to lead our economic recovery let's roll up our sleeves to ensure that america remains the leader we know it to be. thank you, may god bless you, and our great country, the united states of america. >> this weekend on book trvetion on after words, frederick harris argues that barack obama's election victory undermined the civil rights movement that made it possible, sunday night at 9:00, followed at 10:00 p.m. eastern with "vanity fair" contributing editor edward klein, with a critical look at the president before and after he reached the white house, from the best seller "the amateur". then at 10:45, former chief economist at the world bank, nobel prize winner joseph sktiglett on why divisions are bad for democracy and price of inequality, part of book tv this weekend on c-span2. >> this week's guest on the communicators just recently resigned as president of the

internet corporation for a sign, names and numbers. i can, is what it's called and rod beckstrom joins us from las vegas. mr. beckstrom, thank you for being on the communicators, also joining us in the washington studio is galfin mcgesh of washington quarterly, the editor of the technology, executive brief fog cq. if you would start the questioning. host: absolutely. hello rod. our first question today is who owns the internet right now. guest: well, the structure of the internet? it's mostly owned by the private sector, by individuals, companies, governments, on a very small amount. but we estimate that over 85 percent of the internet is actually owned by private individuals and firms. host: and a look a the physical infrastructure involved. are they concentrated in any particular country or is it fairly spread apart? guest: we estimate there's about 2.2 or 2.3 billion users on the internet today,

just over half of those are in asia. so you can guess that about half of that investment overall is in asia, and half is spread around the world. the united states has got a pretty good portion, europe, but you've also got good penetration growing in latin america and africa. host: rod beckstrom, who manages it. >> guest: the internet is a magnificently de centralize dollars creation, and -- de centralized creation and it's governed by a lot of organizations around the world, with more than 2424 different countries and territories involved, and one of the key coordination bodies is i can, and i can and its community with the stewards for what we call the u nike identifiers, the names, network addresses and technical settings, the protocol and parameter registries. those are the things that make the internet look like one place. they're governed through a multi stakeholder process with companies involved, government involved, individuals involved, and

civil society organizations. >> can you explain to our viewers what exactly it is that i can does to help manage the internet? >> guest: sure. when we think about the internet we refer to it as one place or one thing when in fact it's billions of private devices, millions of private networks, but it looks like one place. why? because domain names are unique and consistent all over the world. because every network address is unique. so your e-mail address is unique, no one else has that same e-mail address. that integrity of uniqueness is essential so that the internet look like one place. i can is a coordination body that was created to maintain the uniqueness of those things that makes the internet look like one place. host: rod beckstrom, you were president of i can for about three years, a little over three years. what were your goals going in, and do you think you achieved them? guest: my number one goal was to make i can a more international and global

organization. second objective was to upgrade it as ao toe a world class institution as nonprofit organization, and thirdly, it was to execute 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 in. host: recently, i can added new potential domain names or took deposits on potential domain names. how did that process go? guest: sure. that process -- i when can was created, one of the reasons for the creation in the original mission statements to create more consumer choice and competition, because when we were formed, there was really one dominant domain name registry and registrar. consumers didn't have a choice and they had to pay about $35 a year to get a dot com name, for example. so i can was created to

foster choice, so we have opened up the new top level domains and this is the third time in history we've done it, but by far the largest opening. the process started about six or seven years ago, in 2005, the policy development process started, the polices were approved in 20 08, and from 2008 to 2011, we were developing the details of the program, and then in the first half of this year, we opened it up for applications and closed it and i think as you know received 1900 -- over 1900 applications. host: so $185,000 per application, correct? guest: that's right. that's exactly right. host: what is that money used for and who gets to hold on to it? guest: i can is a nonprofit organization and this program was costed out on a break even basis, so the $185,000 is an estimate of what it will cost to process those applications. there's legal checks. criminal background checks on officers of the applying institutions.

financial checks. technical checks. there are review panels. there's objections that can be filed that have to be reviewed by an arbitration panel. so it's a very complex program. those are the estimated costs. if the costs come in lower than that, then the i can community will decide what should be done with those funds. they do not go to i can itself as an organization for covering any of its operations unless the community, for example, decided to do that. so that's the estimated costing for the program. host: rod, you mentioned that you look to internationalize i can. there have been growing calls for greater international involvement in the regulation of the internet and other international telecom services. what is your response to some of these calls for, say, having the united nations have a greater role in how the internet is managed and regulated? which are opposed by lawmakers here in the u.s. guest: i think the internet coordination should continue to become more and more global, and we made significant strides over the

last three years. we added more members to our governmental advisory committee, so we have 110 governments of the world, formally advising i can, we added more than 30 new members to what we call the country code name supporting organization, the domain name operators in different countries around the world, we built an international management team. when i came in, there was one foreign -- or nonenglish language flewencey on the executive management team, one instance, when i left, there were 17 and we had members of our executive member team from china, mexico, united kingdom, france, lebanon, and other parts of the world. so we made a lot of progress. and we also opened up the internet itself to internationalization, by including internationalize dollars domain nails so, that if you live in china now you can actually type in domain names entirely in chinese characters if you register your domain under don jungol. we did the same with parts of

india and around the world, so the root that used taliban latin-based characters, we think of it as english characters is now international scripts. this is important. with respect to the united nations and the e.u., there is an interest of course by many governments in the world, struggling with how do you deal with the internet, how do you deal with this incredible tsunami force of change that is shifting associationite, affecting governmental structures, et cetera, and when you have that level of change of course you've got different government bodies that might be seeking to change or extend their set of authorities to expand into an area such as the internet and that's what i think we see taking place here. >> host: how serious a threat for you is the notion of government interfering with the domain sense with the internet for sen -- censorship or intellectual property. we've seen a whole host of reasons why governments have sought to tap into the internet, physical and

network structure. is that something that i can is concerned about. are you personally, now that you're no longer with the organization, is that something you feel is a threat? guest: yes, it's something i'm very concerned about. it's certainly something that i can and the internet community are very concerned about. not only at the international level, of international governmental bodies seeking to expand their authorities or mandate and sore of having a scope creep, but also international governments and we saw that, for example, here in the united states with the sopa debacle when there was an effort to create the provisions that would have dns filtering or blocking websites without proper due legal process. this is extremely concerning, and the great news is that in this country, and political activists in this country, rose up with the leadership that jamie wales and others demonstrated by taking wikipedia off line for a day, and i think there were more

than 10 million e-mails and letters in a single day, froze sopa in its tracks, and this is part of the new reality that governments have to deal with, which is when they try to create new regulations that might harm the integrity and the open she is of the -- openness of the internet there's very, very strong public responses, and i think we would see the same thing at the international level than we've seen at the national level and that's a good thing i would argue because it keeps a check and balance going, because it's 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 a problem is much worse than the underlying disease or problem that some party feels they're trying to address. so we've got to keep the internet open, we've got to keep it unified, we need to keep it global, keep it as neutral as possible, and it should be governed by these open multi stakeholder processes that include the technical experts that can make sure that the integrity of a system is managed. because the end result that we all want to have is that

we should each be able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, any time in the world. and for that to happen, there has to be this global openness in the integrity in the system. so i think that's what a lot of us care about and we continue fighting to. >> host: rod beckstrom, has the new app world we live in now changed i can's mission? guest: interesting question. i mean, i'm here at black cat. there's a lot of discussion of apps and the security vulnerabilities that come through this profusion of hundreds of thousands of new apps being built. you know, technology is exciting, because it's always a changing game. some parties have said, for example, that perhaps creating all these new apps are going to make domain names less useful or less valuable but there's no indication of that happening so far. you see both a tremendous profusion of creativity and new applications on smartphones and tablets and at the same time, we're seeing more creativity and growth in the domain name

industry. so-so far, i don't see a big change, yet at the same time, you know, no one can predict the future in technology. things just move so quickly. so we're all students of this magnificent process that continues to unfold. host:host you've mentioned black cat, what is that and in your previous life, you were the director of the national cyber security center and is that why you're at black hat? guest: i do have an affinity for the security community, and the field, 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, as i'm sitting here today, sean henry, former director of cyber security at the fbi, is giving his keynote this morning. but black hat is a preeminent security conference globally, there is about 7500 people registered here this week, and then it's interesting, because after three, four days of meetings, with the security community, we have

people from companies here, security companies, security experts, hackers here, the whole kind of eco system, then on friday and saturday there's another conference called deaf con, which is a hacker's conference and think they're expecting somewhere between 5,008,000 hackers, as well as some of the other security participants to be there and i've be attending deaf con as well. it's an exciting time to hear what's going on in security, see the new threats, new vulnerabilities, end products, and see what people are doing to counteract those. host: red beckstrom, you mentioned deaf com, the hacker's conference t. they've commanded that the head of the nsa, keith alexander, will be speaking, doing their keynote. you resigned your position because of the nsa, is that correct? guest: no, that's not correct. i expressed certain views when i resigned about the nsa, but i did not resign because of the nsa, i resigned because i felt that

i had done my term of service with the government and i was ready to move back to california to be with my family. host: in your letter of resignation you said you thought it was bad policy for security and privacy issues to be centered under a military agency such as the nsa. guest: yes, i did say that, and i still believe that there needs to be a separation between civilian activities and cyberspace and those security activities and the military activities. i think it's an important principle in american constitutional history. host: rod beckstrom, currently cyber security is working its way through the congress. do you have views on the current attitude towards cyber security in the congress? guest: well, you know, i think congress is concerned, and i think a lot of people are concerned. the reality is anything attached to a network these days is vulnerable and that's just the reality of this new hyper transparent world that we live in. and i think that we're all

struggling with trying to figure out how to best develop new policy structures and approaches for dealing with that. it's a challenge to do. it's much easier to write policy than to implement successful programs, and no one has got all the answers. so i think it's good that congress is focusing on it, i think it's also very important that they work closely with the global internet technical community, as well as civil rights, civil liberties groups, and make sure that the right balance is achieved in any legislation that's created. and in general, you know, i'm not a fan of a lot of regulation here. i mean, the internet is a force of its own, we have existing legal structures for many of the rights we have in society, and we have to be careful not to create new legislation and new laws that are very difficult to implement or that impinge upon this openness of the internet that we all enjoy. host: are you watching c-span's communicators program, our guest is rod

beckstrom who for three years served as president of the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. prior to that he served as director of the national cyber security center. he is a technical -- i don't know, i guess the word is whiz, from silicon valley originally, a graduate of stanford university. our guest reporter is galfin ngesh of congressional quarterly. host: rod, you discussed the legislation that's currently in front of congress, specifically in the senate, we're seeing them debate a piece of legislation where the sponsors have bent over backward to appease concerns from privacy advocates, but they've also been forced to make some concessions on regulation. so what would you like to see from a cyber security law passed by congress, if not all this year? guest: you know, i have not jumped in depth into that current proposal -- current proposed legislation so i'm not in a position to go into

it in any specific detail. i'm pleased to hear concessions have been made to try to strike a balance. i haven't necessarily heard that feed back from all the communities that they're content where where we've gotten to yet. so i think there's more work to be done and again, i think we've got to be very careful and very deliberate in what we do. host: how much can legislation or policy really make a difference? as you discussed, a lot of this is about implementation. what sort of differences could policy make? are there any positive steps that could impact the operational state of cyber security right now? guest: sure. i mean, good polices can always help, and then the challenge is how do you craft a good policy. you know, one of the things that i believe in strongly, and this is also reflected in the book i co-authored, called-the starfish and the spider", when you're dealing with a de centralize dollars phenomenon like the world of hacking and hackers, which is

quite de centralize dollars for the most part, you want to deal with it in a de centralize dollars way if you want to be suckle, so i think the u.s. government will be more successful in fostering, for example, dlabration centers that include government and private sector, law enforcement and other, that's voluntary, so state and local, as well as federal, foster the collaboration, don't try to control it, don't try to pull the informs into the government paw that usually becomes a one way sucking sound and there's not a lot of information going the other way and a lot of trust gets lost there. i think we should focus on education programs in schools, make sure we're investing in cyber education, make sure we're investing to support collaboration and make sure that we're supporting the research and development and the development of best practices. i think that's a better solution than trying to look at any sort of top-down approaches. host: rod beckstrom, back to the top level domain name issue. 1900 or so applications.

is cyber squat ago legitimate -- squatting a legitimate business in this case? guest: it's actually a very tricky thing to define, okay? it's an easy word to say, but there are different definitions with how people look at that. this program was created so that right holders, parties that own a trademark or servicemark 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 terms that are servicemarked or trademarked. will there be some defensive registrations and that's the term of which some parties might go choose to register their namena new top level domain and they may not want that but they're doing it to protect their name or brand, certainly there's a legal of that but most parties when they do defensive registrations link it back to the main website and use it to drive more business to

themselves, and anyone who's doing that is actually de riving economic benefit out of having those registrations. so it's not a simple issue, and again, a lot of the smartest intellectual property experts in the world working on this problem for six years, and they added in a lot of really strong protections into the program. so it's certainly much stronger with respect to intellectual property rights than any previous generic top level domain round in i can's history. >> are you -- host: i apologize for interrupting, but are you satisfied with i.p. protections around the world right now? guest: oh, gee. you know, that's a big question. you know, am i satisfied. i think that there's a number of challenges. so let's take the trademark system as an example. the trademark system is designed by country, typically, by nation states, and then it has different categories. typically there's more than 40 categories in more than 100 countries that have these

systems. so there's 4000 different parties that can have the right to exactly the same trademark, okay, so the trademark is fractured by geography and industry category. the domain name system is unique. there's only one, you know, brand name dot com, for example. and so what it means is there's a fundamental mismatch there. so the fractured system is trying to map to a system that has integrity and is internationally unique so you're always going to have tension there, so that's an imperfect flaw that just comes from history of how the trademark system was established by nation states. and the internet, it's a new global system so you've got an incompatibility there. intellectual rights is more challenging because of all the jurisdictions around the world where the internet is active and because of actions that parties can take, and i think that what we've seen in the i can community and multi stakeholder community is a lot of work to improve those

programs and there is an intellectat property constituency, for example, in i can that has prominent attorneys but am i personally happy with the overall global system, for one thing, i'd note that fundamental dichotomy in the architecture that's going to create ongoing tensions and i note the difficulty of enforcement because of how open and unified the internet is. so i think we've got some really interesting policy challenges we're going to have to work on for decades to come here. host: what about privacy protection? guest: privacy protection, the internet brings rad caltrans patiencey to almost everything it touches. privacy becomes a construct. it's an artificial construct. very important one. created bylaws and institutions and enforcement. and so i think privacy is importance because we all value it in our lives and i think it's challenged by the

internet and i think that's why it's really important that there's outspoken, articulate groups out there that -- and citizens, people around the world, supporting the importance of some role of privacy in the internet, and at the same time, people want openness. so those are the tensions, you know, between the openness of the internet, between the desires for privacy and the desires for intellectual property protection, and all those -- there's not a simple solution that can solve that equation, and so we're going to find ourselvessite rating around different -- ourselves around different solutions to get our hands around these issues host: next question. >> host: obviously the high price tag, we saw mostly companies applying for the domain name suffixes, but my question is, are domain names and, therefore, domain name suffixes, are they losing performance to personal users or consumers, because when you go on tv i'm sure people ask you for your twitter

handle as opposed to your dot com or what have you, and i find that these are -- social medium is often face bike, twitter for many people these days. how does that affect the domain system and i can specifically? guest: when facebook came out and started getting really popular five years ago, some people predicted that domain name registrations by individuals would decline, maybe even start to shrink. it just hasn't happened. when the economic crisis hit, growth slowed in international domain names but it's up to about where it was and by international, i mean globally. it's growing 5 percent to 7 percent per anum in registrations and revenues. so there's growth in the business, and you know, i think it may change sometime, it may turn around, it may contract, but i think that what's interesting is just how the internet continues to expand and touch our lieches in so many different ways, and it's really up to

consumers and the market to decide, do they want to use their facebook name or a twitter handle, or their e-mail address, or some other tool as a primary contact means or telephone numbers, you know. these things will all change and coexist. i'm not really sure where it is going to go. it will be interesting. host: rod beckstrom, who's the approval process on these 1900 applications? guest: they go through an initial evaluation phase, each of the applications, to see if all the information is complete and they're valid application, et cetera, so they're being worked through that process right now and then the community and the organization will be developing some approach to order the processing of those or to process them as a whole group, and then there's an objection period that's very important, that's open right now, and a comment period. so anyone listening to this program, if you hear about a new gtl name that you either like or don't like, you did go online to i can.org and you can file your comment right now on how you feel,

either in support or objecting to any term. and there's also a formal objection process, where parties with standing have an ability to actually file a specific objection. so for example, if you own a trademark and you feel that someone has filed for a new domain that has your trademark in it and they have no trademark rights you can file a specific objection and that will go to a review panel and i certainly predict if you own the trademark and the other party doesn't, you're in a good position to block that application. so the applications get sproas dollars, they have to get through the objections, if they get through the objections, if they get past the criminal background checks, the financial checks, the technical checks, et cetera, et cetera, then eventually they will be put forward to the board of i can for approval, then after they're approved they can subsequently be entered into the root of the internet. so it's a process that takes time. the very earliest, you might be seeing something in the

root, about a year from now, and it may take some number of years to process this large number of applications. host: do you expect most of those companies that are approved would then sell or offer as a service those -- the option to create new sites using that domain suffix, is that what most proposals say? guest: we'll see. you know, there's a change in the proposals. at some of the organization, they'll probably just use it, let's say i'm a big company, i'm going to have dot company name because i just want to be branded with my company name. i don't want to be advertising somebody else's dot tld. so i might just use it for my primary website and not provide registrations to anyone else but my own employees. or maybe i'm a broad-based internet provider and want to provide free e-mail addresses to people. then, you know, some parties may be providing millions of e-mail addresses for free, or domain names for free. so there's a whole set of different options that the

parties have. it will be interesting to see what creativity comes out of it. and then you have some developers that are more -- investors that want to develop a new category and create community and or a business model around whether it's a city and getting registrants from a city or around a sport or any other kind of activity. so it's quite a broad view and they're all online. people can go online and take a look at all the applications and the information that was submitted on how it's proposed they'll be used. host: finally, rod beckstrom, who succeeded you at i can, and what do you think the biggest challenge is facing that organization -- challenges facing that organization are in the short term? guest: my immediate successor is acra motolla, an operating officer who i recruited and who is a superb leader and i'm pleased to see him step into the row. he's lebanese and i think

that's really excellent in the sense that i was the fourth i can ceo and the fourth one born in an english speaking country and i think it's great we've got someone that's promoted from the inside and who comes from the nonenglish speaking world. but he's filling a temp hear role for about three months and then faha shahadi is someone who acra worked with previously, who is also lebanese and also has a strong background in technology and worked on open source issues. the challenges are very much the same ones we've dealt with, continued internationalization and globalzation of the organization, dealing with the geopolitical threats and challenges, and national regulation natural evenings 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 and very complex top level domain program. host: rod beckstrom, former president and ceo of i can and former director of the