just recently resigned as president of the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers icann it is what it's called and rod beckstrom joins us from las vegas. thank you for being on the communicators and joining us here in the washington studio of congressional quarterly if you

could start the questioning. >> welcome our first question today is who owns the internet right now. estimates owned by the private sector by individual companies, government on a very small amount but we estimate over 85% of the internet is owned by private individuals and firms are the concentrated in a particular country or is that fairly spread apart? >> we estimate there's about 2.2 or 2.3 billion users and the internet today. just over half of those are in asia say you can guess that a lot half of that investment overall is in asia and half is around the world. the united states has a good portion coming year up, but you've also got good penetration growing in latin america and africa.

>> so, rod beckstrom, who manages it? >> it is a decentralized creation and is governed by a multi stakeholder community with martin to wondered 40 different countries and territories involved, and one of the keycorp nation body's is icann and icann and its community are the stewards for what we call the unique identifiers or the network addresses and what are some technical settings called the pravachol and the parameter registries. those meek the internet look like one place so they are governed through a multi stakeholder process of companies involved, government involved, individuals involved, and the societe organizations. >> host: can you explain to the viewers with axson cui it is icann thus to help manage the internet? >> sure. when we think about the internet we refer to the dow's one place for one thing when in fact it's billions of profit devices and

millions of private networks but it looks like one place. why? domain names are in unique and consistent around the world because every network address is unique so your e-mail address is unique and no one else has the same address. that integrity is a central so that the internet looks like one place. icann as a coordination body that was created to maintain the uniqueness of those things that makes the internet look like one place. >> so, rod beckstrom your president of icann for a little over three years. what were your goals coming in and do you think you've achieved them? >> my number one goal was to make icann an international global organization and second objective was to upgrade it to a world-class institution as a nonprofit institution and third to institute the key strategic programs. and i think that we succeeded very significantly on all three

fronts despite some pretty serious head winds and a very complex environment to get things done. >> recently icann added new potential domain names or took deposits on new potential domain names. how did that process go? >> sure, that process when icann was created one of the reasons for the creation and the original mission statement is to create more consumer choice and competition because when we were formed, there was one dominant domain name registry and restore consumers didn't have a jury said they had to pay about $30 a year to get a dot.com ne for example so it was to foster choice. we have a new top-level domains and this is the third time in history that we've done it but by far the largest opening. the process started six or seven years ago the process started the policies were approved in

2008 and from 2,011 we were developing the details of the program and in the first half of this year, we opened it up for applications and close to it and i think as you know, received over 1900 applications. >> $185,000 per replication, correct? >> that's right. >> what is that money used for and who gets to go on to it? >> icann as a nonprofit organization on a break-even basis. so the $185,000 is an estimate what it will cost to process the applications those legal checks, criminal background checks on officers of the applying institutions. financial checks, there's review panels mother's objections that can be followed that help to be reviewed by arbitration panels so a very complex problem. those are the estimated costs.

the icann community will decide what should be done with those funds. they don't go to icann itself as an organization for covering its operations unless the community for example decided to do that to read that the estimating cost for the program. >> you mentioned the you look to international icann. there's been calls for international involvement in the regulation of the internet and other international telecom services. what is your response and some of the calls for having the united nations have a greater role in how the internet is banished and regulated which are opposed by lawmakers here in the united states. islamic internet coordination should continue to become more and more global and make significant strides over the next three years. we added more members to the government what fais recommitting we have the governments of the world advising icann and added more than 30 new members to what we call the country code name supporting organization those are the domain name operators in

countries around the world. we built an international management team. there was one form of monrad english language team in instance when i left there were 17 and we had members from china, mexico, united kingdom, france, lebanon, other parts of the world so we made a lot of progress and we also opened up the internet itself to international's asian by including international domain names if you live in china you can type in domain names entirely in chinese characters if you register your name under the chinese characters. we do the same thing with parties in india and around the world. so the word that used the latin based territory as the sort of think to include characters is now included in international stock groups. this is important with respect to the united nations and the i.t. you, there's an interest of course by many governments in

the world struggling with how do you deal with the internet and deal with this incredible tsunami force of change that is shifting society, affecting government will structures etc. and when you have that level of change you a different government bodies that might be seeking to change or extend to expand to an area such as the internet and that is what we see taking place here to the estimate how serious of a threat is the notion of government interfering with the domain name system or the internet for censorship reasons or in some cases protection of intellectual property we have seen a host of reasons by the government's to tap into the internet structure is that something icann is concerned about or are you no longer the organization is that something you feel as a threat? stat yes it's something i'm very concerned about and certainly something that icann and the internet community are very

concerned about not only the international level of international government bodies seeking to expand their authorities or mandate but also the national governments and we saw that here in the united states of america with the debacle to stop the online privacy act and including provisions that would have d ns filtering block in website without proper due legal process this is extremely concerned and the great news is political activists in this country rose up with the leadership that jimmy wilson and others demonstrated by taking wikipedia off line for a day i think there was more than 10 million letters and e-mails for sopa and this is a part of the new reality the governments have to deal with which is that when they try to go create new regulations that might harm the integrity and the openness of the internet there's a very strong public response

and i think we would see the same thing of the international level that we've seen at the national level and that is a big thing i would argue because it keeps the check and balance going because it is easy to talk about regulating the internet but it's a very difficult and dangerous thing to do because very often the proposed prescription to fix the problem is much worse than the underlying disease or problem some party feels they are trying to address. we've got to keep the internet opening unified and global, keep it as natural as possible and should be governed by these policies that include the technical experts that we assure the integrity of the system is managed because the end result we all want to have is we should each be able to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world and for that to happen there has to be a global openness in the integrity of the system so that is a lot of us cared about and continue fighting for. >> rod beckstrom, has the new

application world we live now changed speed of's mission? >> it's an interesting question. there's a lot of discussion in all of the security vulnerabilities that come through this profusion of hundreds of thousands of new applications being built. technology is exciting because it is a changing game. some parties have said for example creating these new apps are going to make the names less useful or less valuable but there is no indication of that happening so far you see both a tremendous profusion of creativity and new applications on smart phones and tablets at the same time we see more creativity and growth in the domain name industry so far i don't see a big change yet at the same time no one can predict the future and technology. things move so quickly so we are all students of this magnificent process that continues to unfold. >> you mentioned a blackout.

what is that? and in your previous let or the director of financial sires kildee center and is the one you are at blackout? >> i do have an affinity for the security committee in the field coming and i did start coming here in fact when i was in that position i had the great honor of keynoting here in 2008. and in fact sitting here today, john henry, former director of cybersecurity at the fbi is giving his keynote this morning, but it's a prominent security conference globally. there's about $7.500 people registered in here this week and then it's interesting because after three or four days of meeting with the committee we have people from companies here, security companies come security experts, hackers, the whole kind of ecosystem. the bonds friday and saturday there's a conference called defcon which is a hacker's conference and i think they're expecting summer between five to

8,000 as well as other security participants to be there and i will be attending as well. it's exciting to hear what's going on and see the new threats and vulnerabilities and products and also see what people are doing to counteract those. >> you mentioned that hackers conference. they confirmed that the head of the nsa keith alexander will be speaking during their keynote to review resign your position because of nsa; is that correct? >> no, that's not correct. i expect certain views when i resigned about the nsa, but i didn't resign, i resigned because i felt that i had done my term of service in the government and i was ready to move back to california to be with my family tree is the mikey thought was bad policy for security and privacy issues to be centered under a military agencies such as the nsa.

>> yes i did say that and i still believe that there needs to be a separation between civilian activities and cyberspace activities and the military activities. it's an important principal in american constitutional history. >> now, currently cybersecurity is working its way to the contras. do you have views on the current attitude towards cybersecurity in the congress? >> i think congress is concerned and i think a lot of people are concerned. the reality is everything it to the organization is vulnerable. that is the reality of this new high bertrand's print oral that we listen, and i think that we are all struggling with trying to figure not how to best to develop new policy structures and approaches for dealing with that. it is a challenge to do. it's much easier to write policies and implement successful programs, and no one has got all the answers. so i think it's good that

congress is focusing on and it's also very important that they work closely with the global the internet community and as well as civil rights, civil liberties groups and make sure that the right balance is achieved in any legislation that created, and in general we have a lot of regulation here. the internet is a force of its own. the existing legal structures for many of the rights we have in society coming and we have to be careful not to create new legislation that is very difficult to implement or that intent upon this openness of the internet that we all enjoy. >> you are watching c-span communicators program. our guest is rod beckstrom who for three years served as president of the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. prodir to that he served as director of the national cybersecurity center. he is a technical -- i don't

know, from silicon valley originally he is a graduate of stanford university. our guest reporter is the ultimate ashraf reporter corker >> he discussed what is in front of congress specifically in the senate we are seeing them debate a piece of legislation where the sponsors have really been to over backwards to try to appease some of the concerns from the privacy advocates but they've also been forced to make some concessions on regulation. so, what would you like to see from a cybersecurity law passed by congress if at all this year? >> you know, i have not jumped into the current proposed legislation. so i'm not in a position to go into it in any specific detail. i am pleased to hear concessions that have been made to try to strike a balance to really haven't necessarily heard that feedback from all the communities that they are content with what they've gotten to yet so i think there is more

work to be done and again i think we have to be very carefully and very deliberate in what we do. >> how much can legislation or policy making difference as you discussed a lot of this is about implementation. what sort of differences could policies meek? are there any positive steps that could impact the operational state of cybersecurity right now? >> sure. good policies can always help and then the challenge is how do you craft a good policy. one of the things i believe strongly and this is reflected in a book by colcord called the starfish and the spider is when you're dealing with a decent list, like the world of hacking which is quite a decentralized for the most part then you want to deal with it in a decentralized way it used to be successful so i think the u.s. government will be more successful in fostering collaboration's interest include government and private sector will enforce and others that the

voluntary system and look as well as federal, foster the collaboration. don't try to control it, don't try to pull the information into the government because it usually becomes a one way and there's not much information going the other way and a lot of trust gets lost. so i think we should focus on education programs in schools, make sure we are investing in side of education, make sure we are investing to support collaboration and make sure that we are supporting the research and development and the development of best practices. i think that is a better solution than trying to look at any sort of top-down approach is. >> rod beckstrom, back to the top-level domain name issue. applications is cyber squatting a legitimate business in this case? >> you know, it's actually a very tricky thing to define. it's an easy word to say there's different definitions of how people look at that.

this program was created so that the right holders, parties that own a trademark or service mark have preference over those that don't so there's a whole set of different protections put into this program to discourage cyber squatting if that relates to the terms of our service mark or trade mark. will there be some defensive regulations? that is the term when some parties might choose to register their name and a top-level domain and they might feel they don't really want that but they are doing it to protect the name or brand certainly there will be a level of that. however, most party is on the defense of restrictions link it back to the main web site and to drive more business to themselves. anyone that is doing that is actually deriding economic benefits out of having those restrictions. so it is not a simple issue and again, a lot of the smartest intellectual property experts in the world work on this problem for six years and added in a lot

of really strong protections in the program so it is certainly much stronger with respect intellectual property rights than any previous top-level domain round. >> are you -- i apologize for interrupting. are you satisfied with ip protections around the world right now? >> you know, that's a big question to bigot am i satisfied. i think there's a number of challenges. let's take the trademark as an example. the trademark system is designed by countries typically buy nation states and then it has different categories. untypically more than 40 categories and 100 countries that have the systems, so there's 4,000 different parties that can have the right to exactly the same trademark said the trade market structured by geography and industry categories. the domain system is unique. there is only one brand name of tom for example what it means is

there's a fundamental mismatch so the factor system is trying to map to a system that his integrity and is international uniques if you always have tension so that is an imperfect flaw that comes from history of the trademark system was established by the nation states and the internet global systems and you have an incompatibility. intellectual property rights enforcement is more challenging in many cases because of all such restrictions around the world where the internet is active and because actions parties can take and i think that what we have seen in the icann community and the multistate older community is a lot of work to improve those pardons and there's an intellectual property constituency for example the icann that his prominent attorneys. but and i personally have been over all with the system? i receive for one thing i knowed that fundamental dichotomy in the architecture that is going to create ongoing tension, and i

noted the difficulty of enforcement because ho open the internet is and we have some really interesting policy challenges we have to work on for decades to come here. >> what about privacy protection? >> privacy protection, the internet brings radical transparency to almost everything it touches. privacy becomes a contract. it's an artificial construct, very important one created by laws and institutions and enforcement. citing privacy is important because we all value in our lives and i think it is challenged by the internet and it's why it's important that there is outspoken articulate groups out there citizens and people around the world supporting the role of privacy and the internet at the same time, people want openness so those are the tensions between the openness of the internet

between the desire for privacy and intellectual property protection and there's not a simple solution that can solve that equation so we are going to find ourselves into reading run the different solutions over time i think to get our hands around these issues. islamic next question. >> obviously the high price tag we saw mostly with the high price tag multi companies apply in for the domain name but my question is are the domain names and therefore are they losing a little bit of their importance to the personal users or consumers because right now these days when you go on t.v. i'm sure people last you for your twitter handle as opposed to your dot.com or what have you and i find that these are social media often the primary identifier for many people these days. how do you think that has affected the domain system specifically? >> sure. you know, when facebook came out and started getting popular

about five years ago some people predicted the domain name registrations by individuals would decline maybe start to shrink it just hasn't happened. when the economic crisis hit the growth slowed international domain names but now i think it is back to where it was by the international media just globally the internet industry is growing five to seven per cent per annum in registrations and revenues. so there's continuous growth in the business and i think it may change some time. it may turn around and contract. but i think what is interesting is how the internet can expand and touch our lives in so many different ways and it took to the consumers and the markets that decide if they want to use their facebook name worker handle or their e-mail address or some other tool as a primary contact means or telephone numbers. these things all change and coexist. so i'm not really sure where it's going to go.

it will be interesting. >> rod beckstrom, what is the approval process on these applications? >> welcome they go through an initial evaluation phase each of the applications to see if all the information is complete and develop applications etc. so they are all being worked through that process right now. and then the community and the organizational develop some approach to order the processing of those or to process them as a whole group. then there's an objection period that's important that's open right now and a comment period so anyone listening to this program, if you hear about a new to be made in name that you like or don't like you can go online to icann.org and show your support in objecting and there's a formal objection process where parties with standing have an ability to file a specific objection so flexible if you own a trademark and feel someone has

filed for a new domain that has your trademark and they have no trademark rights then you can file a specific objection and there will go to a review panel and i would certainly predict if you own the trademark and the party doesn't and you are in a good position to block the application. so, the applications that process and get through the objections if they get through the objections if they get past a criminal background checks, the financial checks from a technical czechs et cetera, et cetera and put forth to the board of approval and then after they are approved, they can subsequently be entered into the root of the internet. so, it is a process that takes time. the very earliest you might be seeing something new in the road it's about a year from now. it may take a number of years to process this large number of applications. spec do you expect most of those companies that are approved would then file or offer as a service the option to create new

domain suffix is that most proposals say? >> we will see. you know, there is a range of proposals. some of the organizations will probably just use it let's say i'm a big company. i'm going to have a big company name because i just want to be branded with my company name i don't want to be advertising somebody else so i might just use it for my primary website and not provide registration to anyone else but my own employees. or maybe i'm a broad based internet provider and i want to provide free e-mail address this to people. then some parties may be providing millions of e-mail addresses for free or domain names for free so there is a whole set of different options that the parties have. it will be interesting to see what creativity comes out of it. denney you have some developers that are more investors that want to develop a new category to manage your business model around whether it is a city and

getting registrants from the city or around a sport or any other activities of there's a bright view and they are all longline people can go online and take a look at all the applications and the information that was submitted on how its proposal will be used. >> finally, rod beckstrom, who succeeded you at icann, and what you think the biggest challenge is facing the organization in the short term? >> sure. my immediate successor is a chief operating officer who is an excellent executive and just a superb operating leader and i am really pleased to see him stepping into the role. he is lebanese, and i think that is really excellent in the sense that i was the fourth icann ceo and the for the one born in an english-speaking country and i think it's a great the we've got someone promoted from the inside and that comes from the non-english-speaking world, but he is filling a temporary rule for about three months and then

someone they worked with previously that has a very strong background in technology and also worked on the open source issues. the challenges are very much the same ones we dealt with continued international position, globalization of the organization, dealing with the geopolitical threats and challenges and the national regulation challenges from around the world that might seek to impinge upon the domain name system and the integrity of the internet. and then the execution of this very large share of very complex top-level domain program. >> rod beckstrom, former ceo of icann and director of the national cybersecurity center thank you for being on the communicators. and also joining us is galthem nagesh of congressional quarterly brief. gentlemen, thank you.