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Progress on Point 
Volume 16, Issue 15 August 2009
1444 EYE STREET, NW
SUITE 500
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005202-289-8928
 mail@pff.org 
 www.pff.org 
ICANN & Internet Governance:How Did We Get Here & Where Are We Heading?
*
 
Michael Palage, ModeratorDavid JohnsonMilton MuellerMike RobertsPaul Twomey
Table of Contents
I. Introductions ................................................................................................................................ 1
 
II. ICANN’s Mission
.......................................................................................................................... 4
 
III. ICANN’s Governance Structure
................................................................................................ 12
 
IV. New GTLDs ............................................................................................................................... 17
 
V. Questions & Answers ................................................................................................................ 25
 
VI. Speaker Biographies ................................................................................................................ 31
 
VII. Glossary of ICANN-Related Terms .......................................................................................... 33
 
VIII. Background Charts ................................................................................................................. 35
 
A. Timeline of Internet Governance .................................................................................... 35
 
B. Diagram of Internet Governance .................................................................................... 36
 
C. Internationalized Domain Names ................................................................................... 36
I.
 
Introductions
Ken Ferree, President, The Progress & Freedom Foundation:
 
I’m Ken Ferree from The Progress
& Freedom Foundation and thank you all for coming to this event today on ICANN and Internetgovernance. I can assure you it will be a lot better than that thing they are doing downstairswith those two G fellows, Gore and Gingrich, about climate change or whatever. This is mustmore important and much more interesting.In all seriousness, these are very, very important issues. I think most of you know that somevery important decisions, indeed critical decisions, will be made over the next six to 12 months,
*
This is an edited transcript of a PFF Congressional Seminar that took place on April 24, 2009 inWashington, DC. The edited transcript has not been reviewed by the program participants.
 
Page 2 Progress on Point 16.15
perhaps longer, about ICANN, the structure and future of ICANN and some basic Internetgovernance issues that really will affect the way we all use and interact with the Internet atsome very fundamental level.We at PFF think that these are issues that are not being covered as much as they deserve giventheir importance. I think probably that is due to their sort of arcane nature. This is hard stuff.As I said to somebody outside, opaque to understanding and not easily accessible fornewcomers among
whom I count myself. I hope to learn a lot today. I’m sure this will be a
great presentation. We have some of the leading experts on ICANN and Internet governancehere today.
We have two moderators actually for today’s panel. The principal moderator
will be MichaelPalage who is a PFF adjunct fellow and former ICANN board member. He will be assisted byBerin Szoka, one of our senior fellows, who will be helping with crowd questions andcomments.I will turn it over to Berin now.
Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Internet Freedom, The Progress &Freedom Foundation:
 
Thanks, Ken. I am Mike’s humble sidekick here. I’ve been working with
Mike on a number of ICANN papers. In particular we are going to releasing a Primer soon thatis intended to make ICANN more accessible. So our mission here is to education, distill, andhelp people understand why the issues are important, what the broad themes are, and that is
really what the purpose of today’s event is.
 I would encourage you to refer to our glossary today during the discussions. You will probablyalso see that Steve DelBianco from NetChoice brought some extremely helpful graphics thatkind of break down the ICANN landscape. [
See
Section0]. All of that will be in our Primer.
With that, I’ll turn things over to Mike who, as you heard, is a former ICANN board member and
who has worked on ICANN issues almost as long as anybody. He has an amazing knowledge of the area and a great passion for ICANN that is shared by his panelists today.
Michael Palage, Adjunct Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation:
Thank you, Berin.Again, I would like to welcome everybody here today. We are trying somewhat of, if you will, a
unique and innovative format. Today’s panel will be addressing three over
-arching issues.
First is ICANN’s mission. Second is the ICANN governance structure including accountability
mechanisms and ICAN
N’s relationships with other governments. The third question, or thethird topic, will be ICANN’s proposal to add new generic
Top-Level Domains to the root such as.BLOG and .WEB.Now, what I have asked the panelists to do in addressing these three questions today is toanswer these questions from three perspectives, 10 years ago when ICANN was first born,today, and looking forward 10 years from now.
 
Progress on Point 16.15 Page 3
Now, in order to provide that unique perspective, I had to go to some of the founding fathers of ICANN and all of these gentlemen here today have been here since the beginning.Let me state for the record I did try to get some of the founding mothers of ICANN.Unfortunately, Marilyn Cade and Becky Burr are away on travel and were not able toparticipate.
Again, today’s panel here, we basically have 50 years of ICANN institutional knowledge and
experience. Both Paul Twomey and myself have actually been to over 30 of the 34 ICANNregional meetings. Now, when you consider that the average ICANN meeting runs betweenseven and 10 days and you couple that with the number of board retreats when I served on theboard with Paul, that basically means that over the last 10 years Paul and I have spent one year
of our life together at ICANN related events. I don’t kn
ow whether that is a badge of honor or aself-certification to an insane asylum but, again, I think this is one of the things informing thepanel why I wanted to bring everyone together.
As a backdrop of today’s discussion, I wanted everyone here to sort
of hop in a time machineand go back 10 years to look at what was the framework or the landscape when PresidentClinton issued the executive memorandum directing the Secretary of Commerce to privatizethe domain name space to increase competition and participation in the domain name space.Now, at that time there were about 26 million host computers connected to the Internet andabout 100 million people that were using the Internet at that time. E-commerce was in itsinfancy and, you know, Web 2.0 was j
ust a twinkle in Tim O’Reilly’s eyes at the time.
 
Now let’s fast forward to today. There’s over 600 million host computers connected to the
Internet, a billion and a half people, hundreds of billions of dollars in global e-commerce, andwe have a much more diverse Internet demographics. What was originally U.S. and European isnow a very strong Asian participation of developing countries.The dynamics have changed. Again, if you look forward another 10 years, you will probably belooking at the majority or a significant portion, if not the majority, of the people being non-English speakers or non-Western countries, people from Asia. Again, what is very critical in
today’s discussion of these three over
-arching issues is to look at that sort of spectrum, 10 yearsago, today, 10 years forward.I think that is important. With that backdrop out of the way, what I would like to do is to beginby just briefly introducing the panelist and there will be no opening statements. We will deepdive into the questions so that we provide you, the people in attendance, some time at the endfor some questions and answers because we do want to make this interactive.The first panelist is Mike Roberts. Mike came to Washington in 1987 to promote federalinvestment in research networks as the Vice President of Educom and was a founder of theHigh Performance Computing Coalition. He successfully pushed for Internet and super-computing legislation that became the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 that wassigned into law by then President George H. W. Bush. Mike had the distinction of serving as
ICANN’s original president and CEO.
 
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