international. 16 out of the 22 are from around the world. >> how is it funded? >> by a fee from the registration of domain names. when a registry registers a name, typically that registry pays us around 20 cents per name per year, and we also get a small feet per name from the registrar. an entity like godaddy, when you go and register that name, another 18 cents or so goes to ican. there are some other minor sources. >> so no government funding at this point? >> 0 government funding. >> is their government oversight? >> there was until october 1, when the u.s. government -- we

published reduced to the u.s. government on a periodic basis -- we published reviews. that was to ensure that we live up to the standards. when we formed over 11 years ago, there was only one commercial registry and won registrar. we were support to it -- supposed to create a system. there are now over 900 registrars. since we have created the echo system, the government says we have accomplished that, now we should be responsible to the world to be accountable and transparent with how you help to administer your part of the ecosystems. >> joining me is chris roads, a technology reporter for "the wall street journal" in new york. >> i greater than greater thanican is going through an

international -- i note that ican is going through a process where the part of the domain name to the right of the dot will be in non roman characters. why is ican doing that now? >> there has been -- when the at internet initially got design, there was a big debate about whether it should support international scripps or just latin based scripts. at the time, the engineers decided to make it latin only because there was not a standard for the other languages and scripts. the internet protocol itself got created around latin scripts. people around the world have been saying they want everything in their own language. they should be able to write

their domain names in arabic or chinese. about 11 years ago, a swiss researcher came up with the idea that got picked up in singapore and china. now there is idna. nine years of policy work later, we are finally ready to roll it out. it has been two years of technical testing, having international domain names in the internet in a route system. that has gone successfully. it has taken a long time but finally we are ready to begin rolling that out. we will start accepting applications november 16, in just a few days, and hope to put those into the internet by the middle of next year.

>> now with this going beyond roman characters, is something lost in the sense of the universality of the internet, where we might not start to get a more segmented internet that focuses on more individual countries than the more global forum? >> both yes and no. yes it in ways that we will see large pockets of content and communities developing in languages you and i might not recognize. from our standpoint as westerners, it might seem fragmented. yet on the other hand, introducing internationalized domain names so that chinese

internet users can use their native language, will actually hold the internet unity together. one of the primary causes people have cited for the interest is the inability to use their own native language and scripts for the internet. there'll be a proliferation of different communities that we may not recognize with our language skills. a the same time, it will help the overall unity of the internet to continue. it will be interesting to see. >> did you think that by going with internationalize domain names, it really will have a practical effect in terms of how people use the internet, or is it more of a cosmetic change or a symbolic change where you are saying to the rest of the world,

we see you and recognize that most of the users now are outside of the u.s. or english- speaking countries, so we are making this step for you recognizing that. in terms of the practical effect, creating more internet users, do you think there will be much of the difference? >> we will see. it will be a little bit of both. first let's talk about symbolism. this is really important to people. it is an issue of national and cultural pride. people want to be infused this global shared resources in their own languages. -- want to be able to use this resource. if he only speak korean or chinese, your kia in europe -- your keyboard is laid out for korean or chinese. to go to look domain and, you

would have to flip your keyboard and work in a second language. the other thing we have learned is that the biggest uptick of the national domain names is the smaller businesses. it is not the global brands that everyone knows in latin characters. it is the local restaurant or the park are the police station that has a local identity that people think of in chinese characters. they would never think of that police station or that local restaurant in a latin character. we can expect to see more proliferation there in the smaller businesses and groups around the world. we will see if this is just a pet psychic issue and a private issue or if it opens up the floodgates for domain names. >> is there a security issue or concern involved with opening this up? >> there are.

anytime you do anything on the internet, we tend to use open standards and opening it up. most people will use it for good purposes. some people are very bad, and will try to take any new technology or standard and find a way to use it to steal money or extort money. cyber crime is a serious problem. concerns around some of that security issues is part of why it has taken nine years to develop the policies. a simple example would be in a script like cyrillic, which the russian jews, they have a letter that looks just like our letter -- which the russians use, but they have a letter that looks just like our letter "a". they can use that in a site that

makes it look like a different site. the string has to be consistently and international characters to avoid what we call spoofing, where someone tries to make a website look like someone else's website to get their password or steal their money. a lot of the policy development has been designed to reduce some of the security risks of fraud. there will always be security issues with any type of new technology. the policy has been created in participation with law enforcement to try to minimize those attacks. >> where does icann's authority derives from? >> really from the community. we have registries, government, 99 governments on our government advisory committee. we have private sector groups,

privacy groups, everybody -- there are probably between 10,020 thousand people who participate in these policy processes and meetings each year. >> or their governments that do not recognize that authority -- are their governments that do not recognize that authority? >> there are some governments who might like to see it controlled by some kind of other governmental body. we were pleased when china just came and formally read. -- rejoinder government advisory committee. another country that is not formally at the table is russia, because of a very subtle legal

issues. perhaps that is something that will change. >> does that prevent them from using the internet? >> there are very active. there seems to be an expression of interest in international domain names. president medvedev just got a briefing that is on line of him being briefed by the minister of telecommunications on international domain names and how they intend to work on the cyrillic alphabet, which means a lot to them. we generally see good government buy into what we are doing. >> this is "the communicators" program. our guest is rod beckstrom.

>> will be part of your role to go forward and play a bigger part in the cyber security area? >> that is a great question. what role we play and cyber security? there are certain things we can do in cyber security and certain things we absolutely cannot do. we are fundamentally a bottom up community driven organization. we have to be sensitive to the roles that governments and stakeholders want us to be engaged in. we are focusing on the security of the domain name system. when we typed c-span.org into

the browser, it comes back with the network address. that system is used hundreds of billions of times today. it can be used by hackers in what is called bot-net attacks. they leverage the domain name system. they have to move their control point, otherwise you can shut them down. we have a special focus on the domain name system. the other thing about us is unique is that we have to be like switzerland. we have nothing to do with offense anywhere. we focus only on defense, and we have to remain as neutral as switzerland. we have 240 countries around the world that we deal with, and

territories, everything from the u.s. to syria, iran, north korea. everyone has some presence on the internet, and their relationship for their country is with icann. we have to stay very neutral and focus on security of the domain name system through and with our partners. it is a tricky game we have to play of staying in the middle. >> there are computer viruses and other types of computer attacks which are nothing new. they have existed since the beginning of the internet. it seems like they are getting more sophisticated and growing exponentially. what is your current assessment of the state of where things are right now in terms of the level

of cyber illegal activity attacks, and the ability of the good guys to fight against that? obviously it is an up and down situation, but what is your sense of the current situation, and how serious is this for using the internet as we know it? >> it is a very serious issue, as you point out. in the short term, things have been getting worse. the trend line in the last 24 months has been many more viruses, more sophisticated bot- nets. there is one out there very nasty right now called conficker. it is still on at least 3 million or 5 million machines. our role of helping to get another country's end of joining

the battle against conficker. in the short term, the bad guys are getting a bit of the upper hand. their net working very nell internationally -- very well internationally. they have very sophisticated techniques. a lot of financial crimes are taking place. this is a world-class problem, and one that can only be solved by better international cooperation. as consumers, we have to be very careful on our own machines. we should all think twice before doing all are banking on line, for example. you want to be really careful in how you approach it. i do mine with a separate machine that is only plug in for a couple minutes a week. there are no financial records on any of my other computers. i have a dedicated laptop used only for that.

with computers getting as cheap as they are, it is not a bad practice. i tried to limit the access people might have to my financial records. the alternative is to stop using on-line banking completely. i am not advocating that, but there are programs called keystrokes loggers that can get it loaded on your machine just by looking at one image or one video. they can look at your keystrokes and see that you go to a banking website, captured password, and then use that to take your funds. >> millions of people on line on their normal computers or a work computer -- has the danger increased, or what is being done to stop that? >> when you work on those kind

of problems, you get a sense of the scale of activity and help pernicious it can be. i think people should be quite cautious. banks and credit card companies have been very good in covering most of the customer losses that have come from this. one of my credit cards was canceled. it was nothing i did, i was just told that my credit card had been compromised. my guess is someone broke into a computer system somewhere in my have gotten a copy of that credit card data. there is a lot of good work going on in industry and around the world, but cyber crime is a very big thing, and i just encourage everyone to use caution.

there is a game online that teach you to avoid certain web links and certain names that might come up. >> the other big change that seems to be coming down the pipeline for icann is the opening up the domain name process, meaning it making it a lot easier to create new top- level domain names such as .com or .net. if i understand it correctly, we will soon have the ability to create a whole host of possibilities such as .car or .airline. some are worried that having an increase of domain names could

make it a lot easier for the bad guys out there to trick people and do their bad things. what do you think about that? >> my gut sense is that overall, having new generic top-level domains will lead to more security. the new parties who create top- level domains like .airport will have to sign an agreement with icann. they will have to use a secure domain name system with a digital certificate so you can really know you are getting the website you want to get to. that is a high security requirement that is in the current proposal. they will have to be able to support a new form of internet

protocol version 6 that adds further attributes that can be used for security. moreover, they have a contract with us or they will have to avoid certain practices that they might have been able to do in other domains in the past. the country code domain's around the world, many of those have no contracts. for sovereignty issues, many countries have said they will not sign a contract with us. there are roughly 240 of those. we do not have contracts with them, so we cannot dictate or develops security standards. it's totally optional. there is that set of issues. if you misspelled common name, in some cases you will go to a site that is controlled by a

hostile party who is trying to generate transactions off of that. that is called typo squatting. when that falsely spelled request goes to a domain name system, it will be rejected, because we will not approve any applications by those parties. we will do background checks on the individual officers of the company. we will look at the history of litigation of the companies any disputes that have had over domain names. we will do a lot of quality control around the new our friends that we have not been able to do historically. my gut sense is that consumers will not be that confused. let's say hypothetically that c- span not a high level name. they would not go to c-span.org anymore.

arguably, all the issues are complex and varied. criminals will try to figure out how to use any system to create harm, so we will have to keep an eye on it and possibly involve practices and policies as well. >> how did you get into this work? >> i was a high-tech ceo historically and started a company and sold it when i was young. i did different social-service projects mostly. i was in new york on 9/11, and my life changed that day. for 3.5 years, i worked on building a network of ceo's to work on peace in the middle east and around the world. that led to insights on how these human and technical

networks worked. it led to a book called a goat the starfish and spider." it got led by senior -- a book called "the starfish and spider." i did my job in the u.s. government for a while. icann gave me a call and said they had the perfect job for me, and all i had to do was moved to los angeles. fortunately, we came up with an understanding and they allow me to work out of palo alto. the first step aside ever connected was los angeles at the ucla campus. it was the first connection of the internet, 40 years ago in

october of 1969. >> icann is obviously a unique beast. you have been there now for four or five months. what has been your biggest surprise, either positive or negative, since you have been there? >> the biggest surprise is just the massive volume of communication activity. stakeholder groups are generating 350 pages of new material every group of issues around the world. a massive amount of documents, thousands of people involved, and economic stakes are so massive. we are just a tiny local nonprofit organization in the middle with billion dollar players of fighting over the

economic outcomes of these policies. what has surprised me is the power of these tectonic forces that are hitting the internet, and thus adding that little role in the middle and how it is all coming together. i am thrilled to be here, and is all fascinating. >> how do you get that authority? do you foresee that an organization such as icann could go out of business because of all these forces? >> the forces are coming to the table and getting more engaged. it is bringing more businesses into the community and getting much were involved. no one ultimately has authority over the internet. it is the ultimate collaboration environment. if we are not doing our job ended the day, another party can create their own internet root.

our only authority really derives from the community of internet users and our partnership with ietf and all the other players in the internet system. we have a very humble role, and we have to do our best to be a fair meeting place and to let the internet name and undenumbe involved. -- evolve. we have all lot of critics inside and outside the community. that is what makes the process fair and open. >> there is traffic about what happened on october 1 and some constitutionality and sovereignty concerns. how do you address those? >> i am more of a technology

guy. i am not an attorney. there are some subtle legal issues about sovereignty. the preponderance of our community is absolutely delighted with the outcome on october 1, including thousands of attorneys around the world who think it is a terrific thing. i think we need to consider that issue, but by and large, the world has spoken and the world is very pleased. more countries are coming to the table to engage, so we view it as positive. there will always be criticism, and that is a great thing. . rod beckstrom is the ceo of icann.

thank you for joining us. >> tomorrow on "washington journal," the international affairs professor looks at the obama' s next steps for dealing with iran. daniel erickson looks at u.s.- cuba relations. "washington journal," live at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> now available, c-span is book, abraham lincoln, great american historians on our 16th president. a great read for any history buff. from 56 scholars, journalists, and writers, from lincoln's early years to his life in the white house and his relevance today. in hardcover at your favorite bookseller and out in digital audio to listeno