[registrars] Position statement for Technical Officer position

[Bruce Tonkin <Bruce.Tonkin@melbourneit.com.au>]

Hello All,

I have been nominated for the position as Technical Officer in the Registrar
constituency of ICANN.  All the candidates for the positions look good to
me.  To help registrars make their decision, I provide the following
information about myself.  As a general comment I think it is good to have
some diversity in backgrounds of the people elected, and also have some
diversity in geographical locations.

I have been at Melbourne IT since early 1999, but have only recently been
more involved in the domain name side of our business since the second half
of 2000 (ie the company became more focussed :-)).  Prior to that I was
mainly looking at other opportunites in the telecommunications industry (e.g
wireless). When Dr Erica Roberts left Melbourne IT last year, I took over
her policy responsibilities for ".com.au" and ICANN related matters.  Erica
has continued to provide consulting advice to Melbourne IT since her
departure as an employee.

Over the past 12 months I have been heavily involved in a working group to
develop competition policy in the ".au" domain space.  Most of my
contributions have been on the technical side.  I attended my first ICANN
meeting in Melbourne earlier this year, and attended the meeting in
Stockholm.  I also attend IETF meetings, as well as keep up to date with the
various email discussion lists.

In future I plan to play a stronger role in policy development within ICANN,
with particular emphasis on the technical issues - such as WHOIS standards,
registry/registrar protocols for all the top level domains, and methods for
verifying transfers.  If elected I will do my best to represent the
interests of all registrars, and will also provide feedback from the
registrars constituency to other bodies such as the IETF's provreg working
group.  I am also experienced in giving presentations on technical issues to
non-technical audiences, which may be of assistance in raising awareness of
registrar issues amongst the other DNSO constituencies.

I have a strong background in competition issues in the IT industry, and
have been heavily involved in supporting competition in the
telecommunications industry in Australia for the past 5 years.  I also have
a strong engineering background that spans both the traditional
telecommunications industry as well as the Internet industry.  I have been a
heavy user of the Internet since 1986 (originally in a research role playing
with UNIX etc at AT&T Bell Labs), and have a reasonable knowledge of its
technical origins prior to that.

See below for a short biography.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin
Chief Technology Officer
Melbourne IT



BIOGRAPHY

Dr Bruce A. Tonkin, BE (Hons), PhD (Univ of Adelaide, Australia)

Bruce Tonkin is currently Chief Technology Officer at Melbourne IT (a
subsidiary of The University of Melbourne before it was listed on the
Australian Stock Exchange in December 1999).  He oversees Melbourne IT's
technical infrastructure and strategy, as well as evaluates new technologies
for commercialization.    Melbourne IT now has offices in the USA and
Europe, and operates a major data centre in California.  Bruce is a
technical specialist in telecommunications network technologies, Internet
network infrastructure, and Internet security technologies.

Bruce previously directed a research venture at Monash University in
Melbourne in partnership with Telstra and Siemens in the area of digital
video services, and coordinated the operations of an Australian Cooperative
Research Centre (CRC) from 1994 to 1999 that researched the application of
broadband network technologies for new Internet applications.  The CRC
involved 13 organisations, including Monash Uni, Australian National
University, Uni. Of Queensland, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun
Microsystems, Siemens, Fujitsu, CSIRO and Telstra, and received $13 million
in Australian Government support.  It focused on advanced Internet
applications requiring broadband network capacity.

Bruce has wide experience in advanced computing and communications, both in
Australia and overseas at AT&T Bell Laboratories in USA (during the late
80's).  He has advised organizations in industries such as building and
construction, natural resource management, telemedicine, automotive, film
and television, and education in the application of new telecommunications
and Internet technologies.

Bruce has been on the Board of Directors of ATUG (Australian
Telecommunications Users Group) that represents over 1000 large corporate
users of telecommunications in Australia with a focus on telecommunications
industry policy since 1997, and is a member of the Competition Committee for
the ".au" domain.  Bruce has been on various company boards, and is a Fellow
of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.