Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. On today's show, we're going to preview IGF USA, what it is, what it's going to do, when it takes place, and who's going to be there.

Joining me, I have Shane Toos and Steve Del Bianco. Shane is, what it's going to do, when it takes place, and who's going to be there? Joining me, I have Shane Tews and Steve Del Bianco.

Shane is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Steve is the president

and CEO of Net Choice.

Shane, Steve, thank you so much for joining me.

Great to be here.

Thanks, Ash.

So, guys, you will have been with IJF USA

for a while, as I know. Let our listeners know what it is, how it started. So a little bit of history,

the Internet Governance Forum was started really as sort of a third way, in the Internet Governance

Forum, not just here in the United States, but as a international forum. There was a challenge of ICANN when it was still in its sort of nascent.

And ICANN is...

The Internet Corporation on assigned names and numbers, which was created in 1997 by a green paper,

which became a white paper under the Clinton administration by some very smart women, Becky Burr and Karen Rose,

were the key people because Larry Irving believed in embracing women in tech.

So ICAN was a way of taking the domain name addressing system and moving it outside of the

U.S. government and they created a multi-stakeholder

process. The International Telecommunications Union has always challenged the notion that the DNS

should not sit outside of them because they would like to run everything. And then the IGF was

created with kind of a middle way to say,

can we find a way to bring governments more into the fold that don't choose to be full participants

of ICANN and keep the multi-stakeholder process, which was created really under ICANN and has

...