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 63 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.