**** Question: is the IETF only about techies talking about technology? how would that be multistake-holder model? or has the IETF changed, and if so, why? It is true that the originally, much of the Internet's development was primarily the playground of a relatively small set of engineers. Who worked on fun things but which at the time had no greater economic or other significance. But things have changed, and they continue to change. Obviously the significance of the Internet has changed. But the technology has also changed. For instance, when we talk about things like emergency call technology or access points that dynamically retrieve usable radio spectrum from the regulator, suddenly we are a situation where things like laws and regulation matter. We've seen this at the IETF in the last couple of years. We do understand the importance of the policy and governance side as well. Not that we on purpose want to be involved, but we will be when needed. The IETF has a number of very active policy/government people, and their number is growing rapidly. And of course, the IETF cares about things like a well running IANA, so we have been deeply involved in the discussion around the IANA changes. But governments are of course not the only relevant multistakeholder participants. The IETF has always had a significant population of academics. And as the Internet has become a very significant business, we see the effects of the private sector opinions daily in our work. I think technology and other aspects of the Internet are becoming more inter-related. We have also seen this in the amount of interactions between various Internet communities. *** Question: can you explain what IANA does? The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA is a small organisation that manages some resources for the Internet. Given that we have all seen IANA in the news in recent months, you may be interested to learn that it really is just 11 people. And all of us, a number of Internet organisations, thousands of interested Internet people, 200 governments, politicians are following them very closely. That's a lot of oversight - I'm glad I'm not one of those 11 people! But what IANA does is actually a clerical function. They maintain a database of names and numbers for three things: the top-level domains, Internet address block assignments to regional registries, and protocol numbers for the IETF. Port 80 on the TCP protocol, for instance, stands for HTTP. But IANA itself does not decide what goes into these databases, they follow detailed instructions from the ICANN community on names, RIR community on address blocks, and the IETF on protocol numbers. IANA also works currently, via the US goverment, with Verisign who then runs the operational DNS root. **** Question: And what the fuss is about the transition? And lets talk about the transition. I am very happy the NTIA announced they are handing their oversight role to the multistakeholder Internet community. We all together have and will evolve the IANA in a responsible manner. And when we say that the NTIA hands over their stewardship role to the community, what does that mean? Many people are searching for the concrete thing that the US government has been involved with in this. However, that role is extremely clerical even in areas where it exists. They basically just check that IANA has done its work right, and even that they only do in some special cases. To me, the good stewardship that the US government has shown with regards to IANA has been not so much about the concrete things they did, but rather that they let the multistakeholder community grow and take on the tasks that were needed. The practices have evolved over time. The process recently started by NTIA is just another step in that evolution. For instance, in the last 15 years, the IETF and IANA have seen the creation of the contract, SLAs, role definition RFCs, and groups to track the relationship. Not to mention 100s of RFCs on protocol parameter allocation policies. Those policies have been set by thousands of IETF contributors in a consensus process. The process is open to all, with participants ranging from academics to businesses to regulators. Overall, the IANA process works and has worked very well from our perspective, and I think of the NTIA transition process more as a recognition of this fact than the redesign of the system. **** Question: why should the common people care about Internet Governance? I do not think the people or the society cares so much about Internet governance, unless we screw it up. It really is essential that the Internet continues to be the driver for not just economic growth but also for enabling people to do all the wonderful things they can do with the Internet. And I think everyone takes the Internet for granted today, but its success depended on getting its distributed nature right and policies surrounding its development and use right. As the Internet becomes more and more important to all aspects of our lives, there will be even bigger pressures to direct it in some way. I am very happy about certain things that are going to the right direction, e.g., was very happy to see the outcome of the SOPA/PIPA debates, very happy to see IANA developments continue, and so on. But there are many other discussions to be had, and all of them will have an effect on the Internet.