Welcome Session
Monday, 14 March 2011
ICANN Meeting
San Francisco, California.


>> Ladies and gentlemen, if you would be kind enough to take your
seats, we'll begin our welcome ceremony here, Silicon Valley, San
Francisco.

Please take your seats, and if you would be kind enough to put your
cell phones on vibrate so we don't hear them during the program, it
would be greatly appreciated.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you would be kind enough to take
your seats, we'll be able to begin our welcome ceremony.  Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for the welcome ceremony.
I'd like to introduce at this moment chairman, ICANN board of
directors, Peter Dengate Thrush.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Thank you and good morning, everyone.

On behalf of the ICANN board, I want to welcome you all to San
Francisco and the Silicon Valley for ICANN's 40th -- 40th! --
international public meeting.  It's great to be here today.

And as they say life begins at 40, so ICANN's underway.

And it's fitting that we're marking a milestone like our 40th
international meeting near to Silicon Valley, since Silicon Valley and
the Internet itself have kind of grown up together.

Silicon Valley can lay some claim to being the birthplace of the
Internet itself.  It was just down the road at Stanford University
where a young assistant professor named Vinton Cerf was based while he
worked in partnership with Bob Kahn on something called TCP/IP and
from that very beginning, Silicon Valley has been at the heart of the
Internet, the technology it has spawned, and the change that this has
wrought to the entire globe.

Think now of the then-unimaginable consequences that came from that
work in the early days.

And so the Bay Area itself has become Silicon Valley, with one of the
largest concentrations technology workers in the world.  In fact,
close to 30% of people in the area work in high-tech and the region
itself drives innovation.

San Jose was home to 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and 1881
alone from Sunnyvale.

So that represented first and second spot in the United States, the
country itself with the highest number of patent filings in the world.
And fully a third of the venture capital in the United States is
invested right here in the valley.

And a few companies, the names of which may be known to some of you,
have also grown up in this process:  Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems,
Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google.

All, in some way, help individuals and companies connect to each
other, and they each, like so many of their neighbors, are harnessing
the power and the potential of the Internet.

Each of them was an unimagined consequence when the first TIP work was
done all those years ago, and their companies and their range of
products and offerings and their technologies themselves were
unimagined, even 40 meetings ago.  The 13 years ago when ICANN was
created to coordinate the domain name system.

And so these kinds of unintended consequences are why we're here in
the Silicon Valley this week.

Since our inception and through the course of the 40 meetings, ICANN
has had a very clear role.  We're here to preserve the
operationability [sic] of the Internet, to promote competition as
appropriate, to achieve broad representation of the global Internet
community, and to develop policies appropriate to our mission through
our bottom-up consensus-driven processes.

We're not here to develop new technologies for the marketplace.  We're
not here to create new consumer, business, or industrial products.
But we are here to enhance and expand that platform that makes so much
of all this possible.

And that's the truly amazing work of ICANN and the Internet.  Our work
builds a platform that unleashes that kind of innovation.

The last time we got together as a community was in Cartagena in
Colombia, and let's just stop for a moment and recall what a fabulous
meeting that was and thank again our hosts from Colombia.

[ Applause ]

For those of you that didn't go, let me recommend a truly wonderful
city.

At that meeting, I told you that the launch of the Russian
Federation's IDN ccTLD had exceeded their expectations, and let me
confirm that they still are.  You'll recall they had expected a
hundred thousand registrations in their first year.  They now have
close to 800,000 since November.  And we've seen IDN applications
approved and launched or nearly launched in China and India and the
Russian Federation, Algeria, Singapore, and Oman, just to name a few.

And this week we'll be talking about the next stage for
internationalized domain names.  How they move from the ccTLD arena
into the generic top-level domain space.  And so millions of people
all over the world are anxiously awaiting the availability of a TLD
entirely in their own script.

And we'll be getting in rooms large and small -- we're back in this
room later on this afternoon -- over the next few days to talk about
how we can keep the ball moving on the new gTLD project.  Because
that, too, is about building a foundation for further innovation.

We've already seen possible proponents of new TLDs talking about new
ways of building their businesses, attracting customers, connecting
people through these new Internet extensions, and they're coming up
with ideas also that we couldn't have imagined a few short years ago.

So there's probably a company a few miles from where you're sitting
today trying to figure out the next big thing and how new gTLDs can
make that happen.

So our work this week is to make sure that the platform is there for
that innovation and those ideas and innovation and ideas not yet
imagined.

And we're going to be talking about safety and security, about the
innovations we require if the platform we're building is going to be
there, reliable and safe, for future innovators.

And that's a key role for ICANN and all of you in ICANN, because we're
-- there are a lot of, let's call them, innovators as well who are
working against us, looking for security holes and opportunities to
compromise the system.

So this week is when you can see in action some of the key goals built
into the ICANN DNA since our very first meeting held in Singapore in
1999:  Preserving stability, promoting competition, achieving global
representation, and developing policies in our bottom-up consensus-
based way.

So I want to thank each and every one of you for joining us here today
and in this week, as we continue that incredibly important work.
You're here because you're dedicated to the future of this shared
platform we call the Internet.

You believe, as I do, in a single global interoperable Internet.

And if you're like me, you're here because you believe in the
Internet's ability to unlock the unimagined potential and the
possibilities for everyone.  It's an enormous task but it's rewarding
and exciting, and the buzz in the room as we got here and as we
started is a testament to that already.

In the past week, we've seen the incredible power of Mother Nature in
the devastating earthquake and its aftermath in Japan, and our
thoughts are with everyone in that country and around the world
worried about the future, about their families and friends and the
other tragic consequences.

But just as we saw that awesome power, we've also seen the power of
the Internet and how it can help people to deal with that disaster.
People have used the Internet and its myriad of platforms and
connections in incredible ways:  to warn about dangers, to marshal
emergency efforts, to track down family and friends.  And some of you
have been kind enough to contact me over the past few weeks about the
recent earthquake also in Christchurch, New Zealand, and I can tell
you there that just in the last few days, using Facebook, 15,000
students were mobilized who turned up with shovels and went to work in
Christchurch shoveling the liquefaction that's occurred as part of the
damage.  I don't know whether you realize that Christchurch sits on
nearly half a kilometer of silt and once the earthquake struck, all
that just turned basically to jelly and bubbled up through the houses,
through the streets, through the buildings.

So 15,000 students turned up with shovels and helped to clear that.

And as they departed, another Internet-generated exercise, the farmers
of the Canterbury region, came to town with their utes and their
trucks, their utilities, and they shoveled all this mess into the back
of their trucks and took it away.

So we're seeing the use of the Internet in that very powerful way.
Incredible connections and communications have been possible and
they've been possible in large part because of the single global
Internet.

It's an important reminder of the things we make possible.

All right.  Well, those of you who have been to other opening
ceremonies will know that I've made a practice of opening ICANN
meetings in the local language.

[ Laughter ]

There was some sympathy in that, I'm sure, for the people who had to
listen to me in Arabic and Swahili, French, and Spanish and other
languages.  So I'm delighted to be in the U.S. and not to have to put
you through anything other than the torture of my very southern
accent.

What we're going to do today instead is introduce some very famous
U.S. citizens, as we're here in the U.S., who have been intimately
involved with ICANN since the very beginning, and I've had the
pleasure of working at some stage with all of them.  Ira Magaziner,
very briefly, in a telephone call as we were first arguing about the
shape of ICANN, a bylaws discussion back in I think late 1998.
Obviously Vint Cerf, who was the chairman of the board for such a long
time at ICANN during some incredibly formative and crucial years.
Larry Strickling, who I've had the pleasure of working with on the
ICANN accountability, transparency -- accountability and transparency
team.  And Larry, of course, is the cosignatory of one of our most
important documents, the Affirmation of Commitments.

And Andrew McLaughlin, who I first worked with on a thing called the
IRAC, the Independent Review Advisory Committee, right back in 1999
when Andrew was on the staff.  So we're going to hear from people who
have been intimately connected with the past and the future of ICANN.

So ladies and gentlemen I'd like to call now on my colleague and good
friend, ICANN's president and CEO, Rod Beckstrom, to introduce the
next guest.

Rod.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. ROD BECKSTROM:  Thank you, Peter, for your articulate remarks as
ever and we hope all of you will be joining us in Singapore in June
too because we might be having some celebrations there to thank Peter
for all his outstanding contributions.

It's now my honor to introduce Ira Magaziner.

Ira has had a long and illustrious career, often called cerebral, and
I will add, with great cause.  I know from firsthand experience I had
the honor to serve as a co-chairman of a privacy high-technology
company with Ira about 10 years ago.  Ira is a valedictorian at Brown
University.  He attended Balliol College at Oxford as a Rhodes
scholar.  He has honorary doctorate degrees from Brown University,
University of Rhode Island, New England Institute of Technology, and
the University of Maryland.

He's now chairman of the William J. Clinton Foundation's international
development activities and initiatives.  He was senior advisor to the
president for policy development in the Clinton White House, where he
shaped many important programs for this country and that affect the
world.  He helped drive the policy processes that led to ICANN's
establishment, together with participants from the global Internet
community, as Peter referred to.

He developed a reputation for digging into the nitty-gritty of
technology while considering the big-picture impacts on society.

He became an advocate for the Internet industry in the global
marketplace and for ICANN.

Ira, welcome.  We look forward to your remarks.

[ Applause ]

>>IRA MAGAZINER:  Thank you very much for inviting me.  It's the first
time I've been to an ICANN event since forming it.  I figured that by
now it was safe and I wouldn't have --

[ Laughter ]

-- too many things thrown at me but I'm not sure.

I'm here today to talk about ancient times, when dinosaurs ruled the
earth.

It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter, before WiFi, and even
before Google.

It was a time when you could download a movie through your 56K dial-up
connection if you had a few days, when your large heavy cell phone did
not speak Internet, and when two-thirds of the people in the world
could not make a telephone call because they didn't have a landline
coming to where they lived.

It was a time when there were more people on the Minitel in France
than on the Internet in the whole world.  Okay?

And when all the people on the Internet in Korea could fit into one
small hotel room.  I know because I met with them.

[ Laughter ]

And there were only a couple.

It was also a time when adults still knew more about information
technology than their 10-year-old children.

[ Laughter ]

Which has not been the case since then.

[ Laughter ]

So these ancient times that I'm talking about weren't millions or
thousands or hundreds of years ago.  They were 15 years ago, in 1996.
15 years ago.

In early 1995, then-President Clinton had asked me to head a cabinet
level group in the U.S. government to help decide what steps he could
take if he were reelected in 1996 to improve the U.S. economy.  And at
our initial meeting, we listed 10 different things to look at that we
thought could be important.  By the beginning of 1996 we had actually
decided on a different list.

Basically, what we had decided was that there were three technologies
that had been developed recently that could offer the potential for
huge economic growth:  The Internet, the sequencing of the human
genome, and advances in renewable energy.  And of those three, we
thought that the Internet could move the fastest and so by then we had
decided to focus on the Internet and trying to create a global
environment where the Internet could take off and be a true economic
force.

The last escape we confronted was fraught with opportunity but also
with tremendous uncertainty.

Many entrepreneurs and companies wanted to invest huge sums to build
the Internet economy, but they were worried by the lack of a
predictable environment.

At that time, some of you may remember there were proposals in the EU
and Canada to tax every bit of transmission on the Internet, and they
were being taken seriously.  There were proposals to put tariffs in
the World Trade Organization on commerce done by the Internet.

Many governments, including the U.S. government, we're looking to
censor the Internet.  Regulators in the EU and in the U.S. wanted to
have government set technical standards for the Internet, regulate the
use of digital signatures, restrict the new field of Internet
telephony, set rigid guidelines who could and couldn't deliver
Internet services, and regulate prices for every Internet activity,
much as was done with telephony.

There were no agreed-upon ways to protect intellectual property.  That
was the landscape we confronted.

Many foreign governments did not want to adopt the Internet because
they viewed it as under U.S. government control and there were a large
number of lawsuits, which I'll talk about in a minute, working their
way through different courts around the world that would have broken
up the Internet and put jurisdictional restrictions on it that would
have prevented interoperability across countries or even states, and
many of the judges who were sitting in judgment on these lawsuits had
no clue what the Internet was.

The security of the Internet was very uncertain.  Some of the root
servers were in university basements where anyone could walk in and
pull the plug.  I know because I visited some of these sites
unannounced and just walked alone into rooms where they were housed.

We realized that the Internet had enormous potential to unlock human
freedom, economically, politically, and socially, because its very
designed empowered individuals by allowing them to implement their
ideas directly, without having to go through established hierarchies
and bureaucracies.  The potential seemed limitless.  But we also
realized that the future of the Internet was very precarious.
Balanced on a knife's edge between two extremes that could delay its
advent or even destroy it.

On the one side, if the Internet was too anarchic with no guidelines,
it could degenerate into a constant state of unpredictable, wild west
shootouts, scaring away the decent folk who wanted to invest and help
build it.

On the other hand, if the normal forces of bureaucracy took over with
a mass of government regulations and slow intergovernmental bodies
governing the Internet, the creativity of the Internet could be
stifled.

We had to find a way to allow the Internet to operate in a constant
state of creative chaos, but with some ground rules that would give
those investing huge sums in it some degree of predictability.

There needed to be enough cooperation and rules so that the Internet
would be secure, stable, and resilient, but this had to be done in
such a way as to allow as much freedom as possible, for the users of
the Internet to create standards, content, modes of access, and
economic activity without government interference.

So we established a policy framework to try to accomplish these goals
in 1996 and '97.  We passed an Internet tax freedom act that allowed
Internet commerce to develop free of taxes.  We kept the Federal
Communications Commission in the United States and the ITU globally
away from regulating the Internet and the Internet telephony.  We got
government in the World Trade Organization not to put any tariffs on
electronic commerce.  We struck down attempts to impose censorship on
the Internet.  Instead, empowering parents and other consumers with
controls they could exercise to block content they did not want to
see.  We allowed marketplace solutions on privacy to emerge.  We
allowed the Internet users to set standards.  We established a global
agreement to protect intellectual property.  But in not too
restrictive a way.

Finally, we recognized that there had to be some coordination of the
Internet in order to ensure its security, stability, and resiliency.

The question we faced was how to do this in a way that could operate
with Internet speed, be representative of the wishes of the Internet
community and its various constituencies, be acceptable to
governments, and allow for the rapid growth of the Internet that we
hoped would happen.

After a two-year process of consultation with stakeholders of all sort
all over the world, we formed ICANN.

Now, for those of you who were not around then, let me talk about what
preceded ICANN.

At the time, IANA as it was called was housed in a small office at the
University of Southern California, and run by a wonderful man named
Jon Postel under a contract the university had with the U.S. defense
department which had been involved in starting the Internet.

I'm not sure this is true.  There's some of you who may remember.  But
legend has it that at a meeting of the Internet Society when the
Internet had less than a thousand members, someone suggested that they
needed a person to keep track of everyone's address and Jon raised his
hand.  Jon, for those of you who remember him, had a long scruffy
beard, wore sandals and hippie clothing and was a rebel and a free
spirit at heart.

Because of his appearance, it took me hours of pleading to get him
through security at the White House when I invited him to have lunch.

[ Laughter ]

And I remember when I had the honor of speaking at his funeral, I
thought that day when he was at the White House having lunch with me
with all these self-important cabinet secretaries sitting around that
a hundred years from now, nobody would remember any of those cabinet
secretaries, but they would remember Jon Postel as one of the
inventors of the Internet.

[ Applause ]

It was Jon that decided what top-level prefixes were for countries and
who in each country should have the responsibility for administering
the Internet.  And he did all this from his small office where the
piles of paper and books lying around reflected both his brilliance
and also the creativity chaos of the Internet.  To get from the door
to the one visitor's chair in his office required agility and
extraordinary balance just to navigate around the rubble on the floor.

I often thought when I visited his office about how some of the big
corporate Titans that were about to invest billions in the Internet
would have felt if they knew that all the routing for the Internet was
taking place in that office.

The root server was run by a company called Network Solutions in
Virginia, which under a contract with the Commerce Department had a
virtual monopoly on assigning domain names.  They received the
addresses from Jon and entered them.  But at the time, Jon and the
leadership of Network Solutions did not really like each other, so
their rapport was a bit tenuous.  I remember when the idea for ICANN
first arose, and it came after a particularly difficult week where the
following occurred.

The head of DARPA, the defense advanced research products agency which
had the contract for the IANA called me, saying that no longer would
it let the contract for IANA when it expired.  They wanted out.

The president of the university of southern California called saying
that they could not take the lawsuits that were being directed against
them and wanted out of their contract.  Our legal counsel described
over 50 lawsuits all over the world that could tear the Internet
apart.  A delegation from the International Telecommunication Union,
after a dozen years of opposing the adoption of the Internet
protocols, approached us demanding to take over the Internet.  A
delegation of U.S. Congressmen and senators insisted that the U.S.
government had created the Internet and should never give up complete
control of it.  Several delegations of representatives from over 100
leading I.T. and media companies and 10 trade associations visited
saying that Internet technical coordination and security had to be
brought into a more predictable global environment before they would
invest money in it.

And the EU delegation said that they would pursue their own relation
of the Internet routing system unless the U.S. changed its policies.
Representatives from the Internet Society that I had dinner with told
us that the Internet Society controlled the Internet and they would
resist any attempts by the U.S. government or any government to take
control.  And the U.S. government security task force on the Internet
delivered a report to us saying that as currently organized, the
Internet was in danger of disintegrating from the lawsuits and lack of
agreed-upon coordination mechanism.  And in addition to that, my kid
caught a flu which I also caught, so it was a wonderful week.

[ Laughter ]

So we clearly had to do something.  We clearly had to do something.

Now, the idea of ICANN might have been a result of that flu, but I
hope not.

[ Laughter ]

But the idea of ICANN was unprecedented, but we felt it offered the
best chance to allow for the Internet to flourish.

If we left the coordination of the Internet DNS to an
intergovernmental body, we feared that it would get bogged down in
bureaucracy and approvals would move at a glacial place.  Personally
I'm a believer that governments play an important role in societies,
and I'm a supporter of the United Nations.  I work closely with U.N.
agencies in my current work, leading efforts at the Clinton Foundation
on Global Health and Climate Change, but the slow and bureaucratic
processes of government and multilateral government bodies are not the
best way to coordinate a fast-moving, creative, chaotic medium like
the Internet.  They move too slowly.  They're too risk-averse.  They
officially represent only governments and not other constituencies.
And just in general, they're too cumbersome.

On the other hand, the Internet could not be coordinated by a normal
private entity.  There must be public accountability to Internet users
and investors.

There also has to be accountability to governments.

The idea of setting up a private nonprofit organization that would be
organized to be a grass-roots organization of technical experts
accountable to Internet users and constituencies and be recognized by
governments but not controlled by governments was risky.  That had not
been done before on a global scale.  We knew it would be difficult and
somewhat messy, but we thought that it offered the best chance of
success.

It would have a government advisory group that could ensure that the
views of collective governments were at the forefront, but they could
not control it.

It would provide a strong focal point to take all of the inevitable
lawsuits that would continue to come with any decisions made about the
routing system for the Internet.  It would be flexible enough to
evolve as the Internet evolved.  It would be at the same time strong
but not too strong.  It would have its own independent funding source
for an assessment on domain name registrations but it would never get
too big and its legitimacy would have to be renewed regularly by its
ability to persuade the various constituency groups that it remained
the best solution.

This was the idea that became ICANN.

We identified Vint Cerf as someone to lead it initially because he had
credibility with all the constituencies.  I'm not sure he's ever
forgiven us to this day, but we thought it was the best shot that the
Internet had.

[ Laughter ]

Now, not everything has gone as we had planned.  ICANN has made some
mistakes as an organization.  It's far from perfect.  But overall, we
think the idea has worked.  The political, policy, and technical
controversies that threatened to stifle or even ruin the Internet in
its infancy in the late 1990s did not ruin the Internet.  The Internet
is flourishing.

When, in the late 1990s I used to make speeches around the world
touting the future of the Internet, I was widely mocked for predicting
that by 2010, there would be 1 billion people using the Internet, and
Internet commerce would exceed a few hundred billion dollars a year.

Experts and political leaders alike said I was wrong.  It would be
impossible to go from 16 million people -- which is where we were then
-- to 1 billion people in just 15 years.  They argued it would be
politically and technically impossible for the Internet to expand that
fast.

I was accused of being a big thinker and a dreamer.

Well, I was wrong, but not because of what the critics said.  I was
wrong because I did not think or dream big enough.

Today, there are almost 2 billion Internet users.  There are over 3.7
billion IP addresses.  And over 129 million domain names.  And
electronic commercial has grown to almost a trillion dollars per year.

The Internet has spawned a complete revolution politically,
economically, and socially, and it has all worked pretty smoothly.
The technical and diplomatic work of ICANN and IETF and other bodies
have enabled this enormous growth to occur with hardly a glitch.

Once -- one has not read stories of legal or political battles or
technical difficulties bringing the Internet to a halt or preventing
it from growing.  And I want to pause just to reflect on that.  That
is extraordinary.  If you think about this enormous growth and the way
it's spread around the world and all the commerce being done and so
on, and even though inside of ICANN it must seem like you're having a
controversy every week, the fact of the matter is the Internet has
flourished.  It has grown and flourished.

And I can tell you sitting where we were in the late 1990s, that was
not at all a foregone conclusion.  In fact, it seemed like a likely
thing that could go bad and not happen.

Now, would things have worked as well if we would not have created
ICANN and did the things we did?  Maybe.  You can always speculate.
But the reality is for all its shortcomings, ICANN has not prevented
this resolution; and by most accounts, it has played an important and
positive role in helping to enable it.

So the reason for my history lesson today is to remind you all that
the Internet almost broke down before it really took off in the late
1990s.  And it almost broke down in legal, political and policy
disputes that could have fragmented it, inhibit its use and, the very
least, delayed it and made it more difficult to access.

While ICANN has its faults, I urge you to work actively to improve it
rather than tearing it down or allowing it to be replaced with a more
stifling bureaucratic alternative.

Now, I remember my last day at the White House.  A good friend of mine
said, The good news is that for the first time in six years you will
be able to say what you really think.  The bad news is that for the
first time in six years nobody will care what you really think.

[ Laughter ]

But at the risk of having that be true and having not care what I
think, let me just finish by offering a couple of suggestions.  And I
offer them in the spirit of the success that I believe ICANN has been
and the greater success that it can be.

I think there are things that ICANN should do to work better and that
the reaffirmation of principles issued in September of 2009 offers a
good basis for making these improvements.  And I think having talked
this past few weeks to people at ICANN, people at the U.S. government
and elsewhere, I think that people are aware that these improvements
can be made and are working to do it.  And I would just give support
to that effort.

One is ICANN always needs to work hard to be more international and,
in particular, to include more people in its leadership and management
from developing countries around the world.  The Internet has become
much more widely distributed since we were involved 15 years ago and
will become even more widely distributed still.  And as somebody who
now is working on AIDS in Africa and elsewhere and interacting a lot
with governments in poorer countries, it's crucial that they become
more and more a part of this structure as much as possible.

Number two, ICANN must take great pains to operate in an efficient
manner.  It is a public service organization with a technical mission
that should be frugal, and it must always have humility in the way it
works.  Its leaders must avoid trying to build an empire.  I think you
will be best served by doing what you need to be doing, to be focused
on but not build something that's too big an empire because a bigger
empire becomes a bigger target.

Number three -- (applause) -- ICANN must be incorruptible and fully
transparent in what it does seeking consensus and explaining its
decisions fully.  There are too many disparate interests on the
Internet to avoid controversy, okay?  You are going to have
controversy.  You are going to do things that are unpopular by
definition.  Not only is this a very diverse community, but it is a
diverse community of people with strong personalities.  That's
something I learned very early on.

And so you are going to have lots of controversy, lots of people
shouting at each other, lots of ideas, lots of ideas.  And you are
never going to be able to get full consensus.  But you ought to try to
get as much as consensus as possible all the time.  And where you
don't have consensus, you need full transparency and accountability in
explaining your decisions because even that way if people disagree
with you, they can understand the logic behind what you did.  So
consensus will not always be possible, but you must do the best to
seek as much consensus as possible and then explain your decisions.

Fourth, ICANN should always look to empower Internet users.  Do not
make a rule that limits what people can do on the Internet unless it
is absolutely necessary for the Internet to function in a predictable,
safe and secure way.

And, finally, I will offer this to my successors in the U.S.
government, that they should exercise their role in full consultation
with other governments and in a light-handed manner.

Now, I think if those kinds of principles are followed -- and I do
think there are people of goodwill at ICANN and in the U.S. government
and elsewhere interested in following those principles, I think ICANN
will continue to flourish and the Internet will flourish.

ICANN processes will always be a bit messy.  Grassroots democracy is
by its nature contentious.  While ICANN can and must improve, we must
all work within it to improve it rather than to try to tear it down or
replace it.  With all its faults, it has worked.  The Internet has
flourished.

The wonder of the Internet is that any individual in the world with
any idea is free to introduce that idea to 2 billion people without
having to ask permission.  If he or she can gain a following, that
individual can build a huge business, introduce new art, music or
literature to the world, form a global social movement or improve the
way the Internet itself works.

The Internet gives anybody in the world a chance to change the world.
You as current stewards of Internet coordination and policy have a
responsibility to ensure that parochial, commercial or political
concerns and technical problems are sorted out so that the world
remains safe for the Internet and so that the human freedom and
empowerment the Internet brings can continue to flourish.

I wish for you to have the wisdom, tolerance and patience to do your
job well.  Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Wow.  Thank you, Ira.  Thanks for your
comments today, and thanks for your vision all those years ago,
particularly under the stressful conditions of that particular week.

You helped start ICANN and the Internet community on the path that
moved the coordination of the Internet's names and numbers out into
the global community.  You helped turn this platform for global
connection and innovation into a shared responsibility.  We wouldn't
be here this week if you and the U.S. administration of the day had
not seen the potential of the Internet and the possibility for great
innovations and ideas spawning from it and how freeing that platform
up would make it a global foundation for innovation.  So thank you
again and thank you for the encouragement to everyone to continue
participating in ICANN.

[ Applause ]

Thank you.

So now it is my great privilege to welcome someone who helped seize
the opportunity created with ICANN standing.  I have already mentioned
very briefly the work Vint Cerf did just down the road at Stanford
University.  And I had the honor for many years to work with Vint on
what you might call the buildout phase of ICANN.

His eight years on the ICANN board, the last seven of them as chair,
Vint helped navigate ICANN through those early years and the growing
pains that come along with that stage.  Since leaving the board, of
course, he has continued to live up to his living legend status in the
Internet world through his work at Google and through his work with
the Jet Propulsion Labs on the interplanetary Internet.  And as
always, his ideas and enthusiasm are helping connect to the future,
unimagined for so many of us but always imagined by Vint.  Please join
me in welcoming a good friend, Vint Cerf.

[ Applause ]

>>VINT CERF:  Good morning, everyone.  It is a real pleasure to come
back and see so many faces -- familiar faces.  And I hope to meet some
new ones as well.  It feels like a long time since I stepped down as
chairman only three years ago.

Peter, I appreciate very much your undertaking the task of leading
this organization further into the future.

I'd like to respond momentarily to something -- two things that Ira
mentioned.  First of all, Jon Postel's responsibility as the IANA
actually started much, much earlier.  He was first the numbers czar
starting in 1969 when the ARPANET was underway and Steve Crocker
issued the first request for comment.  Jon undertook to keep track of
a lot of the protocol parameters and the allocations of address space
back then.  And then as time went on, as the Internet TCP/IP protocols
were used, he expanded that role.  So he had been doing a function
like this for a good fraction of his career.

The other observation, I appreciate very much your comments, but I
have to tell you that -- remind you anyway that Esther Dyson was the
first chairman of ICANN and undertook that role because nobody else
would.  She was an impressive act to follow as I assumed the role in
2000.  And second, Mike Roberts, of course, acted as the first CEO.

I did have the pleasure of participating in the inaugural meeting of
the board at which Esther was elected and Mike Roberts was confirmed
as CEO.  I was not a member of the board at that time.  I was simply a
visitor.

Finally, I wanted to make an observation -- a generic observation
about why the Internet and all the institutions surrounding it have
managed to function as -- despite all the stromengen (phonetic).
That's because they are very loosely coupled.  This whole system is
designed around relatively loose coupling and standardization.

If it were not for that, I think it would be easily too brittle to
survive.  So this loose coupling of organizations and networks and
protocols and everything else really has given it a longevity that it
couldn't otherwise have.

I, too, represent the dinosaur period in history, so I'm the second
talking dinosaur.  No insult intended, Ira.  But I do want to mention
a few things about the history, not only of ICANN but of Internet in
general and the United States' role in it.

The project began with support from the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency in 1973 and, in fact, preceding that, it was the
ARPANET Project starting in 1968.  But as time went on, responsibility
for this system devolved from DARPA to the Defense Communications
Agency which is now called DISA and then to the National Science
Foundation and then ultimately to the Department of Commerce.  And in
those transitions, the United States government reduced its position,
its authority, its decision-making activity with regard to Internet.
This is a continuous, essentially, relegation or delegation of
responsibility away from the government and into the private sector.

You can see some of this evidenced in the relationships between the
Department of Commerce and ICANN which began with a procurement
contract for the IANA function and Memorandum of Understanding.  The
procurement contract still exists.  The Memorandum of Understanding
has been replaced by an Affirmation of Commitments that evolved out of
the interactions of ICANN, the Department of Commerce and ICANN's
general operation.

So this creation of ICANN that Ira played such a key role in has
continued on a track towards privatization of the Internet's
infrastructure and the public-private policy development which is part
of the ICANN process today.

So I don't want to spend a great deal of time this morning -- I know
we have a lot to do, but I wanted to offer a few thoughts that come to
mind about the immediate future.

There exists, as you know, a procurement contract and I believe that
that concept of procuring service from ICANN really ought to change to
become a cooperative agreement because I believe that format expresses
more correctly the relationship between ICANN and the Department of
Commerce.  I still think that such an agreement is useful and,
therefore, would not resist it, but I believe that a procurement
contract is an overly rigid structure through which to express the
relationship between the Department of Commerce and ICANN.

The second thing I want to remind you of is RFC 2860 which is dated
June 2000.  It was authored by the Internet Architecture Board, the
Internet Engineering Task Force, or leaders thereof, and ICANN.  That
RFC memorializes an MOU that was signed in March -- March 1st, 2000,
11 years ago, between the IETF and ICANN.  And it was ratified by the
ICANN board on March 10th of the year 2000.

And it concerns the delegation of responsibility for recording and
memorializing Internet protocol parameters and documenting what those
parameters are.  The responsibility for what those parameters are
evolve out of the IETF standardization process.  The Internet
Architecture Board delegated the responsibility for managing that
process to -- initially to IANA and then subsequently to ICANN.  And
that memorandum establishes that relationship.

Those responsibilities for managing the parameter space are distinct
from the allocation of Internet addresses which has been assigned to
ICANN specifically and thence from ICANN to the Regional Internet
Registries and the Number Resource Organization.  That's distinct from
the Internet parameters.

And, finally, the general global allocation policies for Internet
addresses is a bottom-up process developed by the RIRs and confirmed
by the ICANN board.

One thing about the technical standards of the Internet is a guiding
philosophy from the IETF will serve as well.  If you are going to do
something, pick one way to do it, not several ways to do it.  This
philosophy has contributed to the interoperability that has been the
hallmark of the Internet design from the earliest stages and I think
it is a very wise philosophy to follow.

We can see occasions where parties might decide for a variety of
reasons that two standards might be a good idea.  Generally speaking,
that leads to the possibility that parties will pick the opposite
standard and not be able to interwork.  So I would strongly urge that
you think about that as you put policies together.

I want to echo something that Ira said, which I believe is very
important to the health of ICANN, and that's to strive to increase
transparency of and to explain the rationale for policy decisions
arising out of the ICANN process, particularly out of any board
deliberations.

I think there was an attempt to initiate that during board votes where
board members were permitted to speak to the rationale behind their
decisions, but I think that process could be refined substantially.

This kind of transparency helps, as Ira points out, in cases where
there is disagreement with a conclusion, at least one can follow the
logic leading to a particular conclusion.

I think that the Governmental Advisory Committee could usefully
enhance its public policy input to the policy development process.
It's already established a long history of discussion and contribution
to policy making in the ICANN process.  But I would like to encourage
increased amount of attention to raising policy issues not only before
the board but also before other parts of the ICANN organization.  So
I'm very happy to see, at least during my tenure, that the Government
Advisory Committee has been meeting -- had been meeting and I hope
continues to meet with other parts of the ICANN structure, the other
supporting organizations, the Security and Stability Advisory
Committee and so on in order to both raise public policy issues before
those supporting organizations and also to hear from them what kinds
of issues are arising that might have public policy aspects to them.

There are a very broad range of policy issues that are not solely
within the purview of ICANN and its multistakeholder framework.  Law
enforcement, international commercial frameworks, intellectual
property protection, freedom of expression, access to Internet
services, freedom from harm, all of these policy matters lie at least
beyond, perhaps overlapping with, but beyond the purview of ICANN.  It
is very important, I think, not to imagine that ICANN alone can deal
with all the policy issues that the existence of the Internet poses
and that ICANN is a part of a universe of policy-making necessity but
that there are other organizations that have a role to play.  So
somehow ICANN has to fit itself into that policy ecosystem in a way
which is constructive.

And here I believe that collaboration is key among the very many
stakeholders to assure that the Internet operation continues to foster
innovation and protect the legitimate rights and interests of
countries, corporations and individuals.

Sovereignty of nations notwithstanding, achieving these goals requires
cooperation among all who partake of the growing ubiquity of the
Internet.  Let me emphasize that cooperation and collaboration is
absolutely essential among all of the stakeholders in order to achieve
successful policy outcomes.

If ever there were a time when the multistakeholder model needs to be
embraced, it's now, with so much at stake to allow the Internet to
expand in its scale and functionality.  This notion has to be
preserved in future incarnations of the Internet Governance Forum or
further exploration of the notion of a global information society.
There are pressures to move away from a multistakeholder structure in
the IGF, for example, and to adopt a more intergovernmental
multilateral model.  I strongly urge against this because there are
too many valuable points of view that must be incorporated into any
consideration of policy for Internet growth.

Ultimately, the challenge for ICANN and other organizations dealing
with Internet policy is to preserve multistakeholder values and the
single interoperational Internet within the context of the traditional
notion of national autonomy.

I believe that collaboration and cooperation among governments and
between national and international institutions are fundamental to
achieving these goals.  The Internet has been a grand collaboration
and it is up to us to preserve this value for all Internaughts present
and future.  Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. ROD BECKSTROM:  Thank you very much, Vint.  Now it is my
pleasure to introduce Larry Strickling, Assistant Secretary of
Commerce for Communications and Information, responsible for Internet
governance and other Internet policy matters in the Department.

Over two decades of service in the public and private sectors, Larry
served as the chief regulatory and chief compliance officer at
Broadwink Communications.  He has held senior roles at Allegiance
Telecom, Core Express and as a member of the board of Network Plus,
that is as a member of the board.

He served as a Chief of Common Carrier Bureau at the Federal
Communications Commission, the FCC, and associate general counsel and
chief of the FCC's competition division.

We have worked together on many important issues.  We've enjoyed a
highly constructive and productive relationship and I think the
greatest achievement we have been able to work on so far -- and I have
had to work with Larry with -- is, of course, the Affirmation of
Commitments that we both signed on September 30th, 2009.  A document
that commits our organization and the community collectively to
greater transparency and accountability.  And we've worked together on
launching successfully the first three review teams for that effort.

We appreciate the Administration's defense of the ICANN
multistakeholder model vigorously at the U.N., the ITU, and the IGF,
Larry.  And the emphasis on governments playing a key role in the
future Internet and all the assistance that the Assistant Secretary
has provided to us to improve government participation in part is
reflected in the board-GAC consultation which we discussed
extensively.

Finally, looking forward to working together in the IANA renewal and
the evolution process, whether that is another procurement contract or
whether that evolves to a cooperative agreement.  I'm very, very
appreciative, Larry, of your exemplary efforts to help move ICANN and
the Internet community forward.  Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>>LARRY STRICKLING:  Thank you, Rod.  Let me suggest, we have been
here for an hour.  Why not everybody stand up and stretch real quick.
But don't leave, please stay.

[ Laughter ]

Okay.  That's enough.

[ Laughter ]

All things in moderation.  So, I'm very pleased to join all of you
today at the 40th meeting of ICANN.  And I want to thank both Chairman
Peter Dengate Thrush and President and CEO Rod Beckstrom for their
invitation.  But I hope that as we look forward to a week of hard work
as well as taking advantage of the wonderful City of San Francisco and
the Bay Area that we do take some time to think about and pray for our
fellow world citizens in Japan and New Zealand who have suffered so
greatly from the tragedies there in the last few weeks and are working
so hard to recover from these terrible events.

I'm, of course, quite humbled to appear on this stage today following
such luminaries as Ira Magaziner and Vint Cerf.  I'm still pretty much
a newbie to ICANN and Internet governance efforts, but I'm sure most
of you are quite familiar with the agency that I run, the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration, given our long
history and involvement with ICANN.

And while some of you may be familiar with my views on ICANN from my
participation in the Accountability and Transparency Review Team and
other things I have said or written, today really is the first
opportunity I've had to directly address the ICANN community.

And, again, I thank Peter and Rod for the opportunity to do just that.

What I'd like to do today is explain how the Obama Administration has
been approaching Internet policy and the important role that ICANN
plays not just with respect to the domain name system but also as a
model for multistakeholder involvement that can be applied to other
Internet issues.  My message today is that the United States
government is absolutely committed to the multistakeholder process as
an essential strategy for dealing with Internet policy issues,
particularly when compared to the alternative of more traditional top-
down regulatory processes.

And we are committed to the ICANN model as the best way to preserve
and protect the security and stability of the Internet.  But as with
any important institution, we should never shy away from critically
evaluating its performance in making improvements where appropriate
and it is a measure of the commitment of the United States to this
model that this Administration and I personally have spent so much
time and effort working to ensure that the reality of ICANN measures
up to its vision.

The Obama Administration has made it a priority to develop policies to
ensure that we continue to have an Internet environment that
encourages innovation and creativity and fosters trust with its users.

Within the Department of Commerce, we are working with the Secretary's
Internet policy task force to address four key public policy and
operational challenges facing the Internet:  One, enhancing Internet
privacy; two, ensuring cyber security; three, protecting online
copyright; and, four, ensuring the global free flow of information.

We are guided by two dominant principles as we approach these
challenging issues.  First is the idea of trust.  It is imperative for
the sustainability and continued growth of the Internet that we
preserve the trust of all actors on the Internet.  For example, if
users do not trust that their personal information is safe on the
Internet, they won't use it.  If content providers do not trust that
their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it
online.

Our second key principle is that we want to preserve and enhance a
multistakeholder model for dealing with these issues.  Why?  Because
multistakeholder organizations have played a major role in the design
and operation of the Internet and are directly responsible for its
success.

We've taken these principles and put them into practice with our work
on privacy.  The current privacy policy framework in the U.S. has come
under increasing strain as more and more personal data is collected on
the Internet, putting at risk the consumer trust that is essential for
the continued growth of the digital economy.

Last December after convening a workshop and soliciting comments, we
released a green paper recommending the establishment of stronger
privacy protections in the area of online commercial data.  The
starting point for our recommendations was that strong privacy
protection is necessary to preserve and build the trust of users on
the Internet and is indispensable to the continued growth and
innovation of the Internet.

Our recommendations also rely refusal on the notion of
multistakeholderism.  We propose that baseline privacy protections be
adopted in legislation or otherwise, but that we then convene
stakeholders to develop enforceable codes of conduct to implement
these baseline protections.  This multistakeholder process allows us
the speed to respond quickly to new issues of consumer privacy and the
flexibility to have new protections crafted in the most efficient
manner.

In the coming year, we will be issuing recommendations on the other
three work streams of the task force.  And this notion of
multistakeholderism will figure prominently in these recommendations,
as it does in the Internet policymaking principles we have introduced
in discussions at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development.  Our OECD effort is focused, among other things, on
advancing the global consensus around the multistakeholder concept
that we believe is critical to the Internet's success.

From all of this, it should be crystal clear that the Obama
administration is fully committed to the multistakeholder model of
Internet governance.  But when we seek to extend it to other areas of
Internet policy, the obvious questions we get are, "Where has the
model been used before, and how well has it performed?"  And it's
important that we have success stories to point to, and we very much
want to point to ICANN as such an example.

ICANN represents a practical working model of the multistakeholder
approach to Internet governance.

When I signed the Affirmation of Commitments with Rod last September
-- I'm sorry, September 2009, the United States demonstrated its
commitment to the ICANN model and its mission to preserve a single
global interoperable Internet that supports the free flow of
information and global electronic commerce.

And since the affirmation was signed, ICANN has made real tangible
progress in many areas.

One of the most visible and practical steps has been the introduction
of internationalized country code top-level domain names.  The ability
of global Internet users to use the Internet in their local languages
and character sets is critical to the further expansion and
development of the Internet.

When we look back 10 years from now, the expansion of the domain name
system beyond ASCII characters may, in fact, be the most significant
factor in its future growth and success.  And the effort has been
successful, in large part, due to the way the policies for this
program were developed.  A true cross-constituency effort between
ICANN's Country Code Name Supporting Organization and the Governmental
Advisory Committee.

Another visible example of progress at ICANN has been the
implementation of the review team process as set forth in the
affirmation.

I had the great privilege of serving with Peter on the first
accountability and transparency review team, which delivered its
recommendations to the ICANN board this past December.  This effort
provided me the opportunity to do a deep dive into the inner workings
of ICANN, and along with fellow review team members provide what we
think are thoughtful and meaningful suggestions, based on
community/stakeholder input, to enhance and improve this model.

I'm pleased to see that two of the three remaining review teams have
commenced their work, and that they are here meeting this week.

I wish both groups success in their efforts, and I encourage all of
you to actively participate in the review team process.

The success of the framework established by the affirmation depends
upon the vigorous participation of all ICANN stakeholders.

A third accomplishment of note is the strong effort being made by the
board and the GAC to come together and consult on the advice the GAC
has been providing over the last four years on proposals to expand
global top-level domains.

This has been an area of the bylaws that has never been adequately
fleshed out before now, and all of us should give credit to the board
and the GAC for the efforts they are now finally making to reach
agreement on the public policy issues raised by the GAC over the past
years.

But despite these accomplishments, we still have work to do to make
the reality of ICANN meet the vision.

For example, while steps have been taken recently to provide more
clarity around the rationale for decisions the ICANN board makes,
these efforts remain incomplete and, in other cases, not timely.

In the case of ICANN's decision to remove cross-ownership
restrictions, the board still has not explained the basis of its
decision to shift from no cross-ownership to de minimis cross-
ownership to full cross-ownership over the course of a single calendar
year.

In addition, the rationale for the board's decision in January not to
commission any further economic studies regarding the impact of new
top-level domains, reversing earlier commitments, has yet to be posted
nearly seven weeks later.

These recent examples, along with the case studies documented in the
review team report, demonstrate that ICANN still has work to do to
ensure that decisions made related to the global technical
coordination of the DNS are in the public interest, are accountable,
and are transparent.

So how can ICANN move forward to demonstrate that the multistakeholder
model, in practice, can match the vision?

I would offer three suggestions today.

First, the board needs to move with all dispatch to implement the
recommendations of the accountability and transparency review team.
We went to great lengths to engage the ICANN community, including the
board, in our efforts to develop concrete suggestions on how to
improve and enhance ICANN's accountability and transparency.  The
recommendations deal with some of the key building blocks of the ICANN
model.  Specifically, board governance, performance, and composition,
the role and effectiveness of the Governmental Advisory Committee, the
processes for public input into the policy development process, and
the mechanisms for the review of board decisions.

In order for ICANN to continue to enjoy the support of global
stakeholders, they must take the proactive steps outlined by the
review team to ensure the accountability and transparency of its day-
to-day operations matches the expectations of the global Internet
community.

For the most part, our recommendations are not new.  They've been
suggested in past studies from past years.  The question before us is
whether the ICANN board and management have the discipline and
willpower to embrace and implement these recommendations in a serious
and meaningful way now.

In our report, the review team asked the board to provide a status
report on our recommendations at this week's meeting, and everyone in
the community should listen carefully to that report when it is given,
to evaluate the progress to date on the implementation of our
recommendations.

Second, since the recommendations of the review team include a number
of specific observations about the relationship of governments to
ICANN, I'd like to take a few minutes to speak more specifically about
those.

I have spoken in other contexts about my concern that one of the
greatest challenges facing the Internet in the next five years is its
political sustainability.  Which, of course, forces us to confront the
question of, "What is the collective role of nation states with
respect to the multistakeholder governance model?"

The question before the Internet community is whether governments
collectively can operate within the paradigm of the multistakeholder
environment and be satisfied that their interests are being adequately
addressed.  This issue was a focus of the review team as we examined
the relationship between ICANN and governments as reflected in the
dealings between the board and the GAC.  And I need to emphasize that
those proposals, as well as additional suggestions the United States
has made for dealing with objectionable proposed top-level domains,
are in no way intended to turn over decision-making to governments
but, instead, to find a way to bring them willingly, if not
enthusiastically, into this tent of multistakeholder policymaking.

While some nations persist in proposing such measures as giving the
International Telecommunication Union the authority to veto ICANN
board decisions, the United States is most assuredly opposed to
establishing a governance structure for the Internet that would be
managed and controlled by nation states.

Such a structure could lead to the imposition of heavy-handed and
economically misguided regulation and the loss of flexibility the
current system allows today, all of which would jeopardize the growth
and innovation we have enjoyed these past years.

But nonetheless, ICANN needs to do more to engage governments in the
multistakeholder process by providing them a meaningful opportunity to
participate and be heard inside of ICANN.

As I mentioned earlier, I am quite pleased with the apparent progress
made in the last few weeks as a result of the first really meaningful
exchanges between the board and the GAC to understand and evaluate GAC
advice on the new global top-level domain program, but as the review
team pointed out in its recommendations, this is a two-way street.

The GAC needs to have the discipline in its process to offer consensus
advice to the board, but when it does so, the board really needs to
listen and engage with the GAC.

A weakness of the current model is that the ICANN bylaws and practices
seem to envision that GAC advice often comes at the end of the policy
development process.  That should not be the case.

The review team recommendations strongly encouraged the board, acting
through the board/GAC joint working group, to develop and implement a
process to engage the GAC earlier in the ICANN policy development
process.

My third suggestion follows from the recommendation of the review team
that the board clarify the distinction between issues subject to
ICANN's policy development process and those within the executive
functions of the staff and the board.

As ICANN decision-making continues to grow more fractious, the board
needs to evaluate the impact that its process of making decisions is
having on the development of bottom-up policy within the organization.

Increasingly, the board finds itself forced to pick winners and losers
because the policy development process is not yielding true consensus-
based policymaking.

This is not healthy for the organization.

The strength of multistakeholder governance is that it forces all
participants to work together to find a mutually acceptable way
forward.  But how the board makes decisions is just as important as
how ICANN engages its constituents in the process.  If stakeholders
understand they can appeal directly to the board on their particular
policy position, they have less incentive to engage in the tough
discussions to reach true consensus with all stakeholders during the
policy development process.

Thus, the ICANN board needs to recommit itself to consensus-based
policymaking, to give all parties the incentive to participate in the
policy development process in a meaningful way.

Consensus-based decision-making has been the foundation of the
Internet since its inception.  As David Clark, the former chair of the
Internet Architecture Board, explained, "We believe in rough consensus
and running code."

Specifically, there are two steps the board should take.

First, the board needs to insist upon the development of consensus
before a matter reaches the board.  And when the policy development
process delivers a truly consensus process, the board needs to refrain
from substituting its own judgment.

Second, when consensus has not been reached, the board needs to push
back to ensure that the parties have exhausted all possible efforts to
reach consensus before the board imposes its own judgment in a given
matter.

If one group -- in this case, the ICANN board -- attempts to pick
winners and losers, the multistakeholder model is undermined.
Choosing between competing interests, rather than insisting on
consensus, is destructive of the multistakeholder process because it
devalues this incentive for everyone to work together.

In closing, I would like to once again reiterate my personal
commitment to the multistakeholder model and in making ICANN work.

Given that commitment, I will continue to speak directly and bluntly
about the challenges facing ICANN and the improvements it needs to
make.

None of us in the community can afford to back away from candid and
frank conversations on these topics.  In the end, it only makes for a
stronger ICANN and that will help ensure the continued growth and
innovation of the Internet.

Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. PETER DENGATE THRUSH:  Thank you very much, Larry.  Your advice
to President Obama is helping shape the future of technology and
telecommunications here in the U.S. and all around the world.

And your work on the broadband technology opportunities program is
going to connect even more people to the Internet.  And thank you for
your work on the AoC and thank you for the work that you mentioned on
the ATRT, but thank you particularly, I think, for your commitment to
the reality of ICANN and making sure it lives up to under the
circumstances vision.  And thank you, again, for the very public
support of yourself and your administration of the multistakeholder
model here today at ICANN and in other very important fora.  So ladies
and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Larry Strickling.

[ Applause ]

And now, hot on the heels of the words from one of President Obama's
chief advisors, we now have the privilege of hearing from someone else
who until very recently also advised the president.  Andrew McLaughlin
served as the deputy chief technology officer at the White House from
2009 until earlier this year.  And prior to that, from 2004 to 2009,
he was responsible for connecting to the world as director of global
public policy at Google.  But longtime ICANNers will remember an even
earlier job.  His pivotal role at the very start of our organization
as vice president and chief policy officer and chief financial
officer, from 1999 to 2002, and I think that was when we only had
three staff, Andrew, and you were at least three of them.

[ Laughter ]

Andrew helped launch and shape ICANN.  He helped us begin the great
task of connecting to the world, of bringing together stakeholders and
governments.  And it's a task he's returning to, in a way, with his
new startup company focused on creating low-cost collaborative
technology for state and local governments and supporting new startups
in developing countries.

So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Andrew McLaughlin
back to the ICANN stage.

[ Applause ]

>>ANDREW McLAUGHLIN:  Thank you very much.  It's been eight years
since I was at an ICANN meeting, and it feels really like I was just
here -- oops -- yesterday.  It's funny, I was thinking to myself that
I'll always be grateful to ICANN for giving me my first opportunity to
really screw things up on a global scale.

[ Laughter ]

As I keep looking for new opportunities, though, it's interesting for
me to go back and think about the early days of ICANN.

So what Rod asked me to do was from the perspective of somebody who
was arguably -- and I say this arguably because Louie Touton disagrees
with me -- arguably the first employee of ICANN.  I got the first
paycheck, although Louie thinks that it was actually he who signed the
paycheck, so he counts, but anyway --

[ Laughter ]

-- as the first employee of ICANN, to put the organization in
something of a broader context and in some ways to try to make a call
to action to this group today, rooted in the fundamental importance of
the work that you're undertaking.

So a few remarks -- whoa!  That did not seem healthy!

[ Laughter ]

Here we go.

So a few remarks about ICANN from 1998 to 2011 and beyond.  This is a
photograph taken of me at the Boston board meeting.  See if you can
tell the difference between me in 1998 --

[ Laughter ]

That's right.  I've changed my glasses.

[ Laughter ]

I remember very fondly -- and I dressed -- thank you, Larry.  Yes, I
dressed better then too.

[ Laughter ]

Of course the Internet in 1998 had much larger tubes, thanks to the
beauty's of Moore's law we've been able to reduce the size of our
tubes and make the Internet work better.  We've alluded a little bit
today already to the staggering growth of the Internet and when you
look at a chart like this, it really gives you some sense of
appreciation.  You know, really the early years of the Internet were
so marginal, really they were almost like rounding errors compared to
the amounts of traffic that are being carried globally today.  It is
impressive to see -- well, this really does not want to move.  There
we go.

It's impressive to see the growth.  This is one of my favorite ways of
showing data.  It's called gap minder, and what you see here, each
circle represents a country, just to space them out a little bit I've
lined them up according to the human index development indicators and
if you play a time sequence starting in 1990 and moving up to the
present, you can start to see the rising tide that is lifting
basically all humans on the planet into a state of global
interconnectedness through the Internet.

As Bruce Sterling or William Gibson -- I can't remember -- once
famously said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly
distributed yet," this graph which really goes up only to 2007 shows
you that we are starting but in our adult lifetimes we will achieve
even distribution of the future in the form of Internet connectedness.

So -- oops.  Wow.  There we go.

Looking ahead towards 2015, Cisco has put together its numbers for the
next five or six years, and if you think that the Internet is big and
impressive now, this is just -- this is just a graphic.  Mobile data
traffic is going to be jumping from about a quarter of an exabyte up
to six exabytes per month.  Again, this is absolutely staggering
growth and shows you how fundamentally important the work of the DNS
and IP addressing systems is going to be.  This sort of breaks it down
between smartphones and laptops and so forth, and shows basically
there's going to be 92% consolidated annual growth in Internet traffic
in the next couple of years.  That is a further staggering increase in
the amount of data traffic that the organizations represented here in
this room today are going to be fundamentally important in delivering.

Now, what makes all of this possible, since we're here in Silicon
Valley, we have to reflect on this -- what makes all of this possible
is the prediction that Gordon Moore made in the 1960s that the amount
of computing that you could fit onto a given computer chip would
double every 18 to 24 months.  To a quite surprising extent, that has
remained true.  In fact, almost all linearly true.  If you look at the
chip innovations and their ability to deliver computing power for a
given size and price of chip.

So what Moore's law means, in a sense, is that computing is getting
ever cheaper, bandwidth is getting ever cheaper, and that means that
ever more people can communicate ever more amounts of data and
information and communications for the same -- and indeed falling --
costs.

For example, if you look at the cost of a terabyte of data storage in
1992, it would have cost you about $5 million and taken a couple of
racks of computers.  You can now buy a terabyte of data storage for
$89 down the road at Frye's and fit it on the corner of your desk.
That's what Moore's law means in practice.

If you apply the same principles to a car, a car --

[ Laughter ]

-- that cost you $20,000 five years ago would cost you -- the same car
-- only $2500 today and five years from now it would cost you about
$350.

That's if we had Moore's law apply to the auto industry.  And maybe we
will.

But for the Internet, what this means is that cheaper and faster
computing brings cheaper and faster Internet.  Which means cheaper and
faster information and communications.  Which means more information
and communications to and from more people.  And there is a
geopolitical consequence to that.  After all, what this means in
practice is that the Internet is democratizing and decentralizing
access to communications and information.  As we all know, information
is power, and so the democratization of information equals the
democratization of the structures of power in a world where
information is power.  So democratization brings disruption and we're
seeing that unfold before us in so many different ways.  In data, in
news, in culture, in politics.  We see the democratization of the
tools to create information, to access information, to distribute
information are bringing what I believe to be a colossal and very
welcome shift in the culture of the planet that we live on, which is
to say that we are moving from what I hope will eventually be seen as
a kind of bizarre lacuna in human development in the 20th century
where human beings were essentially treated largely in media and
government and politics and so forth as passive consumers of product,
passive consumers of messages, as passive recipients of mass
broadcasts on TV, on radio, through newspapers, as recipients of
politicians' messages to be driven home.  And instead, we're seeing
the ability, the cheapness, and the accessibility of low-cost creation
of information and the sending of communications around the world is,
in fact, enabling people to become active creators, active creators of
culture, active creators of parity, active creators of news, active
creators and activists in politics.

This is what's unfolding around us right now, and in some -- in a
large sense, it's a function of Moore's law.

If you think about the incredible amount of computing power that each
individual in this room has available to you for free, from these
companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook and Twitter and so
forth, they provide you for free staggering amounts of computing.

And human beings all across the planet are putting it to work.  They
are using these so-called Web 2.0 services to change the way that
politics works, to spark revolutions and connect with each other, to
make weak ties strong in countries like Egypt and Tunisia and across
the Middle East today, and no doubt in many countries in the future.

We see mentos and Diet Coke being turned into a business model.  We
see incredibly annoying people get 15 minutes of fame sitting in their
bedrooms.  But this is the power of the Internet is to make this
democratization and decentralization mean something and turn into
something.

Of course we have the problem that our borderless Internet confronts
bordered nations.  This is not going to strange.  The struggle that
Larry alluded to in his speech that we have to figure out what the
role of governments is and how they can enforce and vindicate their
legitimate values and national interests on a borderless Internet that
crosses every frontier that we've built and allows people to connect
to each other directly across the planet, that is still a fundamental
tension.

Turning then to ICANN for just a few minutes, let me say that I share
the previous speaker's, you know, sense that this model which might
have been a debacle and a catastrophe and I did my best to make it so
has, in fact, proven its value.  The multistakeholder model that lies
underneath ICANN has proven to be fundamentally important and
resilient in the face of these national bordered nations and the
challenges that they have presented and the interests that they're
trying to vindicate.

The multistakeholder model requires sitting around the table sharing
ideas and so forth, and I think its importance is fundamental.

I've been thinking a lot about over the years many times I've been
thinking -- found myself thinking about the profound wisdom that was
embodied in Jon Postel and his community's decision to use the ISO3166
table for the designate -- for the determination of what is and is not
a country or geographically distinct territory, and therefore,
entitled to a two-level domain.  If you think about it, in the early
days of the Internet, this was a potentially explosive, extremely
difficult, highly contentious issue.  What is and is not a country is
the sort of thing that wars get fought over.  And one of the things
that Jon Postel did, some would say quite wisely, others would say for
lack of any better alternative, but was he found a table created by an
authoritative body that allowed him, as the Internet coordinator, to
delegate a highly toxic political question to another organization
that was better equipped and better able to handle it.

And when I look at some of the issues and the problems that ICANN is
confronting right now, it's clear to me that there is a profound
kernel of wisdom in that.

There are no easy answers for how to delegate a problem like who
should run dot Muslim or dot Islam or dot Kashmir or dot Tibet, who
should run dot Jesus or pick your religious, ethnic, cultural, or
controversial name.  Nevertheless, the idea that the technical
coordinating organization should be as modest as possible and as
deferential as possible to the institutions that have been constituted
and developed to solve these kinds of questions over hundreds of
years, seems profoundly wise to me.

And I think about that because in some sense, a way to think about the
challenge for ICANN today is whether this room of people and all of
the thousands who participate in the ICANN processes on-line can come
up with an answer that's as good as what this one man figured out
sitting alone in that paper-filled office at the University of
Southern California some years ago.

And so with that, I'm going to close and just say it's really nice to
be back here.  I hope to see as many old friends as I can.  Thank you
to Rod and to Peter for the invitation to be here.  And as maybe not a
dinosaur but maybe more like a Neanderthal man of ICANN, you know,
kind of unsuccessful evolutionary branch that's now extinct, I'd like
to say to everybody in this room, congratulations on all the hard work
you've done.  For all of the reasons that I just said, the work of
this organization, this community, is of fundamental importance to
allow the world to realize the potential, the democratizing,
decentralizing, individual empowering potential of the Internet and
however irritated you may get with one another, however frustrated you
may get, I hope you all will continue to retire for the lobbies for
the beers that will lubricate this process because it is so
fundamentally important that you get it right.  Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>>MR. ROD BECKSTROM:  Thank you, Andrew.  And to use some California
speech that my 15-year-old daughter might give me, there's two words
for his speech.  "Awesome, dude!"

[ Laughter ]

Welcome to my home, the San Francisco Bay Area.  And welcome to
ICANN's 40th public meeting, our largest in history, and our eighth in
North America.  We meet today in a vibrant center of innovation and
technical accomplishment.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley are home to many of history's
transformative ideas, as Peter mentioned, where technology and
inspiration join hands.

Here an idea can grab the imagination, take root in just months, and
begin to change the world.  Ingenious devices, applications, and on-
line services developed in Silicon Valley allow you to watch the
streaming video of this session and post the blog you've just written.

You can use your mobile phone to tweet your disagreement with my
speech.

You can use your iPad to tell your friends you don't like my tie.

They will know within seconds, no matter where they are in the world,
if they're connected by the Internet.

Thanks to the amazing technology and solutions so many of which have
been developed here in Silicon Valley.

Think storage.  Networking.  Graphics.  Mobility.

They all rely on basic semiconductor technologies developed here.

Think Facebook.  Google.  Apple.  Twitter.

This is the place they call home.

The Internet is the greatest communications tool in the history of
mankind.  It is changing the world by facilitating the spread of ideas
beyond national borders, enabling human freedoms, stimulating economic
growth, enriching cultural diversity and nurturing the seeds of
innovation and social change.

And the Internet is helping those around the world who feel
marginalized to raise their voices and to be heard, not just in
presidential palaces but far beyond their borders.

I was once lucky enough to acquire an exceptional bottle of wine.  It
was an 1820s Madeira made of grapes grown during the lifetime of
President Thomas Jefferson, one of America's founding fathers.  The
dusty green bottle had large air bubbles in it and an ancient cork.
It had been preserved in a private wine cellar in New York that dates
back to the 1700s.

A few years later, I was invited to dinner with President Clinton, and
I brought along that bottle of fabulous wine.

That night, I had the extraordinary privilege of toasting William
Jefferson Clinton, our 42nd president, with the wine produced during
the term of our 3rd president, Thomas Jefferson himself when he was
still alive.

It was a magical moment.

Jefferson not only loved wines but had a strong knowledge and passion
for debates -- for a debate on the issues of the day and he was a
voracious consumer of information and believed that a well-informed
public was a cornerstone of representative government.  "I cannot live
without my books," he famously stated.  I know many of us can relate
to that.

He was a wealthy man, so he was able to build a fine collection of
rare and important documents in a beautiful library that he designed
at Monticello.

Now through the global Internet, 2 billion people have virtually
instant access to more information than the human brain, even
Jefferson's, could process in a lifetime and the contents of his
library could easily fit on a small thumb drive in your pocket.

Imagine if Jefferson were alive today to benefit from this resource.
I bet he would be online and fully engaged in the critical issue of
Internet governance and independence, some of the most important
strategic challenges of this age.  As David G. Post wrote in his
excellent and engaging "In Search of Jefferson's Moose" book, if
Jefferson were alive today, he would probably be working on the design
of Internet governance structures.  He might even be with us right
here in this room at ICANN 40.

Issues of governance and independence remain key factors in ICANN's
relationship with the U.S. government.  The Clinton Administration was
instrumental in the formulation of ICANN in 1998 as a not-for-profit
public benefit corporation.  The Administration saw that the Internet
would become a global resource and envision a unique model that would
welcome global voices to the debate on its future.

ICANN was thus conceived as a private-sector led, multistakeholder
organization to coordinate the Domain Name System that the world has
become increasingly dependent upon.

As ICANN's formation evolved during the Clinton Administration, so too
did the Governmental Advisory Committee recognizing the legitimate
role of governments in public policy issues involving the Domain Name
System.

We are honored to have President William Jefferson Clinton join us
this week.  He will speak at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening in this
room, and I hope that you can attend.

And I'm delighted that a pivotal player in ICANN's creation, Ira
Magaziner, has joined us here this morning.

Ira, welcome, and thank you for all you did to help make this
organization a reality.

Creating ICANN required not just vision but courage.  The inclusive
multistakeholder model that is now so basic to our work was a
breakthrough concept 12 years ago.  It wasn't widely accepted, and it
is still under threat today.  It is built on openness, inclusion,
trust, and collaboration.  Among Internet governance operational
bodies, these principles are woven into real multistakeholder
processes, as you well know.

The multistakeholder model can deliver superior policies, actions and
decisions because it leverages the intelligence at the edge of the
network, harnessing the collective wisdom of the Internet ecosystem
and its specialist participants and groups.  Groups such as the
Internet service providers, domain name businesses, local Internet
communities, governments, Internet standards organizations, the
regional Internet registries, individual Internet users, non-profits
and businesses around the world and many others are all welcome here,
and we benefit tremendously from this engagement.

And ICANN actively engages with all of them because we believe in a
simple principle, everyone with an interest in the Internet should
have an equal right to be heard in its governance.  Policy development
structures should be shaped across bodies of expertise and shared
interests, and those competing interests must be balanced, as they are
by the ICANN board of directors.

The multistakeholder model is working.  How do we know?  Because the
Internet works.  It works on behalf of the world, and it brings
diversity and richness of thought to the governance of this primary
and very precious global resource.

Is it messy?  Loud?  Slow?  Frustrating?  Yes, sometimes.  It's in our
communal DNA to debate, to examine every issue in excruciating detail
and sometimes beyond.  Some who do not get the decision they sought
may occasionally express their frustration through calls for
reconsideration or for further accountability and transparency or
other reviews of process of which we have many.  And it is good.  And
we hear them, too, because the multistakeholder model works and the
global public interest is served.  And when all voices are heard, no
single voice can dominate an organization, not even governments, not
even the government that facilitated its very creation.

The success of the model established with such foresight can be
measured many ways most advisebly in ICANN's years of reliable and
successful coordination in the root thanks to all of us.  ICANN takes
its stewardship of this function very seriously and through continuous
improvement has maintained a high level of performance and stability
as the number of daily DNS queries through this community has grown
exponentially over this last decade.  Excellent and predictable of
IANA services are critical to the future of the Internet.  Root
management and DNS coordination serve the community of nations and are
critical to the preservation of a single, unified Internet.

One of my most important responsibilities as CEO is to listen.  And in
our multistakeholder community, that means hearing a very wide range
of voices from private companies and NGOs, from the technical
community to the world's government to average users.

Since I became CEO almost two years ago, I have listened carefully as
many in the community, at our public meetings and around the world,
have expressed concerns about the structure of the current IANA
contract.

Some say the agreement is not international enough.  Some express the
view that it's too short-term and that this erodes institutional
confidence in ICANN and the model.

Still others feel that the U.S. governments limitation of the IANA
agreement to one year suggests a stopgap arrangement, whereas the
global Internet, ICANN and IANA functions demand reliability and
predictability.

Some believe these functions could be better handled through an
intergovernmental organization, as Larry mentioned.  Others disagree
with that proposal vehemently -- rather, Larry disagreed vehemently.
And thank you very much for that.

Many in the community have called for greater transparency around root
processing, looking for clarity on what happens between the time ICANN
hands off a root change to the U.S. Department of Commerce and when
that change is given to VeriSign for incorporation into the root.

These views are often coupled with the belief that the U.S. government
should live up to its 1998 white paper commitment to transfer
management of the functions to the private sector-led organization
entrusted to manage the DNS, which is ICANN.

The Department of Commerce has recently issued a notice of inquiry or
NOI in preparation for the renewal of the IANA contract, the fifth
iteration since ICANN's formation in 1998, as discussed today.

This is the chance to add your voice to those determining the fate of
the IANA function.  If your voice is to be heard, you must speak up.
Whatever your opinion, we hope that you will express it openly and in
writing.  Please take full advantage of this unique window before it
closes and make a difference in the future of the Internet.

Each ICANN meeting is an opportunity to report on our achievements in
increasing our transparency and accountability.  We have a strong
foundation to build upon, but there is always more work to be done.

And we're building on it throughout ICANN, in every department and in
discussions with every community organization, not only to meet our
own goals but to surpass the standards of transparency and
accountability as demonstrated by other global institutions.

For example, the public wiki launched in December to track and
document action on more than 800 board resolutions, every one single
resolution in ICANN's history, now includes the rationale for each new
one.  And those resolutions are now posted in five U.N. languages.  So
for the first time ever in our history, we have every single
resolution posted publicly in a Wiki with information on how that
resolution was followed up on or not followed up on, whether it was
funded or not funded.  All of that information is fully transparent
and online to the world.

We've also raised the bar for public reporting of staff activities and
information.  For example, a metrics dashboard provides detailed
information on internal operations, including performance indicators
on registrant protection, global participation, finance and
internationalized domain names, among many others.

And the recent board-GAC consultations in Brussels were conducted
transparently with almost 100 observers in the room and many more
connected online.

This powerful dedication to transparency is helping us to fulfill the
obligations in our bylaws and in the Affirmation of Commitments.

That ground-breaking agreement affirms ICANN's independence and
commitment to making accountable and transparent decisions in the
public interest around the world.  It also commits us to reviews by
the community, including the recent accountability and transparency
review.  After nine months of intensive work and almost $1 million of
support, the Accountability and Transparency Review Team has issued 27
recommendations.  They focus on our areas:  The board, including the
nomination committee's selection process; the Government Advisory
Committee; public input and policy development; and review mechanisms
for board decisions.

Some recommendations relate to work that our staff is already doing,
and the review team has provided useful guidance for this.  Some
recommendations will require new resources, and several will involve
decisions by the boards and other groups and bodies in the ICANN
family.

We are assessing ICANN's ability to implement the recommendations,
which is largely the responsibility of the board, Nominating
Committee, the GAC and Supporting Organizations and Advisory
Committees, in essence, all of us, the entire ICANN community.  The
board has asked staff to propose a way forward for each recommendation
and, where practical, to provide preliminary work plans and budgets.

This week the board will consider the 2011-2014 strategic plan that
will guide the budget and operating planning process that is already
underway.  Many of you have been involved in that process as it began
early last fall.  A fiscal year 2012 budget and operating plan will be
publicly discussed here and will ultimately the community and the
board will decide which ATRT recommendations should be included.

We will respect the Affirmation's deadlines and provide the detailed
analysis along with our advice to the board which must take action on
all of the recommendations by June 30th.

Now, that was a lot of process and deadlines and budget.  So let me be
very clear.  We intend to fulfill and wherever possible exceed our
obligations under the Affirmation of Commitments subject to receiving
appropriate resources, not just on transparency and accountability but
on the upcoming recommendations of the WHOIS and security and
stability and resilience reviews as well that are also part of the
Affirmation of Commitments and the review of promoting competition,
consumer trust and consumer choice that will follow one year after the
launch of new gTLDs.

These international community reviews reinforce the concept that
Internet Governance is our common responsibility, and we will do our
best to ensure they are successful.

The Internet belongs to no country and to every country.  It belongs
to all of us.  ICANN's relations with governments and other
international stakeholders continues to advance.  That doesn't mean we
will always agree, nor is that the goal.  What matters is the serious,
respectful and positive manner in which we engage with each other.  We
listen and consider each other's views.  We can never make too great
an effort in this respect.

We can also enhance our relationships through greater community
participation in policy working groups.  And in the spirit of
transparency and accountability that we have all embraced, community
participants should also be transparent about the interests they
represent.

The recent board-GAC consultations in Brussels on new generic top-
level domains are good evidence of these deepening relations.  They
demonstrated that the multistakeholder model is viable and that the
GAC has an important role to play in it, as reflected in the ICANN
bylaws.  The meeting was held in a spirit of cooperation and mutual
respect, transparently and openly.  We listened carefully to the GAC's
advice, and we will do so again this week.

Another example of strong international collaboration is the ongoing
effort to ensure the continuance of the Internet Governance Forum.

The IGF is an effective building block in the governance of the global
Internet.  Its future, which looked so shaky just months ago, has
benefited from a series of collaborative international efforts.  And
while it is not guaranteed, it has moved on to a more promising path
than what might have been, thanks to many of you.

A working group of the United Nations Commission on Science and
Technology for Development which will propose changes that will affect
the IGF's next five-year mandate.  ICANN is participating as one of
the five technical community representatives on the working group and
planning is underway for the Nairobi IGF, the last to be organized
under the existing terms.

The IGF is a communication forum, not a regulatory negotiation.  It
serves as a valuable platform for a wide range of stakeholders to
exchange their views, and ICANN fully supports the extension of its
mandate.

In Miami a few weeks ago, I was part of a diverse group of Internet
leaders who met to acknowledge a historic milestone, the allocation
from IANA to the regional Internet registries of the last address
blocks of IPv4, the Internet protocol that has been largely unchanged
for 35 years since Vint and other colleagues developed it.

The expansion of IPv6 is far more than a technical advance.  It is a
vivid illustration of the Internet's amazing growth and essential path
to the future of continuing communication and innovation.

IPv6 offers a quantity of addresses beyond the human imagination:
Trillions of times larger than under IPv4.  There are more IPv6
addresses than stars in the universe, literally.

Full adoption is essential to ensure that the Internet has room to
grow, to accommodate the Internet of things and the ideas we haven't
even thought of yet, the ones your son or daughter may be dreaming up
right now on their smartphones.  And for their vision to become
reality, we need global adoption of this new protocol.

IPv6 is the platform for tomorrow's technology.  Once we deploy it
fully, the future will be limited only by the boundaries of our
imagination, not by the absence of Internet addresses.

Nothing in our work is more important than keeping the Internet's
Domain Name System secure, stable and resilient.  It is our primary
mission.  Threats remain and continue, including technical threats and
political developments around the world.

ICANN conducted its fourth annual exercise in early February, this
time on L-root operations, demonstrating our commitment to fulfill our
DNS charter.  Together with our partners, Asia-Pacific Top-Level
Domain Association, The Internet Society and the Network Startup
Resource Center, we conducted a secure registry operations course in
Hong Kong during last month's joint meeting of the Asia-Pacific
Regional Internet Conference on operational technologies and APNIC,
the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre.  This was an opportunity
for in-depth training with ccTLD managers on best practices and
operational security, furthering our commitment on DNS capacity-
building with regional TLD organizations.

This week's ICANN meeting includes a separate track that links all
security-related events such as today's DNS abuse forum, the Tech Day
hosted jointly by DNS Operations, Analysis and Research Center and the
ccNSO and the DNSSEC workshop.  This is an easy way for you to
identify and engage in security-related discussions.

We also welcome the law enforcement community members participating
here, including Interpol.  Our continuing collaboration enriches the
multistakeholder model.  In partnership with the community, we will
continue to do our part to help coordinate community-supported
security and stability efforts and to serve as a resource in
addressing threats to the DNS.

Perhaps our most significant security achievement is the ongoing
implementation of DNSSEC.  With strong community support, it is being
vigorously deployed around the world at a pace that exceeds our
projections.  We encourage companies to deploy DNSSEC on their DNS
infrastructure, in effect, to turn DNSSEC validation on and to sign
their company's domain names.

In less than a year since the root was signed, today we have 76 top-
level domains signed.  And in a few weeks, dot com with almost 100
million domain name domain names will also be signed.  With the root
zone and many TLDs signed, the number of domains using DNSSEC will
accelerate.  Large ISPs such as Comcast are deploying DNSSEC to
provide additional security for their customers.  And major equipment
vendors such as Cisco are looking at building it right into their
products.  This is a major win for DNSSEC.

And, finally, DNSSEC could help secure more than just domain name
domain names, perhaps e-mail, Web sites, identities, communications
and programs bringing seamless and trustworthy communications across
organizational and national boundaries.

For those of you who may not be fully aware and knowledgeable of
DNSSEC, there will be a session for newcomers today at 4:00.

The Latin American and Caribbean TLD Association has set a target of
50% signed TLDs in Latin America by the end of this year.  2011 will
be the year of DNSSEC for LacTLD, according to its general manager who
is here with us today.  We want to hear that commitment echoed around
the world.

We also continue to see progress in advancing the new generic top-
level domain program.  For some, that progress is not fast enough.
For others, it's far too rapid.  But we're not in a race.  We're
considering a significant change to the world's primary communications
tool.  We do not do that lightly.

We have invested five years of intensive efforts collectively.
Getting it right is much more important than doing it fast.

The Governmental Advisory Committee and the board of directors met in
Brussels two weeks ago with three concise goals:  To clearly identify
areas where differences remain, to work together to bring those items
to resolution and to move the process far enough forward that a
decision to launch would be within reach.

It was a very constructive session.  We're not there yet, but we've
made significant progress on a number of these differences.  There are
remaining issues and given the extraordinary nature of the topics and
the opportunities presented, we have provided extended sessions for
the board and the GAC to meet this week.

No matter how the outcome is viewed, the collegial spirit of
engagement shown by all parties in Brussels is a demonstration of the
multistakeholder model at its best.  And long-term work that has gone
into preparing new generic top-level domains has had a welcoming side
effect.  It has made ICANN a better institution.

The long and inclusive community-based process has broadened our
views.  It has engaged individuals and organizations that had not
previously engaged in ICANN.  And it established more collaborative
relationships among existing constituencies and stakeholders,
including the GAC.

The next step for new gTLDs is here in San Francisco where the board
and GAC will participate in further consultations to ensure the GAC's
public policy advice has been fully considered.

Internationalized domain names are an eloquent testament to the power
of inclusiveness and collaboration.  Perhaps the greatest praise for
IDNs since we met in Cartagena is that they have so quickly become
ordinary.  IDNs are an amazing achievement, a profound change to the
Internet and core part of rapid globalization.

They have opened the door for billions to access the Internet in their
primary language.  Naturally we like to shout that out from rooftops
all the way from Hong Kong to Qatar.

But as each new IDN enters the root, it seems less exceptional.  That
such an accomplishment should be considered normal and not worthy of
much notice is the loudest endorsement of the programs success.

Under the fast-track process, we've received 34 requests for
consideration of IDN Country Code Top Level Domains.  17 countries and
territories now have IDNs in the Internet's root.  They include
Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Indic scripts together used by over 3
billion people worldwide.

We are also undertaking the first annual review of the fast-track
process to ensure that it meets the needs of the Internet community
and users.

This morning you've heard from an architect of ICANN, from one of the
founders and fathers of the Internet, from the Assistant Secretary of
the U.S. Department of Commerce and the former White House deputy
chief technology officer, and first employee staff member of ICANN.
What an impressive group of distinguished individuals linked to the
development of ICANN and the Internet that have provided such a broad
and sophic vision of what we are up to and what we have gone through
and some pointers on where we're heading.  We thank you all.

And I now have the honor to address you, ICANN's dedicated community,
and to thank you for your active engagement which is the very
foundation of our multistakeholder model.  I also thank you in advance
for sending your thoughts to the U.S. government in the next few weeks
on how this model, which works so well already, can be improved even
more, whether you believe that's in the form of a cooperative
agreement or a continuance of the current procurement contract or
something else.

Whatever your thoughts and opinions are, we urge you to share them and
we applaud the Department of Commerce for opening up formally to the
world's input.

This is the moment for you to be heard on ICANN's future and the
future of the Internet.  Please speak up, whatever your view is, about
the multistakeholder model of global Internet governance and how you
would like it to improve because your voice matters.

You have until March 31st, only a few days, not so many days until the
end of this month, to express your opinion by responding to the notice
of inquiry.  We urge each and every one of you to please do so.

Thanks, once again, for participating with such dedication and
enthusiasm in ICANN and in its public meetings.  Let's make ICANN 40 a
fun, respectful and productive week.  Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

And this closes the session.  Thank you.