Bruce Tonk, a long-time community member and just recently left the ICANN board. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Bruce. Appreciate it. You're welcome. You've participated in ICANN meetings since 2001. How have you witnessed the organization become more globalized, become more international? Well, I think originally when I was first involved with ICANN there was only about three staff members. And two of those, I think, were in LA and one of them was outside of LA. So it was very centralized and everything running out of Los Angeles. Then I think the first overseas office that was created that had more than one person was in Brussels. And that was partly to sort of get closer to, I think, the European government and a degree of government relations. But it also meant that there was an ability to sort of provide a bit of outreach into Europe with registrars and others. So I think that was probably the first office. And then after that the next offices would have been in Singapore. And that meant that we had staff there that were in the same time zone as China. And China's one of the, I guess, the fastest growing regions in terms of domain name registration. And we could have staff that could speak not just Chinese but other languages in that region, sort of Tamil, Korean, Japanese, etc. So it meant that ICANN was able to sort of communicate in the same time zone and in the same languages as parts of the community that it served. And then I guess the next major office after that was in Turkey in Istanbul. And the intent of that was to have an office that was fairly central, not just for Europe, but also be able to reach out into the Middle East, Africa. And I guess east of that into Russia and states in that region as well. So I think that's probably been the office that's been harder to establish, I guess. But again, it's got people with multiple language schools. It's able to serve quite a few of the regions around there. And also sort of brings, I suppose, ICANN closer to non-traditional countries that are not as Western as, say, Brussels or Los Angeles or even Singapore for that matter. Since it's early as days, ICANN was always envisioned to be a global international organization. I started with the organization in 09 and I can remember criticisms then that as much as you say you're international, as much as you say you're global, you're really not. Yes. Was that a fair criticism back then? I think it is. A lot of it is cultural. And I think the culture of the organization was very Los Angeles-centric. And that's in the business culture, the legal culture, just things like insurance. The original registered registrar agreements had insurance requirements for a registrar and they worked very well in places like Europe and US and Australia. But they were much more problematic in parts of the developing world where there wasn't really access to insurance that sort of immediately met the ICANN needs. And then people were saying, why do we really need that insurance? We've got other mechanisms to ensure that we can continue to operate, et cetera. So I think it's just that sort of cultural shift. It's not until you actually have an office with people that live in the region. A presence? Yeah, it's more than just a presence. I think you actually have to have people that live and breathe the region. They understand the business environment, they understand the people. Because quite often I think at ICANN, and it's been a struggle at the board level as well, I think, in that to meet some of the diversity requirements we've said, we've got someone that was born in Africa, or we've got someone that was born in Egypt or they're on the board. But when you looked underneath that, you'd find that these people might have lived in England for 20 years. And so they're really used to the Western business environment. They're not actually doing business in the environment where they were born. And I think by establishing the offices in regions where the staff and those officers have probably spent the majority of their life in that region, they've got, they've had business experience in that region, and hence they're able to talk not just the same language in the sense of the, whether it's Japanese or Chinese, but actually the same language in terms of business. Why is it even important? Why is it important that the organization be international, that it have an international orientation? I think basically because you talk about the origins of the internet and it started in the academic sector and the research sector in the U.S. and it spread to, I guess, countries that were fairly closely related to the U.S. so the sort of England, Australia, et cetera, fairly early adopters of the internet. But now when you're looking at where's internet growth coming from, the internet growth is actually coming from the developing world and ICANN needs to adapt to that and adapt to their special needs, I think. And the best way of doing that is to actually set up offices in those regions, staff them with people that are familiar with those regions. Your early involvement with ICANN was through Melbourne IT, one of the first five registrars, I believe, in competition with network solutions. Yes. ICANN's mandate is tied to increasing competition in the domain space. How would you describe the relationship between promoting competition and ICANN's increasing globalization? Yeah, well, I think it's interesting if you look at where those first five test bed registrars were from. They were basically, I think, Melbourne IT from Australia, certainly the only one in the southern hemisphere. I think about three of them might have been, at least three of them were North America. I think there was one from Europe might have been France, Telecom or someone like that in Australia. So even back then you realise how limited it was in terms of global coverage. Now if you look at where are the new registrars coming from that are applying for accreditation at ICANN, they're more likely to be coming from Asia and China and other places. So I think there's very heavy competition in the US and Australia with many registrars. But the competition in other parts of the world is often much lower and that, particularly in African countries, you might just have one party that's accredited, there's really no other choice apart from using it overseas or outside of country registrar. So I think part of ICANN's mandate is probably to encourage registrars to become accredited from underserved regions and those registrars in turn are able to do business with the local community that's probably different to the way we do business in other countries. So for example, in many of these developing countries there's not as much electronic commerce, it's much more cash oriented. And so how do you actually pay and register a domain name when you may not actually have a computer in the first place. So that requires going to some sort of store or location where the registrar is and actually paying cash and getting a domain name. A lot of the large registrars in the world, the sort of GoDaddies and the Melbourne ITs, aren't really designed around that business model. So I think we need registrars in these different or underserved regions that conduct business in the way that the local community finds easiest to deal with. Someone once told me that the only reason I can't work, particularly in the global arena, is because people buy into it. Is that an oversimplification or is that fair? Yeah, I think that is fair. I think basically people buy into the concept that there is a single unified route and you're not getting name conflicts and so you can use a particular domain name and you can use it wherever you are in the world and it gives you the same result. You're not sort of finding that, okay, when I type this name and I'm in another country, it goes somewhere else. And people are now conditioned that one address, when you're in your web browser and you type in that one address, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, it takes you to the same place. Now things are getting a little bit more sophisticated now because what a lot of websites will do is they will look at the IP address that's coming in from where you're accessing the website and they might change the language of the website to match the location where you are. So for example, if you might access a common website or maybe an airline website or something and you're in Denmark and it will actually come up in Danish because it's detected that you are now located in Denmark. You were chair of DNSO before becoming chair of the GNSO and in an earlier interview you once described the split of country codes from generic names as similar to Brexit. What did you mean by that? I must have been around that at the time of Brexit, yeah. Yeah, it was strange because in many ways we're saying we're trying to create a relatively unified set of rules around domain names and business practices if you like around domain names and I think the country codes very much wanted their independence. And actually that's in many ways similar to the Brexit concept is that they wanted to maintain their sovereignty and their own control of their country names and they sort of felt well we're happy to get together in issues that relate to how do we get names and changes made to the root zone file but they really didn't want to be involved in discussions about how should domain name transfers work or how should private registrations work and things like that because they felt that they wanted to have their own rules and regulations around that. So it's very similar to the Brexit concept where you're finding one country is basically saying well we want to control our own rules and regulations we don't want some other country or group of countries defining how we should operate. How difficult is it to explain this funky organization called ICANN where policy is made from the bottom up it's got a wide widely diverse board how difficult is it to explain this very unusual model to people in other countries and other languages who perhaps are not as savvy with the internet in its function. I think one of the biggest challenges is and again it's partly cultural but is the different balance in countries between private sector and public sector in the way the country is managed or in the way business is done. So if you look at ICANN it's based in the US the majority of citizens probably work for the private sector in some way they're mostly interacting with the private sector in their daily lives. Yes there's government there for essential services like getting a driver's license or something but other services like electricity, water, telecommunications have increasingly become in the private sector and you see that as a trend across many of the big developed economies and so in that environment you can explain a bottom up process by saying in the past things like telecommunications regulation it was generally a government owned monopoly that ran the telecommunications infrastructure and then most of the countries that also had that same model and so most of the rules and regulations around telephones were basically done at a government level government to government basically and that was through the ITU and the shift I think that happened with the US at the time had a privatised telecommunications system model for telephone companies and then the internet sort of grew up in that environment as well with really no single control there's no one company that runs all of the internet and so that model naturally fitted the ICANN model and it should be bottom up we've got lots of different businesses that operate parts of the internet we've lots of different businesses that provide domain registration and provide registries and so it's not just one single company that should define the rules so you have this bottom up process saying well if you want to operate an internet registry or registrar come along to ICANN and then you work out amongst yourselves what the rules should be get input from people like the non-commercial sector get input from intellectual property lawyers get input from ISPs but you work that out because there's no central control and then you come up with a policy and then the board's really looking to see did that policy take into account all the concerns of the community did it follow a proper process and then approve it so it's a bottom up approach but when you're dealing with other parts of the world and this is sort of part of ICANN's challenge I think is that we sort of ask for participation we talk to a country in a developing world and they go how do we get involved and we sort of say well get all your ISPs together get your registrars, tell them to come to ICANN and they go we don't have any of those the government owns the internet or the government owns the telephone infrastructure we just have government people and so it's a very different model government is basically used to maybe doing some local consultation but then they send one rep to the meeting who's the government rep and they represent the country completely and that's the complete opposite with say the United States or Australia if you think about how many people from the United States are here in Copenhagen it's well above one Bruce what is the going forward from where we're at now what is the greatest challenge to ICANN's continued international expansion challenge to international expansion or acceptance yeah they're two different things I think I think definitely one of the challenges to acceptance is that you have as you start rolling the services out to other countries where they're predominantly public sector you know government operated they sort of say well this is a topic for governments not the private sector and so I think that's a challenge on one side and I think the other challenge that we have is the in many ways the expectations of ICANN are very high so and we see that all the time with topics of law enforcement and if you look at one of the big media topics around the internet there's obviously concerns that terrorists take advantage of the communication tools to do their activities as concerns that criminal organisations take advantage of the tools to conduct their criminal activities and I think in the past before communication networks things were very localised so if there was a crime done the person that committed that crime is going to be within a few miles of the crime scene let's say well the person that was affected by that crime so it was all driven by local police they would know the people in the neighbourhood if they were investigating a crime against a person they know well the person that committed that crime is pretty close it's all very localised and I think the challenges of the internet now is that if someone has been the victim of a fraud from a police perspective let's say that victim was in Australia but the person that actually committed that crime could be anywhere in the world and I think the level of cooperation still between police forces might be high on certain topics but on many other topics the level of cooperation is probably not quite there and so then people go well let's use this ICANN thing because that seems to have all the people that are involved in the internet and they're all coming to these meetings why don't we get them to help us and there's this pressure on ICANN to increase its scope from technical coordination of the DNS to why don't we get together and solve crime and get together and solve terrorism and get together and solve security expand the mandate there's this pressure in that either you expand the mandate of ICANN or you actually try and so we don't need ICANN because this should all be done by government bodies United Nations or some equivalent now that the IANA stewardship transition has been completed is for a long time when that was being debated an argument in support of it was that other countries it would actually beat if you would the authoritarian takeover that so many feared in resisting the transition now that the transition has occurred is that threat gone? well it depends on who the threat is to are we talking about a threat to ICANN or threat to something else well let's do with the threat to ICANN certainly I think one of the concerns was that governments that didn't like the idea of in their mind a US sort of controlled entity controlling parts of the infrastructure that they now view as critical it's a little bit like you know in the if you're thinking a few hundred years ago the critical thing was to control the C-ways because that was effectively the method of transferring goods and almost like the communication mechanism that you if you could control the C you could obviously control what goods were transferred and you control who was getting transferred etc so the internet's kind of now the modern equivalent of the C's and we're saying well we have in certainly in the oceans we're saying this is neutral territory you can control the C that's within a few miles of your coast but outside of that there's international waters and everyone's sort of free to traverse those waters and the internet's very much like that as well and that we're saying we've got this internet it's like the international waters everyone's free to transfer information across it you might control the information in your local network that's on your sovereign soil but other than that once you've sent your information to the wider internet it can go anywhere so certainly I think that's both an economic plus to countries because they're able to conduct commerce on a much wider basis than they ever had before but it's also a threat on things like information flows so if a government previously wanted to control information flows it would just control the newspapers and control the TV stations that were all local to that to that country now information flows could come from much more difficult now the international waters if you like and I think there's always the threat to the internet that authoritarian regimes will go we have to isolate ourselves to stop this information flow because we want to control the information that are citizens who are receiving so I think that's a a wider threat to the internet I don't see it necessarily as a threat to ICANN but certainly those countries that feel that they want to control the information flows may feel that they can influence processes in United Nations or other things more so than they can influence an ICANN process you said yourself ICANN began as a result of US research did you as an Australian citizen coming in to the ICANN fold early on see that as problematic where you accepted was it difficult let me rephrase that did that Australian lens give you a different vision than what your US counterparts had yes I think so I think one of the things that's interesting in ICANN is that it's often the smaller countries that end up in their citizens often end up in leadership positions at ICANN and you'll see it frequently from Australians, there will often be chairs of the different groups but you also see it in Scandinavia the smaller countries that will often have their members they might be chair of an advisory committee or a supporting committee or a nominating committee the smaller countries because they recognise the need to compromise and I think ICANN fundamentally is a consensus building body and you need to find the areas of consensus amongst people and I think if you're coming from nations outside of the US Australia can't using the seas example we're not big enough we don't have a big enough navy for all the seas so we have to work with the superpowers of the world to ensure that we can export our goods and things and I think it's the same in the internet world that the countries like Australia or Denmark that having to trade with the surrounding countries and have to compromise because they're not big enough to dominate anything that tends to build people that have got more of a if you like around finding the areas of compromise What I'm hearing from you is a general tone of optimism about the future as regards ICANN and its internationalisation Yeah that's true, I think ICANN has evolved tremendously in the last 10 years and become far more globalised I think in particular the Asia one that I'm familiar with I guess in the Asia Pacific region but just talking to the staff in that office and even talking to registrars in that region they found it intimidating if you like to come to an ICANN meeting because they don't understand the language it's all happening very fast there's new rules that they have to keep complying with and they never really understand what those rules are whereas now they've got a local office that can actually properly communicate with them and understand their business more I think the first step is just helping them understand and helping them work out how to comply with our rules but the next step I think you'll see is that as they gain more confidence they'll start getting a lot more involved in the policy development process and I think using China as an example I've seen them evolve dramatically in the last 10 years between having virtually no one attend ICANN meetings to now having quite a few people from both public and private sector in China participating not just turning up but actually coming up to the microphone and speaking and participating in the activities That's great Bruce thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us You're welcome