Göran Marby, CEO and President of ICANN – Key 04 2017

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7 June 2017 | 16:00 - 16:30 | Grand Ballroom, Swissotel, Tallinn, Estonia | video record
Programme overview 2017

Transcript

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.


>> GERT AUVAART: Ladies and gentlemen, if you would kindly take your seats we will continue with our programme.

As you know, this is the last keynote, or the fourth keynote of EuroDIG. And it will be followed by the fourth or the last panel.

It is my distinct pleasure and privilege to introduce to the floor Mr. Goran Marby, the CEO and President of ICANN, for the keynote speech.

You have the floor.

>> GORAN MARBY: Thank you.

You're welcome. Please come in. Sit down. Four minutes ago, I was afraid that no one would come into the room and I would be alone here with my staff. Don't be shy.

I am the last key speaker here, so after me it's over. Do you think want to listen to me as well? Thank you. There seems to be some interesting discussion.

Anyway... first of all, for personal reasons, I have to is say I'm very happy to be back here in Tallinn. I had the pleasure for many years to work for a company that had operations here in Estonia. And we had the best office in all of our places here, because it was actually on the beach. It was on the beach, on pillars, and that is still the best office I ever had in my life. For some reason, we had all of our regional meetings here in Tallinn.

And it's sort of interesting, because I started coming here 15 or 20 years ago. And the change that this country has gone through during that period of time is staggering and amazing. And it also shows that if you use something like the Internet, or you use something like this technology, it can really make a change very, very fast. And I applaud what has been done in this country using this technology. Thank you.

I also like the city in itself.

Anyway, I've been listening to a lot of your conversations over the last couple of days, and I have to say that I'm really impressed with the quality of the discussions. To some extent, maybe they have been very timely. Because over the last couple of weeks and months, a lot of questions have been raised about the Internet and the bad use of the Internet and the bad influence of the Internet. And that discussion has its place. I think it's important.

But, representing ICANN, we should also remember that despite what many people think, Internet is not a natural resource. It's a set of technologies, working together with different partners. We at ICANN work closely with our partners.

Yes. Please sit down. Thank you.

We work very closely with the partners in the parameters, in the protocols and numbers space. And that cooperation actually builds on the basis of what we call Internet.

Remember, it's only 25 years ago, and I know that ISOC is celebrating the birth of the Internet 25 years ago, I think it's in September or something, in California. That happened to be the same year as my daughter was born. So when my first daughter was born, I couldn't post it online. I actually had to use a telephone. And that telephone was actually fixed to a wall. Anyone here remember that time? Half of you were probably not born. Yes. My staff raises their hands.

And it's kind of interesting that I had to explain to my other kids, when I was young, I had to stand at a wall, talking to someone because I was connected. And if you called someone, your first question was: Who is it? Now, the question is: Where are you?

In a very short period of time, everything has changed. A lot of discussions that have been around here, it's about content, it's about how to utilize content better, and all of the challenges it produces. I'm also here to talk about don't forget it is a technology.

Because the interconnectivity of Internet, this is what makes 4 billion users, using the same system, it's built on parameters that is set and fixed. It is a box. And I've seen that some of the discussions here has been about capacity building in that sense. But I think that we collectively have a role, right now, to explain that some of the good courses that were discussed about the threats of the Internet, we actually had to go up and tell our Internet actually works, technology works. Because if we don't do that, there is a potential that for good intentions people will do legislations or other initiatives that will take away the interobjectrability of Internet, which will actually de-create what we call the open Internet going forward.

We reached a point where Internet is not only something which was started 25 years ago, as an educational programme. It was people working together in the universities around the world that really created the Internet. But the Internet today is something that actually connects people on so many different layers.

A lot of the decisions we are making today we do that with the help of Internet. Anything from our love life, how we do education, how we do our banking, a lot of those things that we did in an envelope before we now do on the Internet. And that's kind of amazing. And it's also the reason why we have a multistakeholder model in ICANN. Because your Internet might be different from my Internet, and we need to make sure that everybody comes on board and has their say how we build the next-generation Internet. This is not only Governments. Governments actually in Democratic countries only takes a fraction of this. So the multistakeholder model makes it possible to engage in this fora and other foras in such a way that your views and ambitions can be taken into account.

But going back, it is a technology. And ICANN is about technology. We have a very limited set of things we do. We're not the Internet. But we are an essential part of what you call the Internet. The domain name system and together with our partners for the IANA functions, we actually control some of the identifiers and secure the stability of what is called the Internet. That is the set we have to protect for the interoperability.

And I ask you all to engage in that discussion as well. The policy discussions about how to work on the Internet will always be important, but just make sure that we don't forget the underlying functionality.

And it's actually to your point, a lot of discussion here has been about it. I had the pleasure of having some of my members from my team, who worked with what we call the OCTO, the Office of the CTO -- we love acronyms -- who has been sharing how we actually work with the stability of the Internet in practice. And one of the things we're doing, and I have to say this in all of my speeches, is a small thing that we do on October 11. Does anyone here what's happening on the October 11? Let's do it the other way around. How many people know what we're doing October 11?

Yes, the people I spoke to today apparently.

(Laughter)

Okay.

So a basic theory about this. One of the things we do is to make sure that you write in a domain name, euro, you come to a Web page. One way of making secure that you actually end up in the right Web Page is something that we called DNSSEC. That's a security system to make sure that you don't end up in a fraudulent Web Page. I think it's 25 or 30 percent of all ISPs in the world use this system. The rest of them maybe you should avoid. This is part of security stability.

October 11 we are updating the password for this system. And that is good to know. Because your ISP has to prepare that. If your ISP hasn't prepared that, you will basically not reach websites on the Internet. We of course foresee no problems at all. We, of course, foresee no problems at all. This is going to be very smooth. That's why we keep talking about it all the time.

So it's nothing you do as end-users, but if there are any representatives of ISPs here, and you didn't know about this, you'll get a letter from us or the regulator, because that's the way we're doing it. Very important.

Right now, a lot of discussions about the Internet seems to be negative. We talk about the threats. We talk about illegal content. We talk about some of the things we see that we don't like morally or ethically or culturally. I think it's important -- and that is an important discussion to have. But it's very problem oriented. And we shouldn't forget the good things. Many of my staff and people who are engaged in ICANN is doing this for a simple reason. We believe in the power of the Internet. We believe in this thing that when you actually connect people, something magical happens. And this system now connecting 4 billion people around the world is a unique system to connect people. And when you connect, you can share. And when you share, it grows. That is the underlying reasons why I'm doing this personally, a lot of the people working for me and are engaged in ICANN.

And we should never forget in all of the problematic discussions that we have, the Internet makes a difference and you can make a difference on the Internet. It's actually very positive. Yes, there are very important discussions to have, but please help me of adding in or blending in the positive things. Everything that you can do that you couldn't do, like posting pictures of my child on Facebook when she was born. Actually, when I got my third and last child, I couldn't post it because Facebook didn't exist then.

Internet is not dumb. We have, with 4 billion users -- and according to the UN development goals, it's going to be, if I understand it correctly, they have a goal to make sure that 1.5 billion users will be connected in 2023, or something. Those people will be different from the ones who are connected now. Actually, we could say that the people who are connected now have been the easy ones. They have been the elite. The people living in cities, in societies, who can afford to develop Internet.

The next generation will come much more from the outskirts, in the rural areas, in South America, in Asia, in Africa. In countries with huge populations like China and India. They will be preferably mobile, because that's the access forum they will have. They will not have the same context of Internet as we have today. And the Internet is a fantastic thing, because it's both global and local. Yes, you can go online and go around the world. But if you look at traffic, you'll see that most of the traffic goes inside your country.

So now we're entering a space where local languages and local scripts is becoming much more important. It's something that is going to become essential for us developing the next-generation on Internet users. And we want more Internet users on the system because we want to have it bigger.

And I think everybody needs to engage in this one. We need the diversity to understand the local needs of the Internet going forward. And I need your help and I ask you humbly to engage in ICANN and other foras with the thought in mind, not only of the users here in this room but also the users that doesn't have the same concept that we have. Religious, culture, ethnic or anyone else, that is going to be the next more important users. And we have to fulfill this obligation to us and to the next generation.

And one thing more as I finish on this one: We have never done this before. I'm often meeting people who ask me: Why did you do that? How did you end up there? And the simple truth is that we are facing challenges, together, that no one in mankind never met before. Because some of the things we see here, because of the Internet, it's very young technology. We don't know the answer. And sometimes we have made mistakes. But we have to work together to actually try to figure out how to do this better. So we need people to engage, so we can avoid the mistakes we have done and do new mistakes instead. No one has created Internet before. No one has created anything like the multistakeholder model before. No one has created something like this event before. We are actually doing something for the first time.

I happen to think that when you look back in 25, 50 years' time at this particular period in time, that they will look at this and see a really big revolution, where we were able to, together, to create something that is so big that we call the Internet. But we're not done. It's not a natural resource. It's something that has to be mended, fixed, and developed all the time. And I'm hoping that we can do that together.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

>> GERT AUVAART: Thank you very much. This was the last keynote speech.


This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.