ICANNWiki:Interview with Ron Andruff on the origins of the business community in Internet governance (2024)
| Internet Governance Atheneum |
|---|
| Title: Interview with Ron Andruff on the origins of the business community in Internet governance |
| Format: Edited text transcript of video interview |
| Date: September 19, 2024 |
| Interviewer: Mark W. Datysgeld (User:MarkWD) |
| Interviewee: Ron Andruff |
(Mark W. D.) So, thank you very much, Ron. It's a great pleasure to be interviewing a person that I respect so much. This will be an interview very focused on the history of the business community in Internet governance, and then ICANN in particular. If you could just start by reminding us of what point of your career you were in by the time that ICANN was being assembled, just so that for historical purposes, we can have a reference of where you were in terms of your business and your career at that point.
(Ron Andruff) I came to ICANN for the first time near 2000, and the reason I came was just a crazy story. I met an individual in Venice who had told me at a cocktail party during the Venice Contemporary Art Biennale, that I was attending with my wife, about how he had just applied for .xxx on the Internet. To which I replied, “what are you talking about? And how does that work?” And that was the first time that I actually had a bug put in my ear about ICANN.
We agreed to meet the next day in the light of day and have a conversation where he told me the story; how a number of TLDs had been brought forward, .post, I think was one of them, some of the early ones, and .xxx had got tossed into that mix somehow. He had tried to acquire it, but it didn't happen. But it was interesting enough when he was telling me this story, that this body has just been established called ICANN, and that they were responsible for this thing called the Internet and that anyone could participate.
So, when that conversation ended, I found myself on vacation with my wife and I was ankle deep in the ocean and called my business partner in New York. I said, “look into this thing called ICANN and the Internet," we knew about the Internet of course, it was just coming out, but you know, “what is this body? And what are they doing?" I said "I just heard a story and I think maybe there's a business opportunity.” And that brought me then to ICANN.
We spent about eight or nine months putting together a study on what we thought all this would be and how it might work. And then I flew down to my first ICANN meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, so I think that was around ICANN 10, and met with maybe 100 people total. When I went to the rooms, there were only three or four people in each of them. In the BC, there was Sébastien Bachollet, Marilyn Cade, Philip Sheppard. Then I went into the Registries Stakeholder Group and there was Chuck Gomes, representing Verisign, and then I went into the Intellectual Property Constituency and there was just a couple of people, and the same for the ISPs. So it was a handful of people there relative to what we see today. It was very interesting to see such a small group of people who are being given this responsibility to manage this thing called the Internet, which we did not know at the time what it might become.
(Mark W. D.) That's leads us perfectly into my next question, which is: how did the idea of having a permanent representation for businesses and the private sector within ICANN evolve? So, when you arrived, it had already been established as a small group. But you know, how did this idea among business people evolve in the sense of “we have to be here permanently? We need to have representation at all times and we need to interact here.” What was the mindset?
(Ron Andruff) So, being such a small group of people, it was kind of an infectious thing. It was exciting that each person there had a singular voice, whether they represented IBM or AT&T, or in my case, it was my small company, a small business. At the end of the day, it was just really attractive to think that the Green Paper had been created. So yes, the structure was just being put in place now for the first time. It was exciting to be there with just a handful of people in each room. Back then we did not have the GNSO Council.
We had the DNSO, and that was a forum where everybody kind of just brought their complaints and there was no real structure to it the way we see these forums today, but the fact is that it gave everyone a voice and you could hear the different issues that people were bringing up, whether it was coming from the ISP community, the telcos, or from intellectual property... also ALAC and NCUC. It was such an infectious thing. I think that's the point, is that when we sit and have conversations, because we were such a small group, we would have everybody from the various constituencies sitting at the table. As much work would be done in the restaurant at dinners as it was getting done in the rooms.
The only choke point was that we had such a lack of staff and actual infrastructure, in terms of having an organized staff to capture all of the information and do various things; I think one of the universities was providing the Secretariat, if we will, they were doing kind of a live capture of everything that was being said, so we really didn't have resources like we have today, far from it, but the choke point was on the staffing side of ICANN, their capability to do things. There was enough of us wanting to do things, but we didn't have enough people on their side to make that happen.
| Editor's note: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was providing these services at the time. Source |
(Mark W. D.) What was the vision? What did the small group of businesses expect to do within this organization and what was the general goal of the business community at the time when ICANN was starting?
(Ron Andruff) Well, from the Business Constituency point of view, the thing that we can credit Marilyn Cade, whom I will call the mother of the Internet, as much as Vint Cerf and company were fathers of the Internet... if not for Marilyn Cade, I think a lot of ICANN would not have come together as well as it did. She was such an evangelist. So, within the organization she immediately set up large businesses and small businesses seats, so we had two sides of business actually in one place and with the incentive that my vote, my voice, was equal to AT&T's. So that was a very exciting prospect.
Now, there was no funding, there was not even travel funding for Councilors. You know, none of these things were available because there was no money in the ICANN organization. Basically, if you had an organization that would fund you, say your company had an interest in what was happening, you would be able to go as a small business like myself. We just self-funded because there was a very exciting and interesting place to play in. At that time we were traveling for four meetings a year, and we now have come back to three meetings for the last, let's say, 15 to 20 years, but back then it was every three months that we were on the road to another part of the world to bring this information to those regions where they would be able to have conversations with us and bring their own information to help inform the conversation.
So, I think the Business Constituency in terms of trying to focus on what was it that we wanted, it was more about what we as an entire group could collaboratively do. What's the list of things we need to do? Well, we're breaking away from Network Solutions. Now we have Verisign, we need to have more registrars, more registries... How do we do that? What would it look like? You know, what would be the rules that would make sense to encourage more players to come into the market to provide the infrastructure? What would be effective to bring more membership to the various constituencies so that we could have a much broader and more global voice than we would have if we were just America-centric, which it certainly was at the time. The U.S. government was just kind of giving up control of the Internet if you will, and Network Solutions was the one company that was the registry and the registrar, I believe... but no one knew what this was going to be and how powerful it could be.
(Mark W. D.) So, this early community of businesses and NGOs sort of self-funding and working together with these more established players in the registration community… What were the first few years of policy making like? What do you recall being the key things that were discussed? Or at least the ones that the business community was involved in, or was there no such thing? How did that work out at the time and what did the Business Community actually get involved in?
(Ron Andruff) Well, I'll share a story that actually I was kind of the central figure in. But in terms of a policy activity that we undertook, I think that generally speaking, if the ISPs felt that there was something important that they needed to bring forward, we in the Business Constituency would of course look at it just like all of the other constituencies would review and bring their comments.
Within the BC it was really about stability, security, that the Internet would always be stable. That we could rely on building a website and it would function, you know, interoperability... those elements. Because again, the Internet was just being built. Those were a lot of the policies that the BC would be focused on, but the one that I brought forward early on had to do with financing ICANN.
I mentioned earlier that the biggest problem that we had was this choke point at staff, because Louis Touton, not only was he General Counsel, he was the website manager and also managing all of the administration of the office, and I think he had one or two people with him. So basically, when we needed to post something on the website, if Louis was working on drafting a document, that wasn't going to get posted.
The question was: how do we fund ICANN? It began of course on a million-dollar loan that was fronted by AT&T and others because they believed that this would be something worthwhile. In order to pay for all of the various things that we needed from an administrative point of view, I had asked in my early days “how much does ICANN get, where's the funding source that's gonna keep this organization alive?” To which came back that when a domain name is sold, then they got some money.
I said in reply “but how much money do you get?” Because there were so few domain names, so the numbers didn't add up. When it became clear to me that they was talking about pennies, I went to the microphone at the Open Forum and said, “you know, with regard to funding ICANN, I would recommend that we start taking in 25 cents from every domain name, so that we can create a funding mechanism.” And I said, “when I get my telephone bill at the end of the month, I see all kinds of charges and excises, all of these little things attached on the bottom of it. And that's my bill that I get every month and it's part of my service.” I said, “I can’t understand why we can't be charging an extra 25 cents on top of the domain names that are being sold and give that to ICANN.”
To which Jeff Neuman went to the microphone from the Registrar Constituency. He said, “What do you know? We have to collect that money and it's an exercise, it's a big problem. I mean, this is problematic, I don't know how we'll ever do this.” And I returned to the microphone and said, “my second recommendation is that we give a nickel to every registrar that collects this money and gives it to ICANN. They can have 5 of the 25 cents, but then at least ICANN's getting four or five times what it had been getting in terms of funding.” And that became the law of the land.
In fact, we as the ICANN community reached consensus during the week of the meeting, and that was brought before the ICANN Board. At the Board meeting they passed a resolution that “we will now take 25 cents per domain name”, which would go to funding the ICANN organization, so that we could hire up on some staff, so we would start to be able to produce our work at a much more satisfactory pace for everybody. There you go, my 25 cents policy story... but it is exactly how it used to work: we would come up with an idea, we’d talk about it amongst us and then we would say, “okay, let's go out and try to bring together the community on this”. Because we were so few those days at each meeting, we would be able to bring it forward. Sometimes you get stuff that we have to chew on for a few meetings and go back and forth, but for the most part it was collegial work. Very collegial.
| Key insight: During ICANN 12 (Accra), Ron Andruff proposed on the Public Forum that ICANN org. should start collecting around 25 cents for each registered domain name, and that 5 of those cents be directed to the responsible registrar for the trouble. Source |
(Mark W. D.) How ready was the structure at the time that you joined ICANN? How much was assembled versus how much did the community have to literally do along the lines of “okay, 25 cents” and what was that process like? What was there? What did you guys have to come up with?
(Ron Andruff) We had to come up with a lot. I mean, when there was a lot of improvisation. We have actual live access to every meeting like we do today because the technology just wasn't there. It was more about getting ourselves to the meetings, registering as much of the details of the discussion as we possibly could with the skeleton staff and then trying to work with them to actually bring back the documentation that we needed.
Today, very few people actually appreciate the depth of the ICANN org. team behind the scenes gathering all of that information. The problem that we had then was having specific documentation so that everyone is able to reach some form of consensus, and today we don't have that issue, because we have such an extraordinary and talented staff able to grasp all of these nuances. They've been with us for a long time, doing it in the trenches with us. That's a really fortunate thing.
Back then, we would have to make things up by the whole cloth and then bring that piece forward for everyone to more or less agree with it, and it would just go into the machine and come out of the sausage grinder at some point. We had Open Forums, we had Public Comments, we had those things, but it took a long time for them to get digested within the system simply because of the administrative vacuum that was there.
Once the funding started to flow and we started to add more people, things became much more interesting. And again, as you know, we went through a number of CEOs over time and with the various CEOs you had a more efficiently running ICANN or a less efficiently running ICANN, knowing that this organization was growing exponentially all the time. It was not a reflection of people not doing the work, it was just that we were caught between this dynamic of an Internet that was expanding at light speed and at the same time we need to have people that could gather the information, the conversations, put it into policy language that we all agree upon, and bring it forward. Today we have the luxury of staff... Although I think we’re cutting back on some staff now and next period, but at the end of the day, that's really the luxury we have today, whereas back then it was a much tougher.
(Mark W. D.) I wonder what it looked like from the perspective of small businesses versus large businesses. In this interview you mentioned that from the start there was already a bit of a concession within the BC in terms of voices getting represented. But how did that relationship look like over the years, as more small businesses and more big businesses arrived in the room and had to have these difficult conversations, evolving in terms of complexity? What sort of relationship was being built around there and how was power balanced out?
(Ron Andruff) Well, because of the small and large business rule within the BC, that granted the BC two seats on the Nominating Committee. Whereas the ALAC would get four and all the other constituencies would get one. So the numbers weren't, you know, all quite right from the beginning; that ALAC would have so many voices, when the ISPs would have one, the intellectual property guys would have one, BC would have two, and so forth.
That enabled us to have just more of a voice in the conversation, but the small business owner has much different views than a large business corporate. You know, the large corporations just keep grinding on and on as their BC representative changes, while small businesses and SMEs have to be strategic. I would say it used to be probably 25% small businesses and 75% big business. It wasn't a large number of smaller guys because they need to keep their focus on their business. If their business is Internet related, that makes more sense, but many were not. Still, they were interested in being there and having a voice and making determinations on what the Internet would look like.
Internally those conversations were very free-flowing and understood... Everybody knew everybody had the same voting power, so all voices were heard, all discussions were had. There were very few real issues that would come up other than individual personality clashes. And unfortunately, that's ongoing, doesn't matter what industry you're in. But, in any case, in ICANN, there were serious personality classes from time to time that would cause a big kerfuffle, much ado about nothing for the most part, just people's egos getting in the way. At the end of the day, from a policy point of view, trying to do the things we were doing, both big business and small business collaborated very well within the BC, that part was a joy.
Also, don't forget all of the platforms: Amazon grew up, then Facebook grew up, I mean... Back when we were starting ICANN, they were saying "it's impossible that Amazon can continue to lose all the money it's losing, it will never make a profit." So I guess they made a profit, but these were just companies, they were not institutions by any stretch of the imagination. Inside the BC you will have Amazon, you'll have Meta, and these various representatives. The current 21st Century business community is much more heavily overwhelmed by platforms and big business. That’s why the small business owner, I think, doesn't quite have the voice they would have had in my time.
(Mark W. D.) I wonder how did you guys perceive the ascension of these big platforms, the .com phenomenon, and the whole industry that was created around the Internet, how did that impact the business community that was there? And how did that affect ICANN and the normal policy making that you guys were trying to carry out and develop within this institution?
(Ron Andruff) It took 20 years to see where Meta would go. I think I don't want to use a term like "it blinded us to what was going on", but we didn't have any understanding of what that impact there would be. “What will it really mean? At the end of the day, where will this take us?” I don't think anybody had those visions other than those people working within those companies, maybe they saw what the future of their company might look like.
If you leave a frog in the water and turn the heat up slowly by one degree, even when it gets boiling, the frog will stay in there and get cooked. So, we were a little bit like that, sitting in the pot getting cooked. I don't think any of us had the time or the desire to go and see whether or not Meta was providing safety in terms of young teenagers, like, “what are the safety precautions? What are you doing there? What's YouTube doing? How are you guys managing these things? How is PayPal managing fraud?” and “what are they ways you're gonna solve this problem? My bank account just got emptied through the Internet.”
We were kind of caught up in all of this, just being in the mix, and for myself, I can't say there was a time when I went, “oh, wow, this is it”, but I can say now, after 25 years and seeing where it's gone, it's exciting, and it's thrilling to see that technology could expand that fast and cover so much ground... To think of a world without an Internet is just mind boggling today, but it's not a very old tool. And so now we have to clean up that thing.
That's the really, I think, the next layer of activity that everybody within the industry needs to work on and be very serious about, which is cleaning up the Internet. How do we get rid of the hate speech? How do we get rid of the incitement to violence, of CSAM? How do we get rid of the fake pharmacies and start protecting people in a better way? And that's possible, there's no question and all these technology companies can do it, but greed has a certain affinity for these guys, and doing the right thing often goes against what they're doing for the shareholder. That is the conundrum we face today.
(Mark W. D.) One important question that I have is: what did the interaction between everyone look like over the years in terms of polarization? Because right now, we live in a very polarized world, everything is do or die. But how was that in early ICANN, how did the community interact with each other during its first decade? Were you walking towards the same general direction, but with different purposes, or was there are a lot of fighting about it? Further, how did that evolve over time?
(Ron Andruff) I agree that on a global scale and almost in all politics and issues that we live in, it’s a polarized world, and it's in large measure due to our leaders unfortunately leading us down that path. But in the case of ICANN, the initial issues were between the contracted side and the rest of the community, meaning all of the other constituencies. The GAC sat beside us at meetings but it was hardly engaged at all. We would go over and give a report, their Chairman would give a report at around the end of ICANN, and then the GAC would write up their memorandum.
In terms of polarization, the registries and registrars would say that you didn't understand their industry and that when we were imposing rules upon them, there was a cost to it and it's a very slim margin business, etc. So that was not dialogue. That pushback was there for quite a while, but the ISPs, the BC, the IPC, we all collaborated, generally speaking, because we were all businesses and we were also users of the Internet.
That commercial collaboration was much closer and everyone realized we had to kind of work through these things together. Then ICANN shifted to the two-House system, and when that happened, it created a real strain, because now what you had was this lack of collaborative effort. The registries and registrars had no incentive to collaborate more closely with us because we had a CEO who decided that they were the clients and the rest of us were the users. At that point, they had kind of a free rein. It was very hard to have any veto power over what they were doing because they by themselves could counter all the rest of us. So, that was a big mistake. That was a huge mistake.
In fact, in the ICANN Bylaws, there’s something along the lines that every 5 or 10 years we need to do a full review of ICANN. Once we did it and restructured accordingly, that thing got missed for 5 years, then 10 years. When finally ICANN org. got around to doing it, it took some time, and it was almost in frustration at the end of a long grind of a group of people trying to sort this out that they said, “okay, two-House structure, that's it, we're done,” and that became the law of the land. When that happened, we no longer had our adversary being the registries and registrars. We still had concerns, but now all of a sudden internally on our side, we had the Non-Commercial Users Constituency, and then others like ALAC.
When the NCUC was created, it almost became the militant arm of the ALAC, and started having issues with the Business Constituency in particular. At that point the participants had been around long enough, so personalities were rubbing people the wrong way and so forth... Just based on human nature, not all people liking each other or fed up with someone else or whatever. That started to fray the edges of the collegial relationships that we had. And while the ISPs more or less stayed in line with BC thinking and to a certain extent so did the Intellectual Property Constituency, it was more the NCUC that we had difficulty working with.
There was a number of people who came in that were kind of firebrands who pushed back to the extent that we had really highly qualified people not be put forward on Council or on the Board of Directors simply because they were associated with the BC or recommended by the BC, which is really heartbreaking. And so, all of this was very unfortunate, but that polarization really has to be overcome, and it's really up to the leadership, it's up to the Council to say, “you know, you guys, we're gonna drop everybody's names in a hat, and then we're gonna pull out three names. During the course of this week, you're going to go have lunch or dinner with whoever comes out.” It's simple as that... once people know each other, and once people have an opportunity to spend time in each other's company, break bread together, then you have another perspective and you start to understand more and you start to appreciate the person's sense of humor. It's unfortunate, but personality clashes are more of a problem than any policy issues, honestly speaking.
(Mark W. D.) Speaking of progression, it does bring me to the point that your role, as an individual, also progressed a lot. You arrived acting on the sports/travel sector and your role evolved towards health. And in that sense, I would like to capture how that took place.
(Ron Andruff) After that fateful meeting in Venice, I came back to the States and my partner and I did some homework. I've been traveling all my life and, back then I would call my travel agent and I would say “Sam, I need to be in Paris on this date, London on this date, and then back to New York. Let me know on the tickets.” He would always take so much time to come back to me, take a day or two, and I’d say “brother, you need to give me some flight details so I can make the meetings and make my appointments with people. Why does it takes so long?” So my travel agent said “well, what I do is I go and I look to see the consolidated fares to see if I can get a better pricing on a ticket and then I have to call the company on the phone. Then it's about a 15 to 20 minutes of hold time until I get someone only for them to tell me that a certain class of service is no longer available. Then I have to go through this process again and again until I finally find something, and then I send it to you and you make your choice.”
It just seemed to me that that whole process was ready for a change, and we had this thing called the Internet, and if every travel agency now would have a .travel and we were to create a system, that would improve things. It sounds so logical and simple today, but 25 years ago, it did not. We created a taxonomy of all things travel and you would be able to, for example, if you wanted a hotel, you would be able to just click on the different buttons saying “I want a four-star hotel in this city, close to the Eiffel Tower, and I want to have babysitting service.” You would just click all of it and then it would show you those hotels that offered such things. It was very rudimentary, but it was a taxonomy that would drive traffic to various hotels and airlines.
The whole point is, we thought that through and decided we were going to go after .travel, and ground through this process to create a new TLD. That's when actually .aero went through, two or three went through, and we really made a hard press to the Board and to others in the community of “let's try .travel” because it would be the first industry sector that was completely identifiable, meaning that there are 9 sectors in travel which would be air, cruise, hotel, and so forth. All of those have international associations, national associations, international federations. I said, “all of those would come together as a body, and then we will make rules that they would agree upon and we will create this thing called .travel.”
We managed to get into that mix and we got the .travel TLD. At that point I realized that the beauty of owning the rights to a Top-Level Domain is that any domain name that could be possibly thought up by anybody in the world, you already own it, by virtue of being the steward of that TLD. It’s an interesting concept that you could have such rights, and so I realized that it’s all well and good that you have those rights, but now you have to tell the world that you have them. So basically, I went out and I did for 5 years about a 180 days a year on the road and went around the world, and got off the plane at all the conferences... travel agent conferences, tour operators, the London travel market, the German travel market, meetings in Singapore... I basically went around as a keynote speaker, as a panelist, as whatever, saying, “ladies and gentlemen, it's coming down the road. This thing .travel will be for you and you are the ones to have the first ones. If you're in the travel industry, you get one.”
That whole exercise was exciting. It was long. It was expensive. ICANN delayed and delayed and delayed, just like they've done with this most recent round. At the end of the day, we hoped to have about 15,000 pre-registrations when we started, and we ended up with about 25,000. I met a lot of people... Every business card I got, we invited them to come to our launch party in New York, when we launched, and people flew in from everywhere, it was quite an extraordinary event and a showing of real respect and appreciation for what we were doing.
But because of the situation that we were in, I was just running out of cash. And so, I created a partnership with the man who had created Alamo Rent a Car and National Rent a Car. He knew the travel agencies, the travel industry, and so his company came in and collaborated with us, until they ultimately took over control of the company, which was not a very happy circumstance from my side. I extracted some stock, I extracted some cash, and I seeded in a couple of major projects we wanted to do but... I didn't want to have on me any of the, I'll call it “the stink”, that they were going to create with .travel, because they basically took the Ferrari and drove it into the ditch. And so, to this day, .travel doesn't even have 20,000 names, sadly.
At that point, we had had a lot of experience and we realized the New gTLD Program was coming up. I thought recognizing what we now knew about running a Top-Level Domain, and how to market one, we should go get .sport and create a social media platform that goes with it, as Facebook and those companies were just coming up at the time. We said, “we'll build this technology out, so that every small little hockey team or every baseball team, the federations, whatever they might be in sport, could use this social media platform that came with .sport."
We waited years for that to happen and finally realized that it was not going to happen, so we had started to build out the platform, sold that platform off, got out of the .sports space and just let the buyers carry on. Around that time, I had been very deeply involved in the ICANN community, writing policy, holding the pen, being engaged as a member of the BC. I also sat on a number of committees, and chaired a number of them and so forth. But at this stage of the game, after we finished with .sport, I was more or less at the point where I said, “you know, I'm not sure where I am in the community and how much I want to stay involved, but it's the people at ICANN that keep you involved.”
You meet such extraordinarily interesting people, you meet them every 4 months in a different part of the world, so while I was weighing my options, I got a call for the Canadian International Pharmacy Association who’d just spoke with Marilyn Cade and asked if there was anybody that could help give them guidance within Internet governance, and my name was put forward. Since then, I brought their executive director, Tim Smith, straight into the BC, he became a member and has been very actively engaged over the last decade in policy development, in ICANN and in other organizations.
CIPA truly separates the good guys from all the fake pharmacies that you see online, so we fought our battles, we managed to do some incredible work. We went to a number of IGFs, we held panels there about how to solve the problem of giving people access to safe and affordable medicines, as well as to RightsCon and others, where we went and engaged with the community, talked about how to do this... really came up with some very interesting ideas. Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network was just coming along at that time and really starting to catch on to the fact that we needed to work on these problems, and so they became anxious to deal with that. It's been a nice process to bring us to a point where I'm happy to say that we are collaborating very closely with CleanDNS and Jeffrey Bedser and all of the work they're doing. They’ve just built an all-star team and their theme is as much ours as it is his, and that is to clean up the Internet for good.
That activity has now taken some steps forward, we have created DNS AXE, a not-for-profit that will be a clearing house for the infrastructure industry, as well as the broader community on a global scale to feed in low quality signals. Those are domain names that you can see there's something wrong with them. Through the process we're developing DNS AXE along with the community, supported by the idea of really rooting out these bad actors.
As we go through this process, I think that we'll really have an impact on how we can get rid of a lot of the harms that we see in the Internet by tagging and flagging these various names and by having a dragnet put together, as CleanDNS is doing, to be able to capture that stuff and take it out. It's a very bright, very exciting future in terms of where that goes.
And again, I come back to the fact: it’s about the people. It's meeting extraordinary people like yourself and others that I've met all around the world and to have those 3 weeks a year, where we see each other in a different forum in a different city and work through the issues together... I find that very exhilarating and fulfilling.
| Further reading: Sponsored TLD Unnecessary? Ron Andruff Responds to Forrester Research |
(Mark W. D.) One thing that I noticed in this whole story is that it seems like the then new round of gTLDs, the 2012 one, made certain promises that it did not fulfill. Or maybe that the vision about that round was different than what it turned out to be. I wonder if you could step back to what the mentality was like in the community around what those new gTLDs could be, and how the process unfolded in the subsequent years, in terms of ICANN actually being able to put them to market. I'm wondering especially from the point of view of a business person.
(Ron Andruff) I think it’s the same situation today as it was then to the extent that one of the issues that we brought to ICANN Board and as a community was “okay, so if you're going to give out these TLDs, how are you going to let the people in the world know that they're there?” Because when you get a TLD, it has tremendous value in terms of being a manager of that space. We all lease domain names from a registry via a registrar, and the one managing that space doesn't own it either. They are the stewards of that space. So, those points were quite clearly made early on, but while I'm the steward of the space and it's for the travel industry or the sporting community, there's a certain amount of responsibility required of ICANN, the body that's getting paid for every domain name sold, to actually promote that and make some noise about it.
So, we never really got support from the CEO and from the Board of directors. Like being on CNN to be visivle when people sit in any airport somewhere in the world, that type of thing is what we needed to have. Small enterprise as we were, I needed the marketing budget of Coca-Cola on a global scale if I were gonna put up billboards or radio ads or inserts in travel publications. We were putting inserts in all kinds of major industry publications, but the cost of that was extraordinary.
You need to have some integrity as well. There are certain TLD managers that just let any trash in, whoever wants to register, no problem and whatsoever, they will just turn a blind eye. That's really heartbreaking because, you know, it's overwhelming greed. It's really hard to see that kind of situation happen, because you're out there trying to build something that has real integrity and value, and when you see others abusing this opportunity to be a steward of such an important resource... I's a little disheartening, I guess that's all I could say about it.
(Mark W. D.) The final question is, what was it like for the business community in terms of the long run? We heard about the early years, but how did it all unfold? Where are we now? You started in a small room with a few people and now the business community is evidently much larger, much has changed... So, what was that evolution like and where are we going in the future?
(Ron Andruff) I would say the evolution was organic. It just happened kind of its own accord. It wasn't that there was a strategic plan that was put forward. So I say it was organic and I think it's grown to be what it is today in large measure because there's been a number of people who have remained steady, Steve DelBianco, for example, who came along shortly after I did and he's still with the BC and he's still there drafting policy. His business is in that space so it makes sense for him, but I would suggest that there's been a lot of changing of the guard. In the BC now there's a lot of brown and black and Asian and other faces around. We have a Nigerian and a Indian as Councilors, that's massive change, you know? It's a massive change and it's a very healthy change.
So those are the things that are coming just with time, you know, and the older guys who've been long in the tooth there are stepping back or maybe they're going into retirement, and this younger group is coming in. You know, look at you coming from Brazil to the BC. These are things that we didn't have then, it was much more, I'll say centered around North America, with a few Europeans, but we certainly didn't have a Global South engagement of any kind that we could talk about in a serious way. So, I just think it was natural, things grow and change, somebody steps back, someone steps up.
I would think that's happened kind of across the board with the other constituencies. The problem is when there is a situation where you are trying to reach consensus in the community and you say green, the other part says red, it's like some people are contrarian by nature and then that's where it gets a little difficult because, you know, where can we start? So, it brings me back to: we need to be more engaging with each other, having dinners with each other, spending more time with each other personally to break through those situations.
But otherwise, the reason I kept staying in ICANN early on was because there were so few of us and you could hear the roar of the waterfall not far from you, so you had to paddle like crazy so we didn't slide over that waterfall into the ITU or into the UN, and we managed to keep it in the hands of the public. These kinds of things could really change the world of ICANN pretty dramatically, but I think as an experiment, as we started out, I think we've been very successful in achieving the goals of the experiment so far.
(Mark W. D.) Thank you very much, Ron for your contribution to the history of Internet governance. And personally thank you for taking on this interview. It's the first formal one of a series.
(Ron Andruff) With pleasure, my friend.