Major, and it took me until graduate school to realize that i didnt like mathematics. So i dropped out, became a programmer. Went back in economics, got a couple of degrees. Did work in the United Nations doing Technology Transfer to developing countries. I ran two University Computer networking operations. I had an internet policy project mostly in the tomorrower soviet union, and ive been a director of i can for the last seven years. Presumably, as a retired person but, in fact, as nearly a fulltime person working with icann to help the doeneighbor main Domain Name System and the identifier system flourish. Host when you bring, as you said, technology and the internet to another country, how do you do that . Guest depends when you do it. Ive put in First Computers in some african countries, and its a matter of education, its a matter of working with vendors, making sure you have the right prerequisites like electricity, making sure that theres a process that has to happen and people are dedicated to it and then making it happen. With the internet its been a little different. There you need people who are in the country who are champions of the country. And we did that primarily in the Internet Society when i was a trustee there by training people from developing countries how to do it, how do bring their computers online, how to develop routed networks and how to do internet governance. And we called it Network Administration at the time. You have to work from the ground up. Its slow, but we accelerated it by helping people understand what they had to do and what they needed to know. Host is there a case where you literally have to lay a wire or a cable into that country to get the internet into a country . Guest not initially. Initially, the internet road for the most part is on the existing telephone system. So the initial connections between many developing countries and the Global Internet was by means of a modem over a regular wire. You know, how we used to use modems to access the internet . Whole countries use modems to access the internet. That didnt last long. We went op on to better things, more bandwidth through the telephone system. Now, its interesting how the roles have been reversed. Most of the telephone system rides on the top of the internet rather than the other way around. Host george s or adowsky sadowsky, during the arab spring, egypt cut off Internet Access. How did that happen . Guest well, its interesting. One of our students at the isoc, we were both trustees together, he now works for icann, and we have a close relationship. The army came in and said the president has ordered you on the basis of National Security to take down the internet. And tyrek said, it was the law, i had to do it. Now, i think weve never talked about this in detail, but i suspect if he hadnt done it, the army would have done it by themselves. Host is it the case of flipping a switch . Turning off a server . For those of us when dont understand guest probably the case of flipping a number of switches. If you dont have for one thing, if your equipment doesnt have power, theres no way its going to be able to keep the Network Connection up. There are a variety of ways in which you can shut down the internet. Turning off the power is probably the obvious one. Host could you do that in the United States . Guest i sure doubt no. No, absolutely not. In the case of egypt, there was one connection to the outside world. In the case of the United States, we have a very Robust Network with lots of crossconnections, lots of alternate routes to go from place to place. It would with, it would you cant do it. Host what are your Major Concerns about the future of Internet Freedom . Guest ing freedom, youre saying. I would say the problem with Internet Freedom is that youve got to get the whole room to agree. Let me go back. At the moment, we still live in a world which is dominated by nationstates. They are our form of legitimate governance whether we like certain aspects of it or not or whether we like certain initiations of it or not. And Internet Freedom is not a shared concept. S that is, people give lip service to it, but its not something which is practiced in the same way in different countries. And i think we need once we have a global agreement, a greater global agreement or a greater global con seven is us on consensus on access to information, the internet is going to take care of its. In fact, its really a reflection of noninternet behavior be, and the fact that we have decisions among countries and societies is reflected both in the behavior of people off the internet as well as on the internet. So i am concerned when countries try to shut off Internet Access or when they try to monitor the internet in the a major way. Thats not my concept of Internet Freedom, although the current method of governance, they have the right to do et. In their own country. Host you mentioned your work or your experience in russia. Is the internet governed heavy hi in that country . Heavily in that a country . Guest ing from what i know, the internet is much more leaky in russia than it is in some other countries. Host leaky . Guest leaky in the sense that its not totally controlled by the government. I think china has a much better control over what happens on the internet in china than russia does, and i think north korea probably has a very good sense of what is happening in the internet in its country. Host has the icann system worked, in your view . Guest well, yeah. Lets talk about what you mean by the icann system. Icann is an organization that was set up to manage, to administer the identifiers, the unique identifiers that make it possible for one person on the internet or one location on the internet to go to any other location on the internet. Its an addressing system. And there are two layers to it, the ip addresses which are numeric which internet routers understand and the Domain Name System which consists of things that you and i can read for the most part. We understand that. And theres a dns, the Domain Name System contained mechanisms to translate one to the other. And icann, with its various constituencies, has developed policies for how this network should be managed, how the identifier should be managed and how in particular the domain name space which started out fairly small should be expanded and the rules under which the domain name industry should operate. And i think its been moderately successful. I think that there are certain things that i might like to see differently, certain things that i think all participants would, but by and large, its working now, and its given rise to this multistakeholder notion of governance which i hope is going to work well for the indefinite future because this is some very good things about it. Host you were supportive of the multistakeholder system going into effect . Guest i am. I am, well, lets take that apart a little bit. The multistakeholder is a code word for everybody whos affected sits at the table, and we all decide whats best for us, the collective us. Icann or notes under a specific substantiation of the multistakeholder system. There are a number of bodies, constituencies that deal with things like global toplevel domains and country toplevel domains, the governmental advisory committee, Civil Society has a role, users have a role, and they get together according to the way in which the ican, this bylaws have put them together to sit at the table and make these judgments, to recommend policy with regard to the identifier system. And so far i think its worked fairly well, and i just hope that it continues to. Its, one of the concerns i have is that in order for this to work, the participants have to buy into the fact that sometimes not everybody is going to get their own way. And part of the discussions are going to be really difficult because if everybody agreed, there wouldnt be multistakeholders, thered be one stakeholder, and wed have no trouble knowing what were doing. Host so final question. When you hear people say, well, weve turned the internet over to china or to north korea, whats your response . Guest i wish they knew what the truth was. I think it was Daniel Moynihan who said youre entitled to your opinion, youre not entitled to your own facts, and i think this is a case of that. We havent turned the internet over to anybody. What youre talking about is the transition from the the department of commerce having a contract with a piece of icann, ask that piece was really, really limited, and it amounted, in effect, only to whenever there was a redelegation of a country code or a decoding that the department of commerce looked at it and said is icann following its own policies. And if the answer was yes, no problem. And the answer was never no. So the change is infinitesimal. It was a big political issue here. It was not, it was not a technical issue, and it was not even a political issue in terms of how the internet should be governed. It was a very minor tweak, and the United States government still has as much influence and as much to say in what happens to ican, this as any other government. Icann. So im frankly somewhat mystified. Sometimes people glom onto something because it reflects a different opinion that they have or another point they want to make. It just isnt true. Host george sadowsky, thank you for your time. Guest thank you. Host so, professor Milton Mueller, what are you doing here at the state of the net . Whats your role . Guest well, im considered an expert on internet governance, and so i was invited to be on the panel about internet governance. And, in fact, i consulted with the guy who puts together the program, he always asks me who we should put on these panels, and he always ignores me and puts Washington People on, and i tell him to go outside of washington and get people from other countries and other parts of the internet. But, no, im just joking about that. We do have a european in our governance panel. Host well, youre with georgia tech, youre a professor at georgia tech. What exactly is internet governance . Guest its mow the internet is shaped its how the internet is shaped in terms of not only the policies that govern how you act on the internet, but also some of the technical underpinnings. Is so in order to get a domain name, somebody has to coordinate to make sure that domain name is unique. In order to get an ip address, you have to make sure that those addresses are handed out in certain ways. And theres issues like cybersecurity. Most of the governance is hard to understand, and people are confused about this issue of internet governance and what it means because its distributed governance. Its lots of different people making decisions. Theres no centralized government. And thats why we call it governance. Its kind of a softer form of government. Host at the 30,000foot level, how does internet governance affect regular users . Guest partly it just helps headache sure the thing actually make sure the thing actually with works. So, you know, if you dont have a consistent consolidated coordination of some of these technical functions, you know, the United States might be disconnected from latvia or even canada, you know . You have to have certain forms of management and policy to make sure everything actually is compatible, everything actually works together. So thats the most fundamental form of the way it affects. So most people dont know about it because most of the time, almost all of the time its working, and they just take it for granted that they can hit that enter key, and the packets will go from their house to wherever theyre sending their email, and they dont even have to worry about that actually happening. And then theres times when there are problems or crises. So, for example, you had this bot net attack on these video cameras through the internet of things a few months ago. That means people in the internet have to suddenly Work Together and coordinate things to solve the emergency. And, again, thats a distributed form of governance. It might mean that the domain name registry was acting, it mean mean that the ip address registries are giving information about where these devices are on the internet and whos in control of them. It might mean that Law Enforcement agencies are raiding a command and control certain where the botnet is run. It might mean that the Internet Service providers are doing technical tricks the block the flow of this botnet. Theres a lot of Different Actors involved and, of course, theyre all spanning national jurisdictions. So, again, its not like just one government can say heres what were going to do. Host does the distributed system work better, in your view, than perhaps a centralized system . Guest definitely. I think its much more flexible, and its much more conducive to freedom, to the Internet Freedom because no one person can seize control and just say, okay, this is the way its going to be. Youre going to get control, youre going to have to get agreement. And even consensus from a large number of people. Host has the icann system worked . Guest yeah. The icann is this new institution that we created about 17 years ago to coordinate the policy making process for the Domain Name System. And it had some rough times, it had issues because it was a pioneering kind of an institution. It was meant to be global in scope so that the internet technical identifiers would Work Together, compatible. So it has to be global. It cant be fragmented. Cant have a french icann, an american, a canadian and a gambian icann. Youve got to have a global icann. So at the same time, it has to be accountable the internet users, so how do you do that . And theres been many different ways of trying to make it accountable. The to oldfashioned way was to negotiate a treaty, and in the treaty, its kind of enforced voluntarily by each state. That doesnt really work on the internet. Number one, the government didnt really know what was going on in the early days. Number two, they get too politicized, so they want to drag internet stuff into geopolitics, and, you know, the youre prointernet, you want to avoid that. And the third thing is its just not close enough to the actual operators, you know . You need to be, have direct input from the stakeholders who are making decisions about how the Domain Name System works. That means domain name registries, registrars, Internet Service providers and direct users and customers of those systems. So its really a new form of Global Governance that we have been developing, and i think with the final move from the u. S. Government gave up control, i think we finally got to the point where we can say this is a successful, treestanding freestanding institution that is reasonably accountable. Not perfectly accountable, but reasonably accountable to the people its supposed to be serving. Host if you are, as you say, proInternet Freedom, should the chinese allow the New York Times app to be downloadable in china . Guest of course they should, yeah. The problem is that host but do they have that right to say no . Guest in the sense of the universal declaration of human rights, they to not have that right. In the sense of the power and the sovereignty right, theres this tension. Which is why we created a Global Institution to coordinate the icann stuff, is that we doesnt want sovereignty. We wanted uniformity and global compatibility. But unfortunately, in the world of nationstates, its still divided into territorial sovereigns. So if a sovereign decides to do all kinds of bad things to it population, theres not a lot the rest of the world can do about it. Host even with wifi and wireless . Guest even with wifi and wireless. The wifi transmitters have to be to set up on chinese soil, and its a very shortrange form of communication. And im sure that china licenses or somehow controls who can set up wifi, and then those have to connect to the internet, and then they set up gatekeeping functions that somehow controls. But they do have little holes in the system, various ways of circumventing it here and there, and thats one of the interesting sort of Foreign Policy issues of internet governance. You know, the u. S. Was promoting circumvention of censorship through the state department. And, of course, the chinese didnt like that, so thats a point of tension. We dont like it when the chinese do espionage, Cyber Espionage and break into our systems and steal data. So theres a lot of interesting or these are internet governance issues. Host is there pressure on the editorial side to further governance of the internet . Guest on the editorial side, what do you host when it comes to context. Guest oh, yeah. Yes. I think, unfortunately, freedom of expression is always kind of unpopular because its always, you know, theres always something somebody doesnt like [laughter] gets said or printed or published. So the latest thing, for example, is terrorism accounts on twitter and facebook. So in some sense, yeah, they have the right to remove these accounts because they may be illegal organizations that technically have no right to exist, but what if Somebody Just says im in favor of isis, you know . Under the first the u. S. First amendment, its actually not illegal to say that. Of course, its illeg