but at the same time we did have, our first big mission other than setting ourselves up was to break the network solutions monopoly and create a broader community of registries and registrars. And then there was the second, not so much a monopoly, but an artificial constraint, which was how many TLDs there were. And that's where ultimately I changed my mind from, there should be a free market as many as you want, but the reality is that reduces, it just creates a mess. Then you might as well not have TLDs, and that's something, of course, we're facing right now. The creation of a few more so that .com, .com was sort of the commercial monopoly. That was probably a good idea. But in the end, the problem is not the shortage of domain names, it's the shortage of space in people's minds. So you can cut the space up into ever smaller, smaller little chunks and create a sort of protection racket, you're not really solving the problem of how do people find a particular thing on the Internet. And the reality is the more stuff there is, the less useful the domain name system is anyway. And you can look at the numbers, most people go to a website by typing in its name, they don't type in the domain name, and then Google figures nine out of ten people want ICANN.org, not ICANN.info or .biz, and if you want something different, your browser remembers that the last time you typed this thing in you did not take the first choice, you took the 14th choice, so that in a sense the more domain names there are, the more powerful Google and the other search engines become. Let's jump back to those early days. Given what a weird duck ICANN was, given how unusual it was, you talked about the various voices that wanted to be heard. I'm still curious as to how you, who are basically in charge of this, how you maneuvered this, how you made this work. So first of all, I wasn't in charge. Mike Roberts was more in charge because that was his day job. On the other end, you'll talk to him and he'll tell you, I wasn't in charge either. I guess nobody was, but the board was, it was presiding whether or not it was in charge and it was trying to, we were trying to create community, we were trying to create buy-in and legitimacy. How difficult was that? Well that was very difficult because the USG not wanting to be too visible or too controlling, we had a very limited budget. I don't remember the numbers but it was very limited and we spent a lot of money on lawyers and got some pro bono fighting network solutions. You can be open in the sense of people can ask you questions and still be very closed in the sense of it takes a lot of money or effort to be there to ask those questions. There's a sort of, there's passive openness which is you don't try to be secret and then there's active openness which is you actively tell people what's going on and this is the one thing where I would say probably there was ironically one of the biggest fights that was emblematic of a lot of other stuff and here I had fierce disagreement with Joe Sims. Our board meetings were closed. And you basically thought that the board meetings should not be closed? Yeah, I thought they should be open because believe me, we weren't going to be able to do anything secret anyway and it was just a question of creating trust and hey, the internet culture is based on transparency. It was crazy and one of our Dutch director said well if you close the meetings we'll just make all the decisions at dinner the night before and unfortunately he said it in public and though it was in a sense true there's a difference between being telling the truth versus telling the lie and being really undiplomatic in what you say. Sure. People do talk outside of board meetings they should but to the extent you deliberate again, nothing's perfect but you should have the fundamental policy of we hold our discussions and we set policy within the board meeting and we do that in the open so that people can see the disagreements and can see the decisions we arrived at so that was really unfortunate. Because ICANN was such an unusual organization and there was unprecedented in a kind of way what was the greatest challenge in trying to build this organization? Well again, the challenges were multiple but let me take you back a little bit. The board was selected with the exception of June Merai to be people who were not active in this broad community. They weren't registries, registrars, they were not supposed to be people who had been part of some partisan discussion beforehand and so I was part of the internet community but I wasn't a partisan. Most of the rest of them really were not internet people at all, they didn't use the internet. Trying to get a board that people felt knew something was one challenge, the whole thing with network solutions was another challenge because they were trying to just delegitimize us totally. We were short of budget, the guy who represented the internet, John Pastel had died. When you list the problems like that it sounds like it almost was against all odds that ICANN succeeded. No, it was against a bunch of odds but at the same time it was clear that something like that needed to exist and I think everybody felt well let's not destroy it, let's maybe try and pull it in our direction but yeah, this thing is needed because there's got to be some place where you can go to resolve disputes, there's got to be some place to set policy and if we want more TLDs there needs to be an organization that will do it. So that need was widely recognized. The need was widely recognized. It started out as this little server with a bunch of names on it and suddenly it was this big piece of infrastructure as if you went imagine you're on the moon and you have a little air conditioner and then you build out the territory and suddenly you have hundreds of buildings you kind of want to protect that air conditioner and as it grows make sure that there was somebody in charge of it that was broadly trusted and that would do the sensible thing. You might still have the desire for it to air condition your part of the territory better than the other guys or you might have some preference for temperature but in the end you want something that you can go to that is managing this resource on behalf of everybody. I actually like that metaphor I just thought of it. Let me ask you something that you just said you said that many people on the board were not of a technical background. When ICANN is basically in an oversimplified sense a technical coordination body how problematic was that? The lack of tech specific knowledge wasn't the problem it was the lack sort of the net how does the internet work where is it heading how do people use it and let's face it if you're talking to a bunch of people who write code and use email and you have your emails printed out for you it's not helpful. Within the board itself you were the board chair was it difficult to bring the board to a point of consensus on any particular matter? I'm curious as to what it was like in those early days for you in your function as chair? So again to set the context it's a joke but it's true I was the only one who volunteered everybody else was busy because they were in fact doing something else I was writing a newsletter and had a conference about the internet so for me this was like yeah this could be my day job so I was ready to jump in not to work full time it was completely relevant to what I cared about so I became the chairman but I didn't have any particular gravitas versus the rest of them but it was, I mean they were all well meaning it was a hunts was a little more stubborn but fundamentally it was more a consensus than a voting board Was it satisfying? It was intensely interesting extremely frustrating the whole thing with the at large not really functioning very well was really disappointing because I really do feel that the users were kind of being ignored vis-a-vis the people the government people on the one hand the regulators the business community at large and then the specific registrar business community or money selling domain names and related services versus the companies that bought them there was just a lot of people pretending to represent the at large there was of course the legitimate complaints from people in Africa and Asia and that they weren't being represented and at the same time there were people who would show up at these weekend meetings who would be deputy assistant secretary of the subcommittee of the council on blah blah blah internet and they were charging their countries huge amounts of money for them to stay in this fancy suite and they really had nothing to add and I just found that sort of offensive Well a lot of people came it was sort of like a honey pot of you know really interesting meeting you can go to somewhere very interesting around the world and you can have something fancy on your business card so it sounds like what you're telling me when I'm hearing you say it's the challenge was to get the end user who didn't have great resources to get them involved to hear their voices yeah not to get them involved of all billion of them showed up that would be a little crowded but somehow to get them better represented and at the same time not to bring in all these people who are really just feeding it might have had a vested interest or well I mean they were some had a vested interest in what I can did but many just had a vested interest in their government sending them on a pleasure trip to some interesting board meeting location Esther let me ask you this looking back after all these years is there something that you wish you guys had done differently I could wish the whole thing had been different but in the end I would say most of it kind of unfolded almost inevitably I mean certainly the whole thing could have been more elegant but the fundamental conflicts between governments who wanted to have ICANN be a vacuum of power and governments who wanted to use it to exert their power to turn it into something closer to the ITU the leadership bureau the those were all kind of I would say ordained by history it's become a very lucrative business that at the same time is extremely competitive and there's lots of shady domain name practices the level of that goes up and down I mean I would have liked to see ICANN regulating fraud and sleazy business more effectively mostly thank God kept out of the censorship business which many governments have tried to make it do and in the end I'd rather have somebody taking money out of my pocket than somebody shutting my mouth so I'm happy On that note Esther, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us we appreciate it