VINT CERF:

Oh, the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, which is a portion of the Department of Commerce.

And they have a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to manage the unique identifiers of the Internet, the domain names, which everyone is familiar with, and the numerical Internet addresses, which most people know nothing about. But they're kind of like telephone numbers that let you get to destination points in the Net.

The NTIA's function since 1998 since the creation of this ICANN has simply been to oversee the practices by which changes are made to the way in which Internet addresses are allocated and the domain names are assigned, specifically what is called the root zone, which is the thing that points to the dot-com, the dot-net, the dot-org, the things that you're all familiar.

All they have done is audit that process. They have never interfered with it. They have never made any changes to ICANN's proposed administration of that top-level domain space. And so what's being proposed is to replace that oversight with a multistakeholder process, not a new entity, but a multistakeholder process, that would assure that no changes get made to the root zone that aren't agreed by the multiple stakeholders that rely upon it.