How It Works: IROS and IANA

MTS - AV: Thank you very much. And before we start, let me hand over to my colleague Fernanda to read the script, please.

MTS - AV: Hello, and welcome to the How It Works IROS and IANA session. My name is Fernanda Younes, and I am Participation Manager for the session.

MTS - AV: Please note that this session is being recorded and is governed by the ICANN Community Participant Code of Conduct, the ICANN Expected Standards of Behavior, and the ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy.

MTS - AV: Please observe the following guidelines to participate in the session. I'll also post them in the chat for your reference, or Siranush actually will be posting them in the chat.

MTS - AV: During the session, questions will only be read aloud if submitted within the Q&A pod.

MTS - AV: Interpretation for the session is available in English, French, and Indonesian. If you'd like to speak during the session, please raise your hand in Zoom. When called upon, virtual participants will be given permission to unmute in Zoom.

MTS - AV: On-site participants will use a physical microphone to speak. Only questions posted in the Q&A pod will be read aloud during the session as time permits, and when directed by the chair of the session.

MTS - AV: Please state your name for the record, the language you will speak if speaking a language other than English, and speak clearly and at a moderate pace. And with that, I'll hand it back to Siranush.

MTS - AV: Thank you, Fernanda. Thank you, everyone, and welcome to one of the most important sessions.

MTS - AV: As you may know, ICANN has two directions, two pillars, so technical and policy. And we will be covering both sessions, both topics during today. But now at this session, we will speak about how ICANN works from technical point of view.

MTS - AV: Recently, I came across through the metaphor internet oxygen. So we compare internet to the air. We don't.

MTS - AV: seed

MTS - AV: When air is there, don't, like, notice, but when it's not there, we definitely notice that something is wrong, correct? The same with the internet. We're taking it for granted, but.

MTS - AV: There are so much work behind it, so internet, it's like an air for us when it's there. So when internet is shut down.

MTS - AV: We all feel like.

MTS - AV: very stressed.

MTS - AV: So and it's my real pleasure to introduce the people who are behind of that technical aspect, how internet works in ICANN and I would like to introduce John Crane and Kim Davis.

MTS - AV: Who will be our panelists and presenters, and you will learn about IROS and IANA, those two new acronyms for you, what does it mean, and what stands behind of this. John, the floor is yours.

MTS - AV: Thank you, Siranesh. Firstly, how many people is this their first ICANN meeting?

MTS - AV: I'm lying.

MTS - AV: Okay, so quite a few people, so… Welcome to the family, welcome to ICANN.

MTS - AV: I'm gonna start with some advice.

MTS - AV: Relax.

MTS - AV: Enjoy yourself.

MTS - AV: Get to meet people.

MTS - AV: Don't get worried about…

MTS - AV: The depth of technology, if you're not a technologist, and don't get worried about the policy complications if you're not a policy person.

MTS - AV: This is a mixture of both, if you're a deep tech person.

MTS - AV: You're probably in the wrong place.

MTS - AV: ICANN is not super deep technology when we have these meetings. It's about technology and policy.

MTS - AV: But you're gonna meet a lot of really interesting technologists who do attend ICANN meetings, and you will learn about the importance of policy.

MTS - AV: for technology.

MTS - AV: And if you're the policy people, you're going to learn about the importance of understanding the technology if you're going to

MTS - AV: Set policies, or make policies, so it's a really good…

MTS - AV: Mix. This is where those two worlds really meet.

MTS - AV: So I'm John Crane. I am ICANN's Chief Technology Officer.

MTS - AV: I've been at ICANN for about years. It's been a long while.

MTS - AV: two different ways of counting it. One from when I started working at ICANN, and one from when they employed me, which was a couple of years or a year or so later.

MTS - AV: that's a discussion over a coffee or a beer at some point, but quarter of a… quarter of a cent… of a century, basically, working at ICANN. I've been here for a while.

MTS - AV: So these are actually relatively old slide set because we don't really use the term IROS anymore, but it was an acronym that we made up to describe what we do.

MTS - AV: One of the things you're going to find here at the ICANN, which is of course itself an initialization of something, is we love these acronyms and initializations.

MTS - AV: You will hear hundreds of them.

MTS - AV: This week.

MTS - AV: There is a page, and I'm sure you've probably been sent a link to it, where they're all laid out.

MTS - AV: If somebody uses one and they don't explain it, including myself in this presentation.

MTS - AV: Just ask them politely, call them out, say, could you explain that to me?

MTS - AV: I do not know all of the acronyms. There are so many, and sometimes we use the same acronym for two different things.

MTS - AV: It's like we ran out of…

MTS - AV: Arabic letters or something, it's very strange.

MTS - AV: So the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, that's basically a fancy way of saying the people who at some level work for me.

MTS - AV: Are all people that are responsible for, basically delivering technology.

MTS - AV: understanding of technology, for doing research about technology and for explaining technology to the community and the world.

MTS - AV: And it's made up, basically, of about 5 different functions that all have

MTS - AV: unique characteristics and things they do.

MTS - AV: Sitting here to my right is Kim Davis. He works in a function that's called IANA that's part of an organization called PTI. And I'll let him tell you what that means, because he's going to have his own presentation.

MTS - AV: The IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

MTS - AV: is the reason that ICANN exists.

MTS - AV: If you go back, 30 years.

MTS - AV: into the days when we talked about the need for a global body.

MTS - AV: for coordination of the Internet's unique identifiers.

MTS - AV: Something we called NUCO back then in the late 90s.

MTS - AV: It was all about housing the functions of the Internet Assigned Number Authority.

MTS - AV: And that's… You know, as a technologist, and in my mind, is still one of the most critical things.

MTS - AV: That ICANN does.

MTS - AV: And you probably won't hear a lot about it.

MTS - AV: Because it's not necessarily the most exciting thing, unless you're a geek like myself.

MTS - AV: So, I'm gonna hand over… I'm gonna go about halfway through, and then I'm gonna hand over to Kim, and he'll talk about what the IANA does, which is the area that he leads. So… Let's see where these slides go.

MTS - AV: And it didn't move it. Yes, it did. Oh, I went too.

MTS - AV: So Yeah, this is… Basically, how we talk about them, the IANAs

MTS - AV: A little different, because it has its own

MTS - AV: sub-organization called PTI, its own board, etc. But these all reports up to me, and then there's the…

MTS - AV: Technology functions…

MTS - AV: I'm gonna add one to here, that's because these are slightly out-of-date slides. We have a group we call Business Operations.

MTS - AV: So, I have about… Depending on how you count and what day it is, About 120… Staff.

MTS - AV: Reporting up to me through various technical areas of the organization.

MTS - AV: We manage a budget, in the millions of dollars.

MTS - AV: We have… Tens and tens of projects.

MTS - AV: That we have ongoing. We have…

MTS - AV: I keep picking something up in the microphone, I think.

MTS - AV: So… so we… to manage that, we actually have our own little internal business operations group.

MTS - AV: So, you know, when you run something like a business, you have people that do…

MTS - AV: contracting, and budgets, and project management, and all that kind of stuff. That's those guys. We have the technical engagement folks.

MTS - AV: You'll see a lot of engagement happening from ICANN.

MTS - AV: We have 3 engagement groups.

MTS - AV: by actual individual groups inside ICANN whose role it is to communicate with the world and to engage in two-way dialogue.

MTS - AV: We have a government engagement group.

MTS - AV: Self-explanatory, I think.

MTS - AV: We have a global stakeholders group, which is very generic.

MTS - AV: And then we have a technical engagement group.

MTS - AV: And there's a couple of folks from this region in the technical engagement group, and they're looking at me as though I'm going to ask them to stand up and wave.

MTS - AV: If you insist, Chan Pika, Mei Chan, if…

MTS - AV: So, both based here in region, we have people around the regions, but those are folks who go out and do things like

MTS - AV: Trained on technical issues.

MTS - AV: DNS ECO, or many other things.

MTS - AV: We have a couple of research groups.

MTS - AV: folks who are researching things about the identifier system. I'm going to go a little bit more detail to some of these as I go through.

MTS - AV: Basically in two groups, one that really focuses on…

MTS - AV: protocols and parameters, working with the IETF, etc, and one that is very much focused on how

MTS - AV: identifiers are used.

MTS - AV: So you'll notice I use the term identifiers.

MTS - AV: You probably all thought you were at a DNS conference, domain name system.

MTS - AV: Domain names are identifiers, but ICANN does so much more in the identifier space, and you'll see more about that when Kim gets on.

MTS - AV: microphone. So…

MTS - AV: We do research about how those identifiers are used and misused. You will hear a lot of talk this week about something called DNS, Domain Name System Abuse.

MTS - AV: Some of you have probably studied this. Some of you are probably studying this.

MTS - AV: It's a term that's sort of made up for the ICANN world and the ICANN Policy Forum. It doesn't really exist outside this world.

MTS - AV: Many of these terms… originated within the ICANN world, even the term SSR, Security Stability Resilience.

MTS - AV: came initially out of the ICANN world.

MTS - AV: So, a lot of studies around what's happening there, and some of those stuff are also…

MTS - AV: going to be here, or are here at the ICANN meeting.

MTS - AV: Staff, you've probably been told this. We all have ICANN Org.

MTS - AV: We're paid to be friendly.

MTS - AV: We have to be nice to you, so you can come and talk to us whether we want to or not, and we will be nice to you, I promise.

MTS - AV: And if anybody's not nice to you, you tell Chanpika, and… He will tell them off.

MTS - AV: No, don't go to the Ombuds. That's a lot of paperwork. Love the Ombuds, but it's a lot of paperwork if you do that.

MTS - AV: So let's talk about a couple of those groups. I'm going to kind of flip through these slides because I don't want to do death by PowerPoint. I actually want to get to where you get to ask us questions because frankly, that's more interesting.

MTS - AV: So, I talked about these in the large… this is where Champica and Major are from.

MTS - AV: Basically, promoting best practices. We have… Some programs is… Anybody heard of kindness?

MTS - AV: As a program.

MTS - AV: couple of people. Anybody heard of manners as a program.

MTS - AV: So that's… that's not one of our programs, that came out of something called

MTS - AV: ISOC, the Internet Society, and that was about advancing norms and best practices, if you like, for the routing world, the way we use IP addresses. And it occurred to us that it'd be good to do something very similar for the DNS world.

MTS - AV: So, because…

MTS - AV: we're either very original or not very original. We thought to go with manners, it would be good if you also had kindness. So…

MTS - AV: Knowledge is… and sharing and initiating norms for the DNS.

MTS - AV: spells kindness. I mean, we even have t-shirts, so I don't know if we have any here. But we thought it was clever. But that's a… that's run by this group here.

MTS - AV: And they do a lot.

MTS - AV: of training.

MTS - AV: So we have people on every continent apart from Antarctica.

MTS - AV: that are dedicated to this. They are extremely busy people. You would be amazed, or maybe not.

MTS - AV: How many people… likes to be trained about these obscure technologies that are actually important, like DNSSEC.

MTS - AV: Especially when it's paid for by somebody else. So we do these for free.

MTS - AV: Because we want to get that knowledge out there, so we can get into places and talk to people who may not normally have the budget to bring in some of these commercial folks.

MTS - AV: So, you know, we've got people on every continent, and they are very busy. We mostly teach in English, that is our business language, but we have people that speak

MTS - AV: other languages. Most people in ICANN, not everybody, but most people are at least dual lingual. I'm not Dutch, but I speak English and Dutch.

MTS - AV: Many people

MTS - AV: in our… in our staff and on our board, etc, speak many other languages, so even if we do the training.

MTS - AV: In English.

MTS - AV: A lot of the time, you'll be able to speak

MTS - AV: In some local language to the people, because they're from the region.

MTS - AV: One of the reasons we do this.

MTS - AV: is technical.

MTS - AV: Right? Let's have people running the DNS

MTS - AV: In standardized ways, in ways that meet security.

MTS - AV: needs, etc. But the other reason we do this is to inform policymakers.

MTS - AV: Remember, I said that if you're a policy maker, you need to understand the technology.

MTS - AV: So we don't just do this to technologists. We go out and we also talk to policymakers, governments, and inform them about the technology. Maybe slightly different material, we may be not doing hands-on laboratories like we do with the engineers, but we will be teaching them about these technologies.

MTS - AV: So, as I said, they do many of these.

MTS - AV: These are just some of the topics that they teach on. IDNs, international domain names.

MTS - AV: Obviously, the domain name system in general, you know, kindness is about teaching people how to set up their name service properly, etc.

MTS - AV: DNS security extensions, security best practices for identifier systems, routing… basically wherever we find there's a need that will help support ICANN's mission.

MTS - AV: Remember that ICANN's mission is to ensure a secure and stable identifier system.

MTS - AV: So if people…

MTS - AV: Can't manage their part of the identifier system securely, then obviously it has an effect on the overall system.

MTS - AV: That doesn't mean that it is our role to go and teach everybody on the planet how to configure a router or a DNS server. But we try and reach out, you know, we'll do things like we'll work with universities to build

MTS - AV: their curriculum.

MTS - AV: So we're trying to push knowledge.

MTS - AV: These are… That's an outdated slide.

MTS - AV: I'm sorry.

MTS - AV: Oh, she's not even looking.

MTS - AV: May Chan is not on that slide, so that's an outdated slide.

MTS - AV: I should have looked at these before I came. These are just people out there.

MTS - AV: Giving lots of talks about stuff.

MTS - AV: We've got Nico on the top left there. He's down in Latin America.

MTS - AV: based in Uruguay.

MTS - AV: Montevideo. We've got Aldish, who's Based in Sweden.

MTS - AV: He's actually German, but he's based in Sweden. And then we've got David Huberman there, who's North America, which is, you know, USA, Canada.

MTS - AV: parts of Mexico also. They're just out there giving training.

MTS - AV: They're very, very busy people.

MTS - AV: Research.

MTS - AV: So, how many of you have been to an Internet Engineering Task Force, or an ITF?

MTS - AV: I asked a few of you. I mean, considering you, you know the group that it is. That's Good.

MTS - AV: You know, because I sit in conferences and things, and I teach, and people have never heard of them. So we send a lot of our staff

MTS - AV: to the IETF to help with protocols.

MTS - AV: So, this group… Really engages with the DNS and the identifier technologies communities, very active in the IETF.

MTS - AV: If you read some of the DNS,

MTS - AV: RFCs, the request for comments documents, you will find that they've been written by ICANN staff, either before they became ICANN staff, or while they're ICANN staff.

MTS - AV: So… you know, very, very active there. ITF, like ICANN, happens 3 times a year around the world.

MTS - AV: You can join pretty much everything remotely. In fact, the ITF is interesting in that it doesn't make decisions at the meetings.

MTS - AV: It's a rule they have.

MTS - AV: It's like, it has to be made in the mailing list with the groups, so that the people that can't get to the meetings can make the meet… can actually make the decisions. So we facilitate in those, we actually write protocols, we work on Ensuring that protocols can be implemented. Generally, we don't write code ourselves.

MTS - AV: But we may, for example, fund code. We may go to one of the DNS resolver

MTS - AV: manufacturers, that they're mainly open source, and say, hey, there's a new RFC coming.

MTS - AV: Is this on your implementation timeline?

MTS - AV: And they may say, well, not really. And we might say, well, we think this one's important for our mission.

MTS - AV: Can we help you fund it? Can we do other things to get it raised on your priority list? So…

MTS - AV: Very busy.

MTS - AV: We do a lot of studies. Has anybody heard or read any of the Okto documents, Office of the CTO documents from ICANN?

MTS - AV: So… These guys, they have a lot of engineering background, they write a lot of those documents, so…

MTS - AV: They vary.

MTS - AV: I think the strangest one is on election mechanics, and

MTS - AV: Randomization, how you do proper randomization.

MTS - AV: It's a little odd, but we actually do have elections and things that I can, and understanding how you do randomization properly.

MTS - AV: thought it'd be interesting to document that, so we wrote a document on it. Post-quantum cryptography, where it affects the identifier systems, mainly the DNS and DNSSEC.

MTS - AV: It runs the gamut. There is. There are a lot of documents in there. I do recommend, if you're interested in how some of the technology works to go read them.

MTS - AV: We really try very hard to use plain language and make them accessible to non-engineers.

MTS - AV: Bit hard to do with.

MTS - AV: post-quantum cryptography, there's a lot of really long words in there. It's not easy to make hits.

MTS - AV: manageable and digestible by people who aren't following it, but that is what we attempt to do.

MTS - AV: And of course, We,

MTS - AV: represent ICANN as we go around. There is something called the Root Service System Advisory Committee.

MTS - AV: ICANN manages one of the 13 root servers.

MTS - AV: So that also comes under the office of the CTO.

MTS - AV: It's managed by a group that we don't mention here. It's a little group.

MTS - AV: It's actually one of the biggest groups in ICANN, which is our engineering and information technology group that also reports to me.

MTS - AV: They manage the deployment of the root server.

MTS - AV: And this group, the sort of research guys, actually manage much of the strategy. We do it together.

MTS - AV: But because they are such DNS protocol geeks, they give a lot of the input.

MTS - AV: So this is just a list of some of these. We'll share the slides. I'm not going to go through all of these different things. DNS error…

MTS - AV: reporting was one of those things where we actually developed the protocol in the IETF and published it. It was… we noticed something that was missing in the technology stack.

MTS - AV: And the way you fix that is you go into the Internet Engineering Task Force, and you work with

MTS - AV: what they call the working groups, to write a request for comments and to get that to become the standard. So it's standards development, basically. ICANN does not develop those technical standards.

MTS - AV: The Internet Engineering Task Force does that.

MTS - AV: I think you'll probably cover the IETF a little bit in your slides, at least on…

MTS - AV: And, you know, I'll just leave those up for a second. So this is the other area of research I talked about.

MTS - AV: you know. Obviously, wow! Those are small letters support supporting the security, stability, and resiliency of the identifiers.

MTS - AV: That's what ICANN does, that's what our mission is. So, basically.

MTS - AV: You break this down to.

MTS - AV: two areas. One is understanding what is happening in the ecosystem.

MTS - AV: So we developed a system to measure the reports of DNS abuse.

MTS - AV: Note. I didn't say we're measuring DNS abuse.

MTS - AV: We're measuring the reports of DNS abuse.

MTS - AV: So there wasn't a system

MTS - AV: to go in and find a domain name, and to pull together all the evidence, and to say this is 1 or 0, it is or it is not DNS abuse.

MTS - AV: It was to measure what people were saying and the reputation of a specific name out there on the DNS.

MTS - AV: The reason we did this is the other part of that mission, which is to actually understand the state of the art of the science around this, and then to push that science.

MTS - AV: We did that project.

MTS - AV: Oh my God, it must have been… it's definitely more than a decade ago, because we were told you could not measure these things.

MTS - AV: And there's nothing you should ever say to an engineer that is worse than you cannot do something, because we will find a way. So… and it was really about pushing that science and that methodology of how you identify

MTS - AV: Levels of abuse, or reported abuse, and how you could actually set a baseline and then

MTS - AV: As you change policy, hopefully measure the change.

MTS - AV: Unfortunately, with the way the internet goes, it often seems that abuse, not just DNS, all abuse just seems to go up no matter what you do. But you can measure changes. So it was very interesting.

MTS - AV: That is still happening today. We have a tool called Metrica, that has data around what people are saying about domain names.

MTS - AV: measuring…

MTS - AV: every generic name, because we don't measure all the CC names, because we don't… the country code names, because we don't have all the data that is resolving on the internet.

MTS - AV: Is not a small undertaking.

MTS - AV: I wouldn't say it's big data in the way that, like banks and some other people measure things. But it's it's pretty big data. It's

MTS - AV: moderate data, we'll say. It's a lot of names, but we look at every name every day, see what people are reporting about it, measure how long it's been reported as bad. That's a new module we're doing, and we're building new modules.

MTS - AV: every year, do new ways to measure what is happening out there on the internet. But it's not just about the measurements, it's about the science.

MTS - AV: There are other organizations. There's an organization called NetBeacon that does something very similar.

MTS - AV: They are measuring abuse and reports of abuse, and they're actually working with industry. It's not an ICANN body. I happen to be on their advisory board.

MTS - AV: But they used a lot of our science when they first started up, and now they're improving science. So to me, that's a success of the work we do. When other people look at what we do and they go, we can do it better.

MTS - AV: That is fantastic, because our job is to promote improvement of the ecosystem. It's not to run all of these things.

MTS - AV: And once again, a lot of education.

MTS - AV: We do also facilitate discussions around cybersecurity when… When these things affect…

MTS - AV: the domain name system is normally where it gets seen, but also the routing system. We obviously have an interest.

MTS - AV: Things like, botnets. I think everybody may have heard of robotic networks or botnets may use domain names at scale.

MTS - AV: And how they do this is of interest to us, and we will often work when there are cases to help

MTS - AV: people out there, law enforcement, researchers.

MTS - AV: understand how the naming systems are actually being abused.

MTS - AV: also, so we can understand them.

MTS - AV: So these guys get to have a lot of fun. They're really researching in interesting areas and trying to push the science.

MTS - AV: Awesome. We've also funded

MTS - AV: some projects. So if we see a project that's borderline what we should be doing to our mission. we might go and say, okay, that is actually useful for ICANN. There's a project out there called Infermal that you might hear being talked about. We funded that.

MTS - AV: It's a neutral piece of research. We did not do the research. We, it's… we did actually advise them on some of the technology, because we're the experts.

MTS - AV: and how the DNS works, etc.

MTS - AV: But we funded that, so we do research, we fund research.

MTS - AV: These are just some of the tools. Once again, I'm going to share the slides. I'm not going to go through them, because I'm watching time.

MTS - AV: Where can you find what we're doing?

MTS - AV: ICANN's website, type in Okto, type in… and you will find all kinds of stuff.

MTS - AV: The best thing to do is just go and bug people, go talk to Chan Pika, come talk to me and we can help you find.

MTS - AV: things. It's all on our

MTS - AV: website. You'll see some numbers there, that's just our numbering terminology for the Okto documents. RBL's, classification of unsolicited email threats, that was a piece of science we did a while ago, using machine learning, I guess before it was trendy.

MTS - AV: To go through millions of emails and see if we could classify what kind of threats were in them.

MTS - AV: We have a blog.

MTS - AV: And these are our things, and I am going to hand over to him, and then we can go to things.

MTS - AV: Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone.

MTS - AV: As you heard, I'm head of a team called IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, and I hope that over the course of the next little while, you'll have a better understanding of what IANA is, what it does, why it's there, why ICANN was created to be the home of it.

MTS - AV: And many other questions that you might have for us.

MTS - AV: So if we think about IANA fundamentally.

MTS - AV: We're just a group of record keepers. We have lots of different technical records that we keep.

MTS - AV: We administer them according to various policies, but

MTS - AV: I've heard it said derisively that we just maintain a big spreadsheet, and

MTS - AV: Conceptually, that's not too far off.

MTS - AV: Off track,

MTS - AV: But it's a very important spreadsheet. And in fact, without this spreadsheet, the internet as we know it probably wouldn't work.

MTS - AV: It's a spreadsheet that really predates ICANN. The IANA functions themselves really date back to the very first

MTS - AV: experiments of what became the Internet.

MTS - AV: My predecessor in this role, a man by the name of John Postel, was one of the original researchers that,

MTS - AV: helped develop today's internet, and his role in a lot of those early experiments was essentially to be the guy with a notebook taking notes of what experiments happened, how they were conducted, and part of that was keeping records of, like, what device was connected to what device, and so forth. And that was happening

MTS - AV: Like in the early 1970s. And that role has just sort of organically grown ever since then.

MTS - AV: it was really in the 19… actually, this slide is wrong, it says 1988, should be 1998. In the mid-1990s, there was this big boom of what became the internet. It was really in the 1990s where the internet stopped being a research project and started being the commercial…

MTS - AV: international powerhouse that, you know, continues on to this day, and part of a lot of the evolution

MTS - AV: That was happening on the internet at the time was a recognition that

MTS - AV: this person and his notebook and his team probably needed to evolve into something a bit more formalized, a bit more accountable, and a bit more globally established, and that was a lot of the thinking that went into the creation of ICANN. How do we create an organization that can host IANA

MTS - AV: That had all this global accountability, participation from around the world, simply as recognizing the fact the internet has become so much more than a research project by that point.

MTS - AV: Now, what IANA does, the records that we keep are unique identifiers. And as John mentioned, a lot of people coming here to Bali attending this conference.

MTS - AV: your first… the first identifier that comes to mind, and probably the primary reason you're here, is domain names. And domain names are certainly a very key part of the internet identifier landscape.

MTS - AV: It's usually the first thing people reach to when they want to get somewhere on the internet is through a domain name. But it's not the only part of the story. In fact.

MTS - AV: Behind that domain name is many different kinds of identifiers that are required to make the internet fundamentally work.

MTS - AV: These identifiers usually you don't see. If you're just an end user of the internet, you don't see these identifiers, but they're working behind the scenes to make sure that everything you transact and communicate over the internet works in the way that you would expect.

MTS - AV: I'll get to why that function is necessary a bit later in the discussion.

MTS - AV: I lead a team that is responsible for maintaining these records, and we do it in accordance to policies that we don't ourselves set. So, the IANA team itself is operational. We're not a policy body, we're not a rulemaker. We take the rules that have been developed, largely by this community.

MTS - AV: And we operationalize them. We turn the rules into day to day operations so that when someone wants to get a unique identifier, they come to us.

MTS - AV: We review their request against the policy, and then we'll implement it if they're eligible, and we won't if they're not. But that's at the heart of what we do.

MTS - AV: So why do we need an IANA?

MTS - AV: In a sense, the internet works by having everyone connect to this common network.

MTS - AV: around the world where there's no real rule makers. Like, there's no body you have to apply to for permission to connect to the internet.

MTS - AV: Obviously, laws and regulations in any given jurisdiction or country might differ, but generally speaking, the internet is just a general network where there's no center, there's no sanctioning body that says you are allowed to use the internet and you are not.

MTS - AV: It's a global network free from that kind of centralized control or authority.

MTS - AV: But, for that to work, all the devices on the internet have to speak a common language, a common technical language, so that when your device connects to the internet and starts sending transmissions to it.

MTS - AV: the receiving party understands what it's receiving, that it all works together in a standardised way. And that is really kind of at the heart of why IANA is an essential part of the internet.

MTS - AV: If IANA didn't have its comprehensive set of records that said

MTS - AV: This domain has this particular purpose pointing to this particular service or…

MTS - AV: these IP addresses are assigned for this particular network, and all sorts of other manner of identifiers that weren't standardized in a standard way globally, then the internet wouldn't be sort of a plug-and-play experience. Like, you would connect to it, and maybe you had a different

MTS - AV: Kind of internet on your device than the person you're connecting to, and it wouldn't work.

MTS - AV: So having this sort of global function where everyone comes together.

MTS - AV: We globally set the policies, but there is essentially one single source of truth that says these identifiers have these particular purposes and they work a certain way.

MTS - AV: is what makes the internet what it is. It makes the internet a network that people can participate on that works effectively, because there's this sort of common rulebook that everyone follows at a technical level.

MTS - AV: That you will transmit, your communications using IATF standards that John mentioned, but you'll use identifiers that have been registered with the IANA.

MTS - AV: And so the…

MTS - AV: I mentioned domain names. Again, domain names are a bit of an unusual case, because there's so much complexity around them, so much policy, so much rulemaking.

MTS - AV: But the vast majority of identifiers we administer are actually only really relevant to software developers. Software developers are actually the bread and butter of what we do day to day. We work closely with them.

MTS - AV: When, you know, a software developer is creating a new technology on the internet, they'll often work directly with IANA to register the components of their new software or their new technology to make sure it works on the internet. And that is a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes.

MTS - AV: They'll ultimately develop a product that they'll launch into the world. You might not see the identifiers that sit within it, but they are there to make sure that that particular technology or that particular software works effectively on the internet.

MTS - AV: When we talk about, these identifiers, particularly in the policy space, which is why we're largely here this week, we tend to divide it into three categories. We talk about protocol parameters, which are largely those sort of identifiers that are embedded in software that the end users typically don't see.

MTS - AV: We talk about domain names, and we talk about number resources. So the protocol parameters, our core deliverables there is we manage

MTS - AV: thousands and thousands of registries of these identifiers. Each individual registry can have anywhere between one and something to the magnitude of 100,000 identifiers in it.

MTS - AV: And we essentially manage those according to what the policies stipulate and the technical standards. Software developers in particular will come to us, get allocations, get added to the registries, and importantly, software implementers that implement the new technologies will download our registries. They'll often embed them into software.

MTS - AV: Just one example of a particular kind of identifier we manage is something called port numbers. And so the port number registry has countless entries in it. Software developers will embed that. I'm sure there's a copy of the port number registry in every device here in this room, whether you have a laptop or a phone.

MTS - AV: Somewhere in your operating system is the port number registry, so that your device knows how to connect to different ports on the internet.

MTS - AV: Domain names, our central role when it comes to domain names is administering what's called the root zone.

MTS - AV: The root zone is, the most central piece of the DNS. It is effectively the registry of what is a top-level domain. So we have the official records of what top-level domains exist.

MTS - AV: Along with pointers to where the technical infrastructure is that hosts those top-level domains, and other various technical elements that won't get into too many details here today.

MTS - AV: Another part of administering the root zone is administering the cryptography around it. This is what enables us to validate the contents of the root zone is secure. The cryptographic key for the root zone is called the KSK.

MTS - AV: You might have heard about this in the last week because we actually, for only the second time ever, changed the KSK for the Root Zone on October 11th. So that was a big operational event that took about three years of planning to conduct. It all culminated on Sunday last week.

MTS - AV: And, glad to say, that went off more or less without a hitch, but, that is part of administering the root zone as well, is administering the cryptographic key for it.

MTS - AV: And then number of resources. So number of resources.

MTS - AV: I guess a show of hands, who's heard of an IP address in this room?

MTS - AV: Few people. So the core concept here is that every device connected to the internet needs a unique number associated with it. This is how packets flow over the internet. If my device is talking to your device, how does it know where to send that information?

MTS - AV: Under the covers, each device has this unique number that needs to be used as a source or a destination for transmission. So these IP addresses need to be assigned. Now, people don't come directly to IANA for every IP address because there is…

MTS - AV: 10 billion people in the world, and that would be a lot of work. So, there is a structured hierarchical allocation model. What we do at IANA is we manage the global address space, but we partition it up into mostly regional blocks. So, we'll create a block for the Asia Pacific.

MTS - AV: We'll then hand that block to an organization called APNIC,

MTS - AV: AP NIC is responsible for making assignments within the Asia-Pacific region.

MTS - AV: If a network operator in Indonesia, for example, wanted IP addresses, they would go to APNIC. APNIC would give that network operator a big block of numbers out of the allocation that IANA has given them. They'll subdivide that up for different network providers.

MTS - AV: And then that network provider in turn will allocate individual IP addresses to their customers. So if you're connecting to your ISP at home, for example, you'll just get one IP address, but it's followed that chain from IANA to a regional body to a network operator, and then ultimately to you.

MTS - AV: So who's involved in the IANA functions?

MTS - AV: There we go.

MTS - AV: John mentioned some of the acronyms. I think the key thing I would mention here is there's two bodies that are particularly relevant to IANA. IANA, to be clear, is not a company. IANA is a function, it's a name… it's a name that describes a collective set of services that we provide.

MTS - AV: Now ICANN, as you heard, was created to be the home of IANA, and, you know, essentially it still is. ICANN was created in the 1990s because IANA needed a place to sit that was accountable to the world.

MTS - AV: And so that's why ICANN was created and ICANN's duties still are to be responsible for the IANA functions.

MTS - AV: However,

MTS - AV: Ten years ago this month, there was a big community effort to conduct what's called the IANA stewardship transition. And if you look outside on the pillars in the in the lobby here, you'll see stickers, announcing this fact.

MTS - AV: Essentially, the IANA stewardship transition was a big effort that, you know, I could certainly get into the details on, but in essence, there was a recognition that.

MTS - AV: ICANN had matured to a point where it was finally ready to take on

MTS - AV: Broad responsibility for the IANA functions without.

MTS - AV: oversight above it. For ICANN's first 20 years.

MTS - AV: The US government actually oversaw how ICANN did the functions. But in 2016, that changed. And so a bunch of different restructuring happened to sort of enable this change. And the one that's particularly relevant here is that ICANN actually created a subsidiary called PTI.

MTS - AV: PTI stands for Post-Transition IANA or Public Technical Identifiers.

MTS - AV: And essentially, PTI is a subsidiary organization of ICANN that I lead, that actually does the day-to-day work of running the IANA functions. ICANN still oversees it, but ICANN funds PTI to do the actual work.

MTS - AV: The reason why there's two separate companies is largely to do with an oversight mechanism to make sure that the IANA functions had some legal separation from ICANN so some of the oversight mechanisms can work effectively.

MTS - AV: But, at the end of the day, my team, we sit in ICANN's office, we all have lunch together, we all operate as if we're a department of ICANN, so it's more of a legal distinction than a practical day-to-day distinction.

MTS - AV: And then there's PTI itself, as I mentioned, started in 2016, that actually runs the functions. The IANA staff work for PTI, and then ICANN is the sole member organization that PTI is a part of.

MTS - AV: PTI does have its own board of directors. This is the current composition. John is a director, I'm a director. We have three other directors as well. Two of them are community members, Anupam Anggarwal and Lisa Furr.

MTS - AV: Anupama is actually retiring from his role at the end of this week. He'll be replaced by a new board member. His term is up. And rounding out the board, ICANN CFO, Zavia Calvez, is also on the board.

MTS - AV: And then we have a great team that actually does the work. Some of them will be here this week. Most of them are located in Los Angeles, California. And this is the team that does the day-to-day work of

MTS - AV: receiving the requests from the community, implementing them, and also doing all the support work around that. The technical systems and support that make it work.

MTS - AV: All of our strategic work, our planning, our auditing. Auditing is a very important part of what we do. Since we have such a critical and essential function for the internet, it's important we do our job correctly.

MTS - AV: And so we have lots of checks and balances to make sure that we do the job well. And some of the team that we have, their job is just to check our work, bring in third party auditors, so that they can check our work, facilitate that and so forth.

MTS - AV: Our core work is processing requests, of all the kinds I already mentioned. We have subject matter experts on our team, so a lot of, you know, the very technical things that we do require certain subject matter expertise to assess.

MTS - AV: So that's part of the operations work that we do. We have service level agreements so that the community can monitor our performance.

MTS - AV: It's important that when you ask us for a service, we do it in a timely manner. We do it accurately. So the SLAs are all around timely performance of requests and making sure we do them correctly.

MTS - AV: And then also we have emergency capabilities as well, particularly around the root zone. The internet never sleeps. So for the certain things that we do where we have a critical role to play, we have emergency response available as well.

MTS - AV: We have a technical services team. We do things like software development to make sure our systems do what are needed to support the work that we do.

MTS - AV: product management. We have a cryptographic business operations team. Essentially, their primary function is just managing that one key, the KSK that I mentioned. It is so critical, that key, to

MTS - AV: DNS security, because it is essentially one irreplaceable key that protects the whole DNS. For that reason, there's a lot of effort, time, and operational effort spent on just administering that key.

MTS - AV: As well as monitoring and maintaining our systems.

MTS - AV: I mentioned audits are an important part of what we do. We do an annual external audit where we have, our information security, practices audited. We have risk assessments, we have internal compliance functions.

MTS - AV: We do customer satisfaction surveys. All sorts of functions there are supported by our strategic programs team.

MTS - AV: And I'll, you know, this is a bit of a prelude. I'm going to actually have a much longer session later in the week where I talk a bit more about this, so I won't get too much into the details right now.

MTS - AV: Some common misconceptions about what we do and don't do here. What we do do is create those registries, but we do it based on policies from the community.

MTS - AV: We maintain those registries, we allocate, for example, number of resources. And importantly, we're more or less an open book. Our job is to publish our registries so people can use them. So…

MTS - AV: We're in the business of record keeping, but we're also in the business of just publishing those records. So, we don't charge for service. You don't have to pay IANA to get a copy of our records.

MTS - AV: Everything is published in machine-readable format, so people can just download it and use it as they need to use it.

MTS - AV: What we don't do is we don't create nor interpret policy. We are here to administer the policy that the community has made. When the policies don't exist, or the policies are fundamentally unclear or unimplementable, our job is to go back to the community and say, okay.

MTS - AV: We can't implement this policy. You need to go back and work on it, and then ask the community to rework the policy.

MTS - AV: What we don't do is we don't determine what can be a domain name. As cool as it sounds, I don't get to decide, hey, I'm gonna go create that TLD tomorrow. Yes, we do insert TLDs into our records, that is what makes them real, but we do it following policy, and

MTS - AV: There's this whole application round happening now for new gTLDs. If you're a ccTLD, there's all these rules that govern what can be a ccTLD and on what conditions. So we are not the ones that sit there and go yes or no. We're administering policy that should have more or less made that decision well before it comes to us.

MTS - AV: So I mentioned that later this week I have a bigger session. We're going to be talking much more in depth about what we do at IANA on Wednesday.

MTS - AV: If this little brief preview has given you some interest in this, I invite you to come join us there where we'll go into more detail. I'll also be joined by more of my team there during that session as well.

MTS - AV: And we'll be using that as a moment of reflection. As I mentioned, it's a critical 10-year anniversary of a big change that we had, so we'll talk a little bit more about that. And also, we've done a lot of modernisation work in IANA just in the last 6 months, so we're excited to share some of that work that we've done on Wednesday.

MTS - AV: We invite you to come join us at 10.30am on Wednesday for that session, if you're able.

MTS - AV: But in the meantime, I think that brings me to the end of the slides, but as John mentioned, like, really, we're here to answer questions, so we have another half an hour where we're happy to, dive into the questions that you might have, and I'll hand it back to Sirinush to manage that. Thank you very much.

MTS - AV: We have really 30 minutes for Q&A, and this is exactly the time for you to ask questions and unique opportunity. Please raise your hand, I will see. Okay, Sadhichita, we start, and then we'll come to you.

MTS - AV: Yes.

MTS - AV: Hello, everyone. It's me, Sadiktha Silval from Nepal. I am with Fellowship program. I have a question for John. As I am from Nepal, and you mentioned about the SSR research.

MTS - AV: for the, that supports the resiliency of internet and things. So, how does SSR research conduct under

MTS - AV: IROS translate into a practical improvement in the resilience of the zone… root zone.

MTS - AV: For example, does the research inform the operational challenges, like early warning systems, or the recommendation to the root server operator and the wider community? I'm saying specifically to the context that we recently have a disastrous flood in Nepal, and the early warning system and the internet resilience was something we learned from that flood, so yeah.

MTS - AV: So, ICANN itself doesn't have a major resilience study program. There are other organizations that do, and we participate. There's an organization called the Marconi Society that is doing a lot of work bringing together

MTS - AV: providers of… Services for communication.

MTS - AV: So, you know, the internet's not just the identifiers you need,

MTS - AV: physical connectivity, etc, and we do participate in those.

MTS - AV: We do studies… Around…

MTS - AV: things like how easy is it to query a DNS service? Very technical things. We tend not to get into the… all the other important parts of resilience for communications infrastructure.

MTS - AV: What we do is we participate in other programs which are much broader, and we bring our expertise. Now, that said.

MTS - AV: We have a lot of contacts in country, so, you know, if there's ever a disaster, and…

MTS - AV: the CCTLD or others come to us from the identifier side and ask for help, yes, we step in. You know, either with advice or finding help, etc, but it's not a core part of ICANN's role. ICANN's role is that identifier part. Now, of course, we run a root server.

MTS - AV: Right? I think we actually have one in Nepal. I think we have one in Kathmandu. So we operate the root servers, root server operators, of which we are only one.

MTS - AV: We communicate a lot and work together, and you know, our role is to provide this service.

MTS - AV: And we all do work together to try and ensure that we get these around the globe, get them as close to the end user as possible.

MTS - AV: There's actually new emerging discussion about whether or not physical route service is the best way to get that service.

MTS - AV: Because what you're actually interested in is DNS resolution service.

MTS - AV: A root server describes Basically, a box…

MTS - AV: a way of getting that service. You know, there are 13 letters put into the HINS file on the root zone that identify these 13 machines, and the DNS does its thing, and that's one of the first places it goes on a new resolver.

MTS - AV: But there are other mechanisms at play at the moment. And within the Internet Engineering Task Force.

MTS - AV: about, are there ways to make this more resilient? And we are looking at that. Don't have any papers on it at the moment, it's…

MTS - AV: It's been around for a long while, but it's only now getting documented.

MTS - AV: So, you know, we're interested very much on the identifier space. So when it comes down to root servers, absolutely. We are doing some studies at the moment.

MTS - AV: About… deciding… scientifically, As scientific as you can be with data on the internet.

MTS - AV: where the best place is to position all of these instances we have. We have

MTS - AV: 100 and something instances around the globe. Amongst all the root servers, there's a thousand plus of these machines out there, whether it's actually a physical machine or it's in somebody's cloud infrastructure. So…

MTS - AV: We're not doing any specific studies on it at the moment, but we are participating in a lot of other

MTS - AV: bodies that are looking at these things. So, yeah, thank you for the question.

MTS - AV: Thank you, Sanjina.

MTS - AV: Hello, everyone. I'm Sanjina Chhetri, I'm from Nepal. I'm a next-gen participant for ICANN87. I have a question for Kim.

MTS - AV: You just said that IANA doesn't decide who,

MTS - AV: Which

MTS - AV: which CCTRD to give to which country. So, I just wanted… I was just curious who decides that, and also, if not IANA, then who decides which CCTRD to give to which country, and also how that

MTS - AV: that thing is managed, like, how it balances the global take, balance, and also the local interests, or the country's interest of, on that manner, so…

MTS - AV: Thanks for the question. So, when it comes to, country code top-level domains, or ccTLDs, there's, I guess, two parts to the answer. One is, how is the two-letter code decided to represent a country, like NP for Nepal?

MTS - AV: So we follow an international standard called ISO 3166. This is a standard that is used globally for not just domain names, but if you look in your passport and the coding on the passport, it uses ISO 3166 codes.

MTS - AV: Currency codes use ISO 3166. All manner of different ways of needing to codify countries use the same international standards. So the two letter codes themselves come from ISO.

MTS - AV: So that's part one to your question, but I think the bulk of your question is who runs the CCTLD. And the way the policy is structured is essentially who runs any individual country code should be a local decision within the country.

MTS - AV: So the global policy doesn't dictate like a certain procedure that happens at the global level. For example, we don't decide directly. What we're obligated to do is to perform due diligence to make sure that an appropriate process happened within the country.

MTS - AV: to identify who should run their CCTLD.

MTS - AV: And that the party that we're being asked to recognise is a product of that process. Now.

MTS - AV: That's at the high level. Obviously, there's some nuance and some detail that go into that.

MTS - AV: A big one is compatibility with local laws. Like we have to have an operator that is in the country that is adhering to local laws. So if, for example, there are local laws that say the CCTLD must be administered in a certain fashion, that's part of the analysis that we need to assess that they are complying with those obligations.

MTS - AV: Competency is a very important one, arguably the most important one. CCTLDs are critical internet infrastructure.

MTS - AV: Whole countries rely on their CCTLD working. So, it's important to us that we do not assign it to an operator that does not know how to run critical infrastructure. So, we obligate applicants that want to run a CCTLD to prove that

MTS - AV: they are capable of running a ccTLD. They have to document their technical infrastructure, their operations. We talked about in the last question, like redundancy and

MTS - AV: The ability to sustain operations in the event of some kind of natural disaster. So we asked them, for example, like, where are your different locations? How have you structured your systems so that if there is a single failure, maybe one particular building is out of commission, how will you keep the CCTLD running?

MTS - AV: Things like that. So, operational competency, compatibility with local laws, you know, there's a multi-stakeholder community in the country, have they participated in developing the approach, and so forth.

MTS - AV: And then lastly, I would say that, you know, practically all CCTLDs exist today. There is already an existing operator. So if there's a proposal to move it to a new operator.

MTS - AV: We need to look at what the transfer looks like. So we're taking an existing ccTLD that people rely on today that is presumably working, or at least somewhat working. And we want to make sure that after we move to the new operator.

MTS - AV: that it will still keep working. So we need to look at how are all the files, how are all the records, the business operations going to move from the previous operator to the new operator? So that's part of the assessment as well.

MTS - AV: But ultimately, like, we're not there to, like, decide, hey, we like that organization. We think they should run it. We're looking at a proposals come to us from the country saying, we've done our research, we've done our preparation inside the country.

MTS - AV: This is the culmination of that process that's happened within the country. We're seeking for you to recognize it, and here we're going to prove that we've done everything correctly, and if…

MTS - AV: you know, they have, we will say yes, we'll move forward, and if they haven't, we'll say, look, we've analysed your proposal, and here are the problem areas, and essentially have them go back and work on it. And, you know, they can go back and do corrective work, or continue to develop their application if they wish.

MTS - AV: Thank you. And if I can… Add, because this is an…

MTS - AV: Not really a nuance, but this is a factor of the internet that you always need to keep in mind.

MTS - AV: the internet and CCTLDs, go way back. So many of these decisions were made in… back in the day.

MTS - AV: way before ICANN exists… I mean, one of the reasons ICANN is formed is because we needed to formalize the internet identifier governance. So a lot of these things happened. That gentleman, John Postel, was making decisions back in the day. And a lot of the existing CCTLDs will be the people that connected your country to the internet.

MTS - AV: Or they may have gone to somebody outside your country for a while who was helping, and then gone back in, and there's so much history there.

MTS - AV: Not all of it as clearly documented as we would wish.

MTS - AV: And that's not just with domain names, right? That is also with IP addresses, and with many of these older identifiers. So sometimes you may sit there and go, but this is obviously not the way it would be designed today.

MTS - AV: But then when you come to us and say, well, this is not the way it's supposed to be, you know, it's meant to be this way, then…

MTS - AV: Kim is going to come into these questions, well, how are you going to move that?

MTS - AV: How's that going to work? And we often will get people come and say, well, we need to move this because…

MTS - AV: We are now the right people.

MTS - AV: And when you ask them how they're going to run it.

MTS - AV: It's actually a really great opportunity to bring in people like our engagement folks, and go and actually educate them about what it takes to run a TLD, what… how the DNS works, how DNSSEC works.

MTS - AV: In the background, the internet's actually quite complicated. So, you know, all of these things tie together, but IANA is that…

MTS - AV: I would never call it a spreadsheet.

MTS - AV: Maybe a CSV file, but never a spreadsheet.

MTS - AV: Thank you, Roshate.

MTS - AV: Yes, so my name is Roshate. I work as an AI manager. My question is related to the IROS and the future of the internet.

MTS - AV: As we all know that AI-driven technologies are becoming part of the internet infrastructure, I would want to know how is Airoz working to identify the emerging technical risks that come with it?

MTS - AV: while ensuring that the internet is globally accessible, open, and interoperable. So, yes.

MTS - AV: That is a fantastic question, and if you could…

MTS - AV: Help us, it would be great. So… AI is…

MTS - AV: the latest keyword, or sales pitch that people use today, right? Everything is AI this, AI that. But it's… for once, it's actually a technology, because we've seen hundreds of these technologies over the years.

MTS - AV: That is realistically a truly disruptive technology.

MTS - AV: Maybe not the individual implementations of machine learning that.

MTS - AV: RAI, but the phenomenon of generative AI, et cetera, is transforming society, just like the internet did.

MTS - AV: So we do look at it, but you have to remember that we are looking at it in the context of ICANN's mission.

MTS - AV: We are not responsible for a stable internet, we are responsible for the stable identifiers that allow that.

MTS - AV: Right? So if somebody's laying stupid cables in all the wrong places in the world, we might tell them, but it's not our responsibility.

MTS - AV: But identify it as our area. So one of the things we're looking at is How does…

MTS - AV: AI affect the identifier system?

MTS - AV: But also, how does AI use identifiers?

MTS - AV: Specifically Agentic AI is really interesting at the moment. There are at least six.

MTS - AV: Different proposals out there about agents using.

MTS - AV: identifiers.

MTS - AV: That either are or look like domain names.

MTS - AV: Just because something looks like a domain name doesn't mean it's a domain name.

MTS - AV: None of them… our standards.

MTS - AV: Certainly none of them are open standards, meaning that everybody can use them, and we're tracking those, and we're trying to figure out

MTS - AV: Where is this technology going? So…

MTS - AV: We actually have, I believe, a session on that here at this meeting. We often have sessions that we talk about the future of the identifier systems and emerging technologies, and I believe the one this week is on Agentic AI.

MTS - AV: But there are other questions that we don't know the answers for. Now…

MTS - AV: I run ENIT. Well, I don't run it, but I watch people run it. I'm an exec… I don't… I'm an executive, I don't really do any real work. I've got people for that, and they're fantastic. But they are…

MTS - AV: with myself, we're looking at how are we going to use AI as an organization?

MTS - AV: We have all the same questions that every other business and organization.

MTS - AV: on this planet has. We're no different, right?

MTS - AV: We have the advantage that we actually have people who understand technology.

MTS - AV: But a lot of this stuff, it's not standardized. There's no open standards. You kind of have to guess what they're doing.

MTS - AV: So that's problematic.

MTS - AV: Right? If you're a believer that the internet grew because of open standards, and the ability of everybody to interconnect.

MTS - AV: Then that's a little worrying, but we can't make them do this.

MTS - AV: ICANN is not the governance body for artificial intelligence, and will not be.

MTS - AV: Right? That is not our role.

MTS - AV: When something goes interesting, I'm not gonna say wrong, something goes interesting in the world, and it needs a global governance.

MTS - AV: People come to us, especially if it's technology, and they look to us for an example of how you can do governance. That doesn't mean they're looking at us to do it.

MTS - AV: There are other areas that we do not know about, and people are starting to study this, but how does the use of

MTS - AV: LLMs, for example, to develops policy standpoints.

MTS - AV: How is that going to affect the policy?

MTS - AV: We actually don't know if everybody's using the same public LLM, or is…

MTS - AV: Are the people actually doing the thinking, or are they all getting sort of groupthink through the LLM?

MTS - AV: We don't… so there are so many questions.

MTS - AV: We are focusing mostly.

MTS - AV: on Agentic AI.

MTS - AV: Because that's where the indicators are at the moment that there's going to be a cross-section with identifiers. There is some work in the Internet Engineering Task Force, but there are at least 5 of the proposals out there outside the IETF.

MTS - AV: and we are following closely. We are going to put out some documentation in the next months.

MTS - AV: I don't know that we're late to the game.

MTS - AV: Or I don't think we're any later to the game than the rest of humanity.

MTS - AV: But yes, it's fascinating.

MTS - AV: And this is something that is going to give us.

MTS - AV: Both threats and problems, and vast opportunities.

MTS - AV: And we're trying to fit, just like everybody else in the world, we're trying to figure it out. We're lucky that we have so many smart people to help us.

MTS - AV: But yeah, I mean, what amazing times to live in.

MTS - AV: to be going through this.

MTS - AV: I think, watch this space. We're definitely going to do something. You will hear people in the community

MTS - AV: talking about Agentic AI, and you will see proposals About… Agentic AI.

MTS - AV: The questions you should ask yourself when you see people doing these are things like.

MTS - AV: Oh, are they suggesting an open standard so they can do this with everybody else?

MTS - AV: Or are they looking at closed environments?

MTS - AV: For themselves.

MTS - AV: Are they doing this for the good of the internet, which is what ICANN's here for? And there's nothing wrong with doing things for commercial reasons, but you need to dis…

MTS - AV: You need to understand the distinction and why they're doing things.

MTS - AV: So it's a very interesting time, and I think the next 12 months or so is only going to get more interesting.

MTS - AV: Happy to chat with you offline, because maybe you have ideas.

MTS - AV: Thank you. We have a question from Frank. Frank, please.

MTS - AV: Okay. Frank Asifwa, for the record, I work with an institution called the Association of African Universities. I was quite interested in the conversation with regards to how there are continental leads who are training across the continent.

MTS - AV: We have a very successful relationship regarding universal acceptance. We've worked with ICANN on universal acceptance on the continent. We've been able to help over 300 universities across the continent to

MTS - AV: get both their websites and their emails compliant, and we continue to support, and then we are even incorporating some in, their, curriculum. But, as you know, curriculum changes are quite, difficult. I was wondering if there was a way we could get in touch with the, continental lead on the African continent.

MTS - AV: So we could work with them and then see ways we could synergize and then extend the reach of the activities they're doing so we could reach out to more universities on the continents.

MTS - AV: I don't know if that was supposed to be a backroom meeting, but since I have you here, I wanted to ask that. Thank you.

MTS - AV: So…

MTS - AV: you could… probably your best bet is to talk to Adiel Ekplugen, who is… will be here. He leads our technical engagement team, and he will be here. I think he arrives tomorrow. He would normally be sitting at this table.

MTS - AV: We've moved these meetings further, earlier and earlier in the meeting, so they happen before most of the staff gets here. Happy to have that conversation.

MTS - AV: We try to be a force multiplier. So we clearly can't get into all the universities. So if we can work with like NREN organizations or education organizations, that just makes our job much easier. So let me make that introduction.

MTS - AV: Mahdiha?

MTS - AV: Hello, everyone. My name is Madjiha Mohammad, and I'm an ICANN Fellow. I guess my question starts from the core, sort of function of IANA, which is to ensure interoperability. Speaking of international domain names, how do you, sort of.

MTS - AV: You know, follow up to that, especially with the reveal day sort of revealing basically more application for IDNs. And when it comes to, let's say, the set of rules that are fixated on managing that, how do you also make sure that sort of the IDNs are not in a way monopolized for lack of better terms? Because if we see, for example, it's mostly specific scripture like Mandarin.

MTS - AV: That is sort of, the greater in number. So for maybe.

MTS - AV: one or two, GTLDs that are, like, in another language that is not as huge as Chinese, for example. How do you make sure it's sort of… I wouldn't say necessarily equal, but everything works as it should.

MTS - AV: That sounds more like a next round question than an IANA question. So…

MTS - AV: we can't force people to apply for GTLDs, right? So, the world, unfortunately, isn't fair, and it's driven by business and interest and enthusiasm. So what we did do is we did an applicant supports program.

MTS - AV: To try and help fund organizations.

MTS - AV: that didn't necessarily have the resources, and we did a lot of outreach around universal acceptance and IDNs to try and encourage people.

MTS - AV: Yeah, I think you could argue it's disappointing that we didn't get as many as we'd hoped.

MTS - AV: I don't actually have the answer to how you do that, how you get more people.

MTS - AV: They are specifically, we released the strings, I think last week, I can't remember exactly when.

MTS - AV: And there are… the majority of the IDNs that are in there are indeed of one specific script.

MTS - AV: Yeah, I don't have a good answer to you. I don't know how you… Persia technology. If the

MTS - AV: business and the industries are not out there chasing it themselves. Even if there's a user need for it, I don't know how you push people to actually go and deploy those things.

MTS - AV: You're welcome.

MTS - AV: Yeah, I can add to that. I mean, I guess firstly from an IANA perspective.

MTS - AV: You know, ANA's job is not to make technologies a roaring success. Our job is to globally coordinate what needs to be globally coordinated to make sure they can work.

MTS - AV: But whether they're a market success or market failure is really beyond our remit, and there's plenty of really interesting technologies that completely fall flat due to lack of interest. It's not really solving a problem people have, or maybe it's a very small problem and it's just not worth the effort.

MTS - AV: I think, frankly, and this is switching to my personal perspective, I think the jury is a bit out for IDNs as a technology as a whole. Like it's a great technology, it works.

MTS - AV: ICANN's invested a lot of effort into making sure they work. IANA's invested a lot of work into it. But ultimately, whether IDNs succeed or fail broadly is whether people use them.

MTS - AV: If people want to use them.

MTS - AV: Setting aside the gTLD application round, we offer IDN ccTLD. So if there's countries out there that want

MTS - AV: a non-Latin script representation of their country name, it's available for free for them if they just want to apply and get it for their country. There are processes, and certainly a lot of Arabic-speaking countries have done this.

MTS - AV: Han script, Chinese, etc, have done this as well.

MTS - AV: But, you know, the adoption is a…

MTS - AV: We're not here necessarily to make sure everyone uses IDNs. It's to make sure that they work, they function. If people want to use them, they're available.

MTS - AV: But the broader market has to run with it, and I think that's where we're at with this particular technology.

MTS - AV: Thank you. Mary, our first ever fellow from Tumur Leslec country, so please go ahead. So, how everyone?

MTS - AV: Hello, everyone. I'm Mary from Timor-Leste. Before I'm going to the question, ask the question, first of all, I want to say thank you again to the ICANN to give the opportunity to the Timor-Leste people to join the ICANN here.

MTS - AV: So this is my guess.

MTS - AV: As someone working in the telecommunication industry, I would like to understand how IROS research can help improve the internet, especially in developing countries. Could you please share some examples of how this research can be applied in practice?

MTS - AV: Thank you.

MTS - AV: So often.

MTS - AV: It depends on the problem you're trying to solve. So… If you're…

MTS - AV: in a country, and your citizens are being affected by DNS abuse.

MTS - AV: then obviously developing science to help track and monitor and then hopefully take action against that will help you, will help that citizenship. Right. It's not directed at a specific country. Most of the issues we deal with.

MTS - AV: are…

MTS - AV: Global. Now, with some of the research we're doing about measuring connectivity for root servers or DNS resolution, if we can identify… I think we may actually have a server in Timor-Leste as well, I have to check that.

MTS - AV: you know, then we can identify places that are harder to get to. I mean, Tim Olesley doesn't have a lot of connectivity options.

MTS - AV: And that may help us.

MTS - AV: You know, look at that place and say, hey, there's a spot that we need to get some better infrastructure in.

MTS - AV: For our infrastructure, not…

MTS - AV: the bandwidth, that's not what we do. And then we can actually identify that and go and actually improve the infrastructure. So it does help

MTS - AV: Nations that are less connected.

MTS - AV: We also have, which is not my group, although we participate heavily in it, we also have a lot of regional outreach that are

MTS - AV: On the side of…

MTS - AV: ICANN's mission. We have a lot of partnerships where we will work with other people, things like education, helping increase the education. There are bandwidth

MTS - AV: programs out there that we are not the leader of, but we may actually give them advice.

MTS - AV: I don't know… If Tim Oleste's looking at… the issues around

MTS - AV: post quantum for their DNSX signing for their TOD.

MTS - AV: So we don't aim at a specific country. Our mission is very global, but they should help you locally.

MTS - AV: The one thing that we don't talk about A lot.

MTS - AV: And it's not really written down, but what we are very good at, especially these technical engagement people.

MTS - AV: is introducing People to each other.

MTS - AV: So, I would suggest that you took to…

MTS - AV: Talk to our folks in the technical engagement, and our global stakeholder engagement, and tell them about what's happening on the island, or what's happening in your country, and how can

MTS - AV: You know, they help, because there's nothing they love more than actually making a real difference on the ground. So, talk to our folks.

MTS - AV: And, like, have a conversation about what you think the issues are. And they may turn around and say, well, that's not something ICANN can really do.

MTS - AV: But… We know these people over here. Why don't we do an introduction? We do a lot of that.

MTS - AV: We're very good at connecting people. It's not… but we don't generally do things based on a specific

MTS - AV: locality. We tend to look more globally, and those global things You know, will affect…

MTS - AV: What's happening in your country?

MTS - AV: You know, those protocols we work on, those internet protocols, they're for everybody. They're not for a specific locality, but without them.

MTS - AV: Obviously, Tim Alessi also can't have

MTS - AV: DNS error signaling, which, you know, I'm sure you woke up this morning and thought, oh, I wish I had DNS error signaling. But, you know, that's something that the internet needed, and we do it for the… more for the global sphere. I know that's not exactly an answer you wanted, but let's have a conversation afterwards and see if we can introduce you to some people.

MTS - AV: Thank you. Andrew, please.

MTS - AV: Hello everyone. Thank you for the wonderful talk. I'm Anuza, a computer engineering student from Nepal. As IPv4 addresses are running out and there is adaptation to IPv6, does moving to IPv6 create new security or stability risk for DNS?

MTS - AV: And how do you measure it or look for it? Thank you.

MTS - AV: Doesn't matter what you take.

MTS - AV: I mean, I think that's a good question.

MTS - AV: Fundamentally, no. IPv6 doesn't change…

MTS - AV: interactions with the DNS in a way that presents new security risks and so forth. I think…

MTS - AV: A lot of the… networking challenges that IPv6 seeks to solve.

MTS - AV: is because IPv6 exhaustion has been a problem for 20 years or more.

MTS - AV: A lot of the mess about how networks are provisioned is trying to solve for that problem before IPv6 came around. So a lot of private networking constructs and things and so forth have been built around.

MTS - AV: IPv6 is so scarce that we need to have, you know, private networks and reuse IP addresses in different contexts because we've run out. And a lot of the complexity around network administration comes from that problem, which IPv6 is trying to solve. I think…

MTS - AV: From where I sit, you know, IPv6… Does solve that problem.

MTS - AV: Obviously, adoption has been a general issue, but very gratified that over the last 5 years or so, that adoption has really taken off, and I think, you know, we started to see this particularly with mobile phone networks.

MTS - AV: I would suggest that almost every mobile phone here is using IPv6, not IPv4, because that's the way modern mobile networks are provisioned.

MTS - AV: And through that, I mean, I don't know what the numbers are now, but IPv6 is at least on par, if not overtaken, IPv4 usage. So I think, you know, IPv6 should make network administration easier. It shouldn't present new problems for the DNS. DNS has had

MTS - AV: IPv6 support.

MTS - AV: You know, for a very long time.

MTS - AV: You know, all the root servers support IPv6, practically every TLD supports IPv6, so all the core infrastructure there to support it is there. It's just relying on that long tail of adoption, which is, you know, smaller networks.

MTS - AV: you know, home networks and things to eventually get on, but, you know, it will happen. I don't know if there's anything you wanted to add.

MTS - AV: Yeah, I mean, in our global deployments with the root server, we manage…

MTS - AV: It used to be an issue, right? Oh, can we get native V6 as well as V4?

MTS - AV: It doesn't really exist much anymore. You can pretty much always get V6. There's the occasional place. We have a few locations that they just haven't deployed V6 because they had no need.

MTS - AV: Right? If you have enough V4 for your network.

MTS - AV: Why would you deploy V6, right? Why would you change technology? This is not the first time we've been through IP technology changes. You know, we changed the way we used IP version 4. We did something called CIDR, which is classless inter-domain routing.

MTS - AV: Back in the, I guess, early 90s, trying to… That was painful.

MTS - AV: I was there, like, trying to help that in Europe, and it was painful to get through it, but we got through it, and the same will happen for V6. It will eventually… we've always known that we would have islands of V6 in a V4 world, and we would eventually go to islands of V4 in a V6 world.

MTS - AV: We never knew how long it would take, and we're still in that transition. But I don't think that fundamentally, V6

MTS - AV: adds DNS specific security risks at all like Kim was saying.

MTS - AV: There are interesting things about…

MTS - AV: you know, being able to do jumbograms, being able to do larger packet sizes, etc, in V6, that may actually help us out in the future. You know, as we go to larger key sizes, depending on how

MTS - AV: negative you are about it. Some people think that every packet's going to be enormous, and we're going to need to be able to send those a single packet, so there are actually advantages to V6.

MTS - AV: But normally it's the commercial that matters, so if you don't have… if you have V4,

MTS - AV: you generally don't move to V6, and as V4 gets more expensive.

MTS - AV: people are going, well, why would I spend that money if I can do everything with V6? It's amazing how economics actually drives everything.

MTS - AV: Very short questions. We're not able to take the more questions. So how it works, I look to the audience and you just give me a sign and there is a line of the people who already want to ask. So Ismael, you are the next.

MTS - AV: And one more for from you. And that will be end of this session. Ismail, go ahead.

MTS - AV: Greetings, everyone. My name is Mahe Ahmed, and I'm CEO, founder of Yalahak, and I'm currently a part of, University of Science and Technology of China.

MTS - AV: First of all, I'd like to thank you so much for this great organization, and the team that's behind this great work for making these meetings happen.

MTS - AV: And second, I'd like also to thanks, for this insightful presentation, which, quitely, I have learned a lot.

MTS - AV: And I have raised, like, about…

MTS - AV: Let's say one question for now, which is about Ayaan.

MTS - AV: My main question is focused on the compliance and the operation. When it comes, previously, IAN is starting to incorporate a new tire for the Security Operations Center, Tire 2 and Tire 3. So, when it comes for the ICANN, where they try to

MTS - AV: do kind of integration between a statistic audit.

MTS - AV: and the continuous compliance monitoring, how it can be both balancing together, as you know, like, every day there is, like, a new, a technology, and with comes new technology, comes new opportunities for the cyber threats. Thank you so much for your explanation.

MTS - AV: Yeah, thanks for the question. I would say that our general

MTS - AV: Posture is to have lots of multiple complementary.

MTS - AV: approaches to making sure our systems are fit for purpose and we do our job well. You mentioned the SOC 2 and SOC 3 audits. I think this is an important part of it. This is where we have a third-party assessor come.

MTS - AV: They sample our systems that, you know, do things like control access to our services.

MTS - AV: And make sure that all of our policies are working effectively. I mean, the SOP framework is a North American-focused framework, so it's much more common in North America, I will admit.

MTS - AV: But ICANN more broadly is rolling out ISO 27001 certification across the whole organisation, including us. So it's a comparable kind of approach. So, if you're familiar with that, that might, you know.

MTS - AV: help you there. But I will say that, you know, within IANA, we don't just rely on these third-party audits. Like, we do regular penetration testing by a third party.

MTS - AV: We do all sorts of different checks and balances.

MTS - AV: We do customer surveys, we do analysis and so forth.

MTS - AV: But I think, also, it's worth noting that

MTS - AV: almost everything we do is public and transparent. So, you know, a lot of when you do audits and security practices, it's about how do you keep things secret? And yes, the cryptographic key we use to secure the DNS is… needs to be kept secret, but that's more the exception to the rule.

MTS - AV: Broadly speaking, the work that we do every day is administering public data sets that you can look at yourself. So we don't need to be too concerned about, making sure we keep our data secret because it's intended to be public.

MTS - AV: What we're more concerned about is did we follow policy? Did we follow procedures? Are we doing requests in a timely manner? And for that.

MTS - AV: We rely on our community. There is committees that will meet later this week that will assess our performance. Do we do our processes quickly enough? Are we following the rules? So there's a lot of oversight within this community to make sure that staff do their job well. We're not relying on sort of like security audits to come to that conclusion.

MTS - AV: I appreciate it. Thank you. We are at the end of our session, but I really want to give the opportunity for IO Foundation team member Ekaladi to ask his question. Chris, go ahead. Thank you very much. Be brief. The last question.

MTS - AV: So I'm Eka. I'm here with the Ayo Foundation as one of the fellows.

MTS - AV: So, I have a question, actually.

MTS - AV: It has been mentioned a few times that ICANN does have a DNS vetting function that helps with DNS abuse. Now, I recognize that ICANN's mandate strictly excludes content regulations, like online gambling and explicit content.

MTS - AV: Unlike, I think, phishing and malware distribution.

MTS - AV: However.

MTS - AV: Operators of those contents heavily rely on technical evasion techniques like fast flux IP hopping and automated domain.

MTS - AV: registrations. Are there telemetry platforms or functions that Okto can use to share these real-time abuse data with local

MTS - AV: regional CCTLD managers like PANDI here in Indonesia, and local registrars to help them detect these fast-rotating infrastructures.

MTS - AV: Thank you.

MTS - AV: Interesting question. So… On a planet far, far away, many years ago.

MTS - AV: Some of us made a recommendation that there might be a need for a… industry… Cert.

MTS - AV: Of some kind, where exactly that kind of thing could happen.

MTS - AV: The scars have mostly healed, from the beatings that we took for suggesting that some 15 or so years ago.

MTS - AV: I don't think the industry was ready for that kind of data processing and telemetry. What we didn't suggest back then was that ICANN did that. We just suggested it probably needed to exist.

MTS - AV: I think The industry itself has actually got a lot better at.

MTS - AV: Intel sharing, etc.

MTS - AV: I don't see as…

MTS - AV: gathering and making decisions about what is and is not abuse, and then sharing intel. I don't think the community wants ICANN to do that.

MTS - AV: But I'm…

MTS - AV: a big advocate of sharing that kind of information and the need for the communities to get together and work on these… I mean, you know, if you're a small…

MTS - AV: CCTLD operator or TLD operator, you're not going to have the skill sets. Now, many of us…

MTS - AV: are members of organizations like FIRST, which is the Forum for Incident Response Units. It's a global body. They do information sharing. So I don't see a role where ICANN steps into there.

MTS - AV: I could be wrong. You know, if next year the community came out and said that we need ICANN to do this, then…

MTS - AV: we'd be in a different world, but I don't see it.

MTS - AV: We we're a member of first. We work in

MTS - AV: Most of the environments where that takes place.

MTS - AV: You know, you may be familiar with

MTS - AV: places like Morgue and APWG and many other of these security forums. We do participate in most of those, but we're typically not a source of data.

MTS - AV: we focused on pushing science rather than becoming a data source. It just turns out that some of the data we use

MTS - AV: is shareable. So the things like we have in Metrica, if you're a TLD and you're CCTLD and you want to participate.

MTS - AV: Absolutely.

MTS - AV: Give us the data we need to do the analysis, we'll share the data with you. Absolutely, we… it's not that we're against it, it's just that's not what the community's asked us to do. But I'm a big fan of, like, data sharing.

MTS - AV: In the modern world, all the privacy issues around data sharing, everything has got much, much more complicated. But…

MTS - AV: The operational security communities have found ways mostly to deal with that.

MTS - AV: Love to sit and have a coffee, and…

MTS - AV: Talk about this at some point, because you just happened to hit on one of my hobbies, so…

MTS - AV: Thank you very much, and our appreciation to John and Kim for being with us.

MTS - AV: And having this very interactive and interesting session. With that, we are closing this session, and I'm looking forward to seeing you back at 1.15 to talk about how policy works in ICANN. See you back!