ICANN’s origin story is well worth a watch
The story of how ICANN was born is being told through an ongoing series of video interviews.
The ICANN History Project went live late last week with an initial batch of eight videos on the theme of ICANN’s relationship with the US government, from before ICANN’s inception in 1998 to more recent developments such as the IANA transition.
There are several hours of interviews to watch so far, covering many of the key figures in ICANN over the last 20 years.
We have the likes of “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, “Father of ICANN” Ira Magaziner, “Godmother of ICANN” Becky Burr and “Second Cousin of Usenet” Fadi Chehade (sorry).
Three of ICANN’s four chairs to date are interviewed, along with two of its six CEOs.
From the USG side, recently departed assistant secretary at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Larry Strickling gets half an hour in the warm seat.
It’s fronted by Brad White, ICANN’s head of comms for North America, who says he’s trying to approach the project from a journalistic perspective.
Before he fell to the Dark Side, he was a TV reporter for many years, as will become quickly apparent.
I must admit I’ve only managed to watch half of the videos so far, but from what I’ve seen they’re pretty damn good. Don’t expect PR fluff or self-congratulatory circle-jerky.
The interviewees all seem to talk pretty frankly about what was going on around the time of ICANN’s formation in the quagmire of bloodthirsty partisan hackery over the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, a stirring from the International Telecommunications Union, and Jon Postel’s hacking of the entire DNS.
All worth a listen, if you’re an ICANN nerd.
Subtitled versions of each are available in each of the UN languages.
It’s slightly disappointing that ICANN’s original CEO Mike Roberts and chair Esther Dyson aren’t among the first batch of interviews (Dyson, particularly, has emerged as a critic of ICANN since her departure in 2000) but I gather the project is ongoing and more content will be posted as it’s completed.
The videos are supplemented by documentation that speaks to the same topics as the interviews. As far as I can tell, it’s all public info already, but it’s nice to see it collected in one place.
The project can be found here.
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