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. >

a symbolic sample would he, in a script like cyrillic which the russians use, there are some letters, they have a letter that looks like our letter at, but it's a different letter. if you allow someone to make english script with russian script in a name, they can put the letter a in something and make it look like ebay, for example, when it really wasn't. it was a different site with an e., p., fresh and modern something else. so in international domain names the string has to be consistently international characters to avoid what we call spoofing. spoofing is when someone tries to make a website look like someone else's website to get their password or steal their money. so, a lot of the policy development in idm, international domain names has been the design to reduce some of the security risk and fraud. so will there be security issues? always with new technology. but the policy work has been created in cooperation with law enforcement participation in many other parties to try to at least minimize those effects. >> host: where does icann authority derived from? >> guest: our aut

minister of telecommunications on international domain names and how they intend to work on the cyrillic alphabet. so in general we see very good government buy-in in to what we're doing, but sometimes they're not used to private corporations, in many ways having an equal seat at the table. >> host: this is "the communicators" program, our guest is rod beckstrom who is president of the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, also known as icann. joins us from christopher rhoads of "the wall street journal." next question. >> host: on the point that peter raised a minute ago about the security side of this, rod, of course this is an area you know well as head of cybersecurity for the department of homeland defense. how big of an issue is this going to be for icann, and will that be part of icann's role going forward, to play a bigger role, bigger part in the cybersecurity area? >> guest: it's a great question, chris, you know, what role are we going to play in cyber security? we have certain touch points, so there's certain things we can do and certain things we absolutely ca