It was March 2016 and two thousand lawmakers, lobbyists, and technologists were gathered in Marrakech for the 55th policy forum of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.1 It was a pivotal moment in the short but complex history of Internet governance: on the agenda was the privatization of ICANN, transitioning its control away from direct U.S. government oversight and into the hands of a global multistakeholder community consisting of representation from industry, government, and civil society.2
The debate had been feisty in recent months, with three U.S. senators introducing an amendment to block the transition,3 and a handful of disgruntled insiders fanning the flames of discontent.4 But the reforms were going ahead. Inside the windowless conference room of a luxury Moroccan resort, one of the leading figures in the creation of ICANN in the ’90s approached the microphone with an air of determination and authority.
“My name is Marilyn Cade,” she said with a wry smile.5 It was her signature line, even appearing on ICANN bingo cards. Cade directed AT&T’s advocacy activities on Internet and ecommerce issues for more than two decades, and she always stated her name for the public record whenever she took the floor, whether it was before the U.N. General Assembly, in a Congressional committee hearing, or at an ICANN policy forum.6
Marilyn Cade at the 2015 World Summit on the Information Society (ITU Pictures, via Flickr).
The transition of power to a bottom-up multistakeholder community, she explained, was a natural extension of Enlightenment and Jeffersonian democratic principles and “ha[s] helped us to recapture the spirit that brought us together initially in [forming] ICANN. We were a smaller community, certainly. There were about 371 million users on the Internet. And we’re now at 3.4 to 3.5 billion. And a lot more people are interested. That’s the great news. The new ICANN is going to be a very different ICANN.”
I met Marilyn Cade for the first time that week at a cocktail reception. As I introduced myself, she placed a lapel pin with the initials “FOM” on my suit jacket and added, “You’re now an FOM, a Friend of Marilyn. You could be the future of ICANN. This organization needs new blood.”
I asked why. “I’ll use myself as an example,” she answered. “Ask anyone in this room and they’d say I have played a very heavy role in dealing with the external environment that led to the creation of ICANN. They might say I have represented a prominent company at very powerful and prestigious high-tech associations. Or they’ll say I’ve killed two WIPO treaties. But none of that was me. That was all me empowering others to become engaged.” She smiled, handed me her business card, and added, “I was a social worker for many years. People age out. Look around here, so many people are nearing my age. It’s time to pass the baton.”
Cade, née Buchanan, was born in Ava, Missouri — or Missoura, as she pronounced it — in 1947.
“My father was a lovely spiritual man with a real belief in his lord and savior,” Cade told me when I asked about her upbringing over a phone call in August 2020. “He had been in the military, and then in the Great Depression he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps where he learned to be a carpenter. That was how he supported his family for many years before turning to farming. We lived in a four-room farmhouse with no running water and no electricity. Life was smaller then, but I felt trapped. I went to college, studied sociology, got married, and began working in state government breaking up gangs of teenage girls.”
As a social worker, she came to see the power in being a change agent, empowering people to understand and address their own concerns. “You have to earn the skills and experience of being accepted as a leader, and you don’t always have to have the title to be extremely influential.” This was especially true when she did conflict resolution with gangs in St. Louis, “because you can’t force acceptance.”
“It’s why I now see Internet governance as a kaleidoscope,” Cade continued. “The images that you create as you turn the kaleidoscope are unique to each user who is turning the chips of colored glass, and yet they all have a certain similarity to them. Where you come into the mosaic is where you can contribute as you add information and knowledge for others to benefit from.”
By 1979, after separating from her first husband James Cade, she moved to Washington, D.C., to join the American Public Welfare Association (now the American Public Human Services Association) as a membership coordinator. When the Reagan administration transferred the responsibility of human services to the states7 and public awareness grew around the need for stronger social and service technologies, Cade joined AT&T as a marketing manager for its healthcare business, which was building a national infrastructure to connect U.S. healthcare systems and networks.
Congress passed the High-Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991 and allocated $600 million to build the National Information Superhighway.8 Meanwhile, Cade had been promoted to AT&T’s government affairs division as a vice president and lobbyist and soon began chairing the National Healthcare Industry Consortium, an alliance of healthcare providers and information technology providers trying to get a piece of that $600 million pie. Her next posting was to build support for the fledgling dial-up Internet service AT&T WorldNet.
“My assignment in Washington was pretty exciting,” Cade explained. “I got to work with the emerging technologies, which at that time were high-performance computing and communication, parallel processing, Internet technologies, and the Internet itself.”
Some of these technologies were more advanced than others: among the most basic but critical functions was assigning unique numerical labels to every server that was using the Internet Protocol for communication. Jon Postel, an engineer at the University of Southern California, initially kept track of these assignments on scraps of paper.9 With the Internet growing in importance, economically and socially, it was no longer appropriate for one computer scientist in Marina del Rey to control the Internet’s address book. There were differing proposals on what the solution should be. Many computer scientists wanted the United Nations to take over control of the A root server, and they took their proposal to the U.S. House of Representatives.10 Cade understood this would not be a politically feasible path forward.
“American taxpayers have helped build the Internet as well as many U.S. companies and private sector investors. To now go into a transition plan which would symbolically move that to another country, off-shore, whether Switzerland or any other country, I think, will raise a fundamental question among American taxpayers,” said Representative Charles “Chip” Pickering of Mississippi during the September 1997 hearing. “This is something that is uniquely American, that we have led on, and we need to maintain that leadership. … [Your] plan is not going to sell very well, not here and not on Main Street and not anywhere that I can imagine.”11
After the hearing, Cade recalled, “it was extremely noisy as we all spilled out into the hallway. The proponents were congratulating each other. I was huddling with people like Joe Alhadeff from Oracle and Art Riley from Cisco Systems and the legal counsel for ITAA, Mark Perl and Rick Lane from the Chamber [of Commerce]. And they all were saying, OK, what’s next? Because, you know, given the tone of the hearing, we could be spending the next two years having hearing over hearing over hearing over hearing, and … debates about who owns what.”
That evening, Cade and her then-partner James “Jim” Hoecker, whom President Clinton would later appoint to lead the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,12 were headed to a fundraising event.
“By chance, literally by chance, we were having dinner with Mack McLarty, President Clinton’s chief of staff, and I was making conversation and trying to be humorous about what’s going on in this Internet space,” said Cade. “And Mack looked at me and said, I think you’re right, it’s going to get pretty noisy up on the Hill; call Ira Magaziner. He’s working on President Clinton’s ecommerce agenda and right now it’s got seven key points and he wants to add an eighth one.”
Cade called Magaziner the next day, and a meeting was set up with attorneys from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. An idea was born: an independent organization to manage the Domain Name System, which would be based in the United States and (initially) under the purview of the Department of Commerce. In January 1998, the Department of Commerce requested public comments on a proposal to create a new private, non-profit organization to perform the Internet’s naming and numbering functions.13 That new organization was ultimately ICANN, headquartered in Los Angeles.
What the green paper didn’t propose, however, was any funding for ICANN. There were ideas for funding mechanisms, but nothing concrete.
“I managed to coax or coerce or hound Mike Roberts into agreeing to be the first executive director. He was highly trusted by the technical community,” said Cade. “There were four staff when Mike unlocked the door and they weren’t paid for many, many months in the first year.”
“I was using my corporate credit card to print flyers. I funded the meeting transcripts out of my [AT&T] budget,” Cade recalled. “I raise[d] $60,000 a year to hire Glenn [de Saint Géry] with no contract to be the first Secretariat.”
ICANN’s first few years of operation were lean. Money was tight. Because some stakeholders thought their needs weren’t being met, the contracted parties — the entities that sell domain names — stopped paying their fees and created a budget gap. At the time, for every domain name registered, a payment of 8 cents was passed on to ICANN.
“The registries and registrars started holding their breath on paying their fees to ICANN, so they would delay the payment by a month or two months or three months,” said Cade. “And literally we were in a financial crisis not because there shouldn’t have been revenue, but because they were collectively refusing to pay.”
ICANN needed a reserve fund in order to be stable. Cade joined forces with Ron Andruff, a former professional ice hockey player from Canada, to lay out a coherent argument at a meeting in Ghana in 2002. They’d fund the reserve fund through a twenty-cent tax on domain name registrations: “No change in this process is needed,” Andruff proclaimed. The registrars “need only to increase the payment by a few cents per name.”14
“It was a breakthrough moment for the community of users who were saying, we want this organization to survive,” said Cade. “It needs a reliable revenue stream.”
Since then, ICANN has grown significantly in size. ICANN’s 1999–2000 annual budget totaled only $5 million in expenses. The 2021–2022 operating budget exceeded $143 million.15
The reform effort in 2016, known as the IANA stewardship transition, was the final step in bringing about what Cade originally proposed: transitioning the coordination and management of the Domain Name System away from one person and into the hands of a responsive, accountable third party. The removal of U.S. government oversight, exchanging that for oversight from an “empowered community” of independent global stakeholders, allowed the Domain Name System to belong to everyone, everywhere.16
Cade at ICANN55 in 2015 (ICANN, via Flickr).
Cade retired from AT&T in 2006. She was never able to step away from ICANN, however. Over the next 14 years, she attended every ICANN policy forum — except for one, which conflicted with an invitation to address the United Nations General Assembly — and worked tirelessly to bring in new stakeholders, diversifying the community that develops the technical standards and sprawling bylaws required to keep the Internet’s infrastructure functioning.
“You asked me once, why do I believe in diversifying the participant pool?” Cade said to me in December 2019 as we had lunch in the lobby of the Westin Grand hotel in Berlin. I nodded. “Because I haven’t always belonged. People have tried to push me away. One academic tried his hardest to get me fired, even building a website to cyberbully me. I believe in bringing more voices in, rather than keeping people out. I think the best way we can ensure the longevity of an organization like ICANN is by keeping it relevant, and the only way ICANN can be relevant is if it is open to new ideas and perspectives.”
ICANN was only one of the many organizations that Cade helped build. She was the executive director of IMunified, an organization that opposed the AOL–Time Warner merger; she led America Links Up, a nationwide voluntary teach-in to teach educators, children and school boards about the Internet; she co-founded the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. Behind the scenes, she was the glue that held the Internet Governance Forum Supporting Organization together, and she built the Women’s Alliance for Virtual Engagement to bring women into the Internet governance space from countries where face-to-face participation was out of the question. It was this last work that she did, empowering women in low- and middle-income countries, that she was proudest of.
The national and regional initiatives of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum are independent chapters of the global conference formed under the auspices of the United Nations. They are a platform for local communities to huddle and discuss local challenges, and to annually bring these concerns forward at the global event.
“They are all microcosms of the challenges in their country, in more ways than one,” Cade told me. “So in Afghanistan in particular, before we even got to the substance, in the first year, all of the women are sitting together in the back of the room. I went back to them and introduced myself and sat with them. The head of the Telecom Regulatory Authority came back and said, ‘Marilyn, we would like you to sit with the guest of honor.’ And I said, I will when we start the ceremony, but I would like to sit with the women who are here.”
“Meeting two, we started out with all of the women sitting in the middle rows,” she said. In 2019, when the third Afghanistan Internet Governance Forum occurred, Cade observed that the women were now sitting in the front rows of the room. “That’s actually a cultural change for [the men] because they’re invited and expected to be in the front of the room. I was so happy to see this.”
“That’s what I love about the national and regional initiatives. It’s local. It reflects the culture. They build a conduit between trusted local sources of informed information and national parliamentarians, ministers, and their deputies.”
Cade passed away on November 4, 2020. In the months before her passing, she joked about wanting a cardboard cutout of her to be placed in the public gallery of future ICANN meetings so her legacy would not be forgotten. But that won’t be necessary. Marilyn Cade’s list of achievements is as long as it is extraordinary: among them, grooming so many leaders and making so many friends, from all corners of the world, to continue governing the Internet in the ways she had long advocated.
Cade (right) and Marion Barthelemy, Acting Director of UNDESA (left), at the 2016 World Summit on the Information Society (ITU Pictures, via Flickr).
- ICANN, “ICANN 55 Technical Report,” May 3, 2016.
- National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Fact Sheet on NTIA’s Assessment of the IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal,” June 9, 2016.
- Ted Cruz, “ICANN is Stonewalling the U.S. Congress,” April 4, 2016.
- See, for example, Edward Morris’s public comment, July 17, 2018.
- ICANN meeting transcript, March 10, 2016.
- Kevin Murphy, “Tributes as ‘great mentor’ Marilyn Cade dies,” DomainIncite, Nov. 5, 2020.
- Robert Pear, “Reagan Sees ‘Equal Swap’ With States,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1982.
- 102nd Congress, “S.272 – High-Performance Computing Act of 1991,” Dec. 9, 1991.
- University of Southern California, “Jonathan B. Postel: 1943–1998,” Feb. 1, 1999.
- Marcus Franda, Governing the Internet: The Emergence of an International Regime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 50.
- U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Subcommittee on Basic Research, “Internet Domain Names, Part II,” Sept. 30, 1997.
- “James J. Hoecker: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,” Smithsonian Institution, Jan. 2001.
- National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Improvement of Technical Management of Internet Names and Addresses,” Federal Register, Feb. 20, 1998.
- “ICANN Public Forum in Accra Real-Time Captioning,” ICANN Archives, March 13, 2002.
- “Proposed Fiscal Year 1999–2000 Budget, ICANN, May 27, 1999; “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) FY22 Adopted Budget,” ICANN, May 2021.
- “Empowered Community,” ICANN, accessed Aug. 6, 2022.
