 John, I'd still like to see you. As you know, we're trying to capture some of ICANN's history. And I want to do it in a kind of interesting way. I'm going to ask you two questions. The first question is the easy one. Say a few words about how long you've been involved, how you got involved, what your broad arc is. And that will just be used to frame the rest of what we're going to talk about. So for the people watching, I'm John Crane. I'm a British citizen who currently lives in America working for the Internet Corporation for some names and numbers. But I first got involved in what we call internet identifiers back in the early 90s in Europe. It's a place called the Rypen CC. It's what we call a regional internet registry, giving out IP addresses and looking at network designs and seeing how the network was building. And then I worked a little bit with IANA and John Postel, because that's where we got our IP addresses from, of course, IP version four back in those days. And we got involved in the formation of ICANN basically because John asked us to in the white papers, in the green papers. And eventually, as ICANN became formed, I got more and more involved. I didn't go to the early meetings. I happily avoided them. And then we needed to sign the memorandum of understanding between the address organizations and ICANN. And for some reason, I got stuck with that job. So I was put on an airplane and packed off to Denver, I believe it was, and it was an Aaron meeting. And myself, Paul Wilson and Kim Hubbard, who at the time was the director of Aaron, sat at a table with Mike Roberts, who was then the CEO of ICANN. And we also signed memorandums of understanding. And then a little while after that, I was at my office in Amsterdam, a gentleman who you may well remember called Andrew McLaughlin came by. And he said, well, we've formed this thing. We don't really have anybody actually understand the network. How would you like to come and live in California? And I looked out my window and it was raining. And I said, what's the weather like? And he said, it's always sunny in Southern California. So I moved. The RIPE NCC seconded me. Back in those days, ICANN didn't have anything called money. In the early days, we were formed on loans. And we're still paying back those loans. So the RIPE NCC very generously paid for my time and my flights and sent me off to ICANN. And before I know it, I was working there. And that was about 15 and 1 half, 16 years ago. So around 2000. Around 2000. So ICANN had been formed in late 98 and had been limping along without you before that. How did they manage to do that? On the shoestring budget, very dedicated staff. It was a very small organization. It was amazing how dedicated the early staff were. There was a gentleman called Louis Tuton, who was a lawyer. And if you get a chance to interview Louis, you should. He was an interesting character because he was basically working pro bono at ICANN. And everybody would mock him because, well, he's the lawyer. But he was also the guy that was configuring the routers, doing the websites. I mean, Louis Tuton pretty much did all the engineering work for the early ICANN. I mean, when I first turned up the server room, if I could call it that, was also the kitchen. And we had a rack that stood in the kitchen. It was basically a two-post rack. And there was a couple of servers in there. And there was a piece of fiber running through a back wall into the university server room. And there was a refrigerator in the same room. And if you open the refrigerator too hard, you've disconnected the network. It was very much startup mode. Small offices and the same building as where John had been at ISI. And everybody did everything. It was really that startup environment where you just have to do what you have to do. And I want to get into some deeper issues. But I'm curious, by the time you came in 2000, was it still that slim on operation? Oh, absolutely. It was we sort of got past the loan situation, but not really. I had to take a pay cut to come work for ICANN. I think everybody did. Our meetings, one of the first things I did when I joined ICANN was there was going to be a meeting in Marina del Rey. And I used to run the right meetings or parts of the right meetings. So Louis gave me a piece of paper and said, we have a contract with this hotel. Go organize a meeting. And the meetings back in those days were a couple of hundred people. If you see to that, I don't even know the numbers. But I'm pretty sure even at this small meeting, we're close to 2,000 people. And back then, everything was just a lot smaller scale. And there's many people still here today who were involved there, but also many have moved on. So yes, it was very much everything on the budget, small offices, very long hours, and a lot of fun. This session, I think, is much shorter than I'd like it to be. So my view is this is the beginning of a sequence. And so let me ask and try to provoke a little bit or bring forth. Pick out one or two or three really interesting or meaningful events or sequences of events or threads that run through that stick out in your mind as the essence of what really happened below the surface level of holding a meeting here or going off traveling there. So I think part of what I can is or was was this experiment in, I don't want to use the word democracy, but maybe management or government models. It was something different. And I think in those first years, we were really struggling with trying to figure out what it was. So one of the interesting things we did, which had started before I joined, but was happening as I got there, was we voted for board members based on where they were from. And one of the ways of doing this was to actually have a voting system. So I think you could say that I can had the first global online voting mechanism in the world where everybody theoretically could vote. And I mean everybody. And it broke. It didn't work very well. It was a fantastic idea in democracy. And when you're a small budget organization trying to do something that even the governments of the world have never tried was really interesting. But it was sort of this experiment in trying to be inclusive and to include the end user, the user of the internet. And it kind of worked, and it kind of didn't. But it was a very interesting way of doing things. It was trying new things. It was all about trying to find this balance of getting representation from all over the internet. So when you say it broke, two different things come to mind, and maybe it broke in two different ways. One is the mechanics of the voting, and then the other is whether it did achieve appropriate representation, and was fair, and so forth. So yes, it broke in both ways. When I first joined, there was a lady that was running the program, I believe Jody was her name. And in her office were stacks and stacks of envelopes. Well, what are those stacks of envelopes? Oh, those are the returns. I'm like, what do you mean the returns? For some reason, everything is getting returned. And I'm like, oh, let me have a look at them. Oh, interesting. These are all from China. Why are the addresses written in ASCII? Chinese postmen don't read ASCII. So they hadn't thought about the idea. Now, today we talk about IDNs and localized characters. They hadn't quite considered the concept of having other character sets so that postmen could read the letters. So we got a lot of returns. Also, when everybody had to sign up, I think it was one of these things where we thought, well, there's probably a few hundred people coming to the meeting, so maybe there's a couple of thousand people who will be interested in this. And thousands and thousands of people signed up. And that caused issues with the servers. But that was also part of the system failure. Is that these board seats were starting to be seen as political interest. And people were campaigning to get their citizens to go and vote. So you would see large swathes of signups from particular areas of the world. And you could see that from an organization of maybe 200 or 300 participants in the meetings, we were suddenly getting tens and tens of thousands of registrations. So it was clear that there was interest in those board positions that I think maybe the people designing the system hadn't considered. I think it was a bit of an eye-opener. There's a lot of experience in political systems way before the internet, way before any automation. I have a feeling we probably waded into an area somewhat naively in a way. That's worth some significant recounting and getting the accurate picture of what did happen and the different points of view and so forth. So let me just bookmark that as something that we want to come back to at length. I know that one of the things that you've been heavily involved in, and particularly in the early days, was the IANA operation itself. And my first, earliest introduction, I found myself, as you may remember, invited by Stuart Lynn, the next CEO after Mike Roberts, to look into what was some sort of difficulty involving some of the CCTLDs. And it was you and Louie on the one hand, and Elizabeth Portenove, and Sabina Dolderoll, and I think Oscar Robles. You want to talk a little bit about that episode? Well, it depends which one you're talking about because there were many. So, I mean, especially in the early days, the relationship at times could get pretty strange. One of the issues we had was about access to data. And I don't know if this is the one you're talking about. The question of whether or not the zone files should be transferred to somewhere where they could be, well, I'm actually sure if we even knew what we really wanted to do with them, to be honest. But it was, can we get access to the zone files from the country codes? And a lot of the country codes just said no. And I suspect, in retrospect, rightfully so. So, those early periods, we were sort of, I think, trying to figure out what the relationship was between the country codes, which are really something that are, as they say, within a country and for within the national regulations, et cetera, and this global body. And with the generics, it was very clear. Well, firstly, there really wasn't generics. There was like one and then a few registries. But with the CCTLDs, the country codes, it was really about finding a way and figuring out what the relationship was. And it wasn't always friendly. I think it was mostly always professional, but it wasn't always friendly. And yet, with all of these people, I've always had very good, friendly relationships on the personal level. But sometimes, there was a little bit of conflict there. And that made life interesting. So, yes, I'm keenly aware that you have, personally, a very high reputation, very well regarded in ways that are, we should try to document. And I know that Postel was well regarded. And so, it's interesting to try to tease out what happened in that transition that interfered in the otherwise smooth operation that had preceded. Well, I'm an engineer, so I like to blame the lawyers. I see. I'm not sure if that's the case. I think one of the things that happened, or one of the changes is, John was very light handed. So, you know, I think I met him twice, twice, in person, to have discussions that would be of the nature we were having with the CCTLDs. And that was an RIR that we would meet with him because we had a problem about something. Yeah. Extremely rare, because he was very light handed and he believed in letting people do what they do. And I think ICANN was this different model or this different mindset. And I think a lot of the people that were involved weren't from the engineering background, the guys who had worked in building up networks. So it was a different style. And that caused consternation. You know, and a lot of the CCTLD folks who probably only met John once never had to deal with him again upon technical issues. So people don't like change. So in general, change brings fear. And I think there were misconceptions, or maybe there weren't, I don't know, I mean, but I think there were misconceptions that ICANN was trying to control something. And I'm not sure that was there. But, you know, if you've been left alone all this time and then suddenly these people turn up. I mean, if you talk it to it from the perspective of the DNS root servers, for example, which is another community which I participate, we hadn't even really met each other before this time. And then this ICANN thing comes along like, well, who are these people? And one of the things that was often missed, and I had to remind people on a regular basis in the early days is, all of these people that you're talking to, they've been doing this for 10, 20 years, they predate ICANN. That was, I think, something that was lost at times with people. It's an interesting thought that a formative period of ICANN may not have been with the greatest of poise and cell warfare. Well, one of the things that of course happened is we lost John. Of course. And, you know, I think things may, because we don't know. Of course, you can't run the experiment again. You can't run the experiment again, but I think things may have been very different if John had been there, because the trust would have been there. One would have expected so. Yeah. So the impact is probably not only the most visible things, but also a lot of subtle things. Yes, absolutely. We need to take a break at this point, but identified at least a couple of things that we wanna dive into more, and I'm sure more will come up. So let me thank you very much. And let me thank you particularly for years of service. You're one of the people that is most appreciated by the people who make things work, and probably less well known by the people who like to talk about how things work. I'm certainly less appreciated by them. Thank you, Steve.