Göran Marby

Göran Marby
Marby in August 2016
Born	1963 Gothenburg, Sweden
Nationality	Swedish
Education	University of Gothenburg (BSc)
Occupation	Business executive, former government official
Company	Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
Title	President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN (2016 to 2022)

Göran Marby (born 1963) is a Swedish business executive and former civil servant who was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California nonprofit that coordinates the internet's domain name system and other unique identifiers, from May 2016 until his resignation on December 21, 2022. He was ICANN's sixth chief executive and, according to the trade publication Domain Incite, the first European to hold the post.

Before ICANN, Marby spent most of his career in the Swedish networking and information technology industry. He held sales and management posts at Dextel Findata and at Unisource Business Networks (later part of TeliaSonera), ran Cisco Systems' Swedish subsidiary from 1998 to 1999, was group chief executive of the network services company Cygate from 1999 to 2002, and co-founded the security software company AppGate Network Security, which he led from 2002.

In 2010 the Swedish government made him Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), the national regulator for telecommunications, internet and postal services. While at PTS he chaired the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) in 2014. His time at the regulator was marked by public criticism from parts of the Swedish telecoms industry in 2015, which he dismissed and which did not stop the government from extending his appointment.

At ICANN, Marby oversaw the final phase of the transfer of stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions from the United States government in 2016, the organisation's response to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, its operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its refusal in March 2022 of a Ukrainian request to cut Russian domains off from the internet. His tenure also drew scrutiny over his pay, which passed US$1 million a year in the 2020 fiscal year, and over the organisation's relations with the press. After stepping down he remained a consultant to ICANN until May 23, 2024, the date on which his contract had been due to end.

Early life and education

Marby was born in 1963. A 2022 profile in the Gothenburg newspaper Göteborgs-Posten described him in its headline as a native of the city. He studied economics at the University of Gothenburg, and ICANN states that he holds a Bachelor of Science from the university's School of Business, Economics and Law.

Career

Swedish technology industry (to 2009)

Marby's early career was in sales and management in Swedish data and telecommunications companies. According to the Swedish government's 2009 announcement of his appointment to PTS, he worked as sales and marketing manager at Dextel Findata and as chief executive and business area manager at Unisource Business Networks, a business that became part of TeliaSonera. ICANN's biography describes that role as chief executive of Unisource Business Networks in Sweden.

From 1998 to 1999 Marby was country manager of Cisco Systems AB, the Swedish arm of the American networking equipment maker. He then served as group chief executive of Cygate AB, a network services company, from 1999 to 2002.

In 2002 Marby co-founded AppGate Network Security AB, a company that developed network security software and appliances, and became its chief executive. ICANN later said he led the company until 2009 "with a focus on international customers and operations". At the time of his PTS appointment in September 2009, the government still listed him as AppGate's chief executive. Domain Incite reported in 2016 that he had founded, managed and then sold the company, but did not give a buyer or sale price.

Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (2010 to 2016)

On September 3, 2009 the Swedish government appointed Marby Director-General and head of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority for a term running from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2015. He succeeded Marianne Treschow, whose term ended on December 31, 2009. The trade magazine Telekom idag reported that Marby had not applied for the post himself. He was found by the recruitment firm Horton International Sweden, and none of the 31 people who did apply had been chosen by the Ministry of Enterprise.

PTS is the Swedish state agency that supervises telecoms operators, internet services and the postal market. Under Marby the agency was among the winners of Sveriges Modernaste Myndighet ("Sweden's most modern government agency"), an award run by the Kvalitetsmässan trade fair together with the Ministry of Enterprise, PwC, VINNOVA and other partners. The award was created in 2009 to recognise efficient service, staff engagement, renewal and innovation in state agencies.

In June 2013, at a BEREC plenary session held in Athens on June 6 and 7, Marby was elected to chair BEREC, the body through which the national telecoms regulators of the European Union cooperate, for 2014. The post also made him vice chair from July to December 2013 and from January to June 2015. "This choice shows that there is much confidence in PTS within the EU," Marby said at the time, adding that "well-adjusted regulation is key to developing the market in the best way possible."

In June 2015 the Swedish public broadcaster's news service Ekot published allegations about his management of the agency from telecoms industry sources (see Controversies). On October 8, 2015 the government nevertheless extended his appointment by three years, to December 31, 2018.

On February 8, 2016, the same day ICANN announced his appointment, Marby asked to be released from his post as Director-General. Mehmet Kaplan, the minister responsible for information technology, said he regretted the departure: "He has done a good job and I would gladly have seen him stay for the rest of his term, but I respect his decision." Kaplan added that ICANN's choice of a Swede was "a receipt that Sweden is at the forefront" of digitalisation and IT.

ICANN (2016 to 2022)

Appointment

ICANN's board announced on February 8, 2016 that Marby would succeed Fadi Chehadé, whose term ended on March 15, 2016. Marby took up the post in May 2016. In the interval, Akram Atallah, president of ICANN's Global Domains Division, served as acting chief executive. Board chair Stephen Crocker said the board had "conducted an extensive, global search" and cited Marby's "leadership experience as a technology CEO and start-up founder" as well as his time at PTS.

Marby said on his appointment: "While I know there is much for me to learn, I am eager to work with ICANN's multistakeholder community," and said he was "very committed to implementing the community's decisions", both on the IANA stewardship transition and in ICANN's wider policy work. At the press conference announcing his hiring, he said he had worked with people involved in ICANN but had not himself taken part in its processes. He was 53, married with three children, and planned to move with his family from Stockholm to Los Angeles, where ICANN has its headquarters.

IANA stewardship transition

Marby arrived as ICANN was preparing to take over the IANA functions, the technical coordination of domain names, IP address allocation and protocol parameters, without the oversight contract it had held with the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) since 2000. The ICANN community had sent its transition proposals to NTIA on March 10, 2016, shortly before he joined.

On September 14, 2016 Marby testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts at a hearing titled "Protecting Internet Freedom: Implications of Ending U.S. Oversight of the Internet". The hearing was chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, who opposed the transition. In his written testimony Marby told senators that "ICANN and its multistakeholder community are ready to deliver". He listed the implementation work completed with the community, including new bylaws approved on May 27, 2016, agreements with the Internet Engineering Task Force and the regional internet registries, 90 days of parallel testing of the root zone management system with Verisign, and the incorporation of Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), the ICANN affiliate that would perform the IANA functions.

He argued that ICANN "cannot and does not use this technical mandate to control what Internet users access, do, or say over the Internet". He also argued that the accountability reforms tied the organisation more closely to California law, since moving its place of incorporation would require the approval of 75 percent of the board and at least three community groups. CNET reported that Marby told the hearing that delaying the transition would likely cause world leaders to lose faith in the United States, could lead them to push for the United Nations to take over ICANN's functions, and could encourage groups to create rival domain name systems. NTIA allowed the IANA functions contract to expire on October 1, 2016. ICANN's board later said Marby had been "instrumental in leading ICANN organization (org) through the final phase of the IANA stewardship transition".

GDPR and the WHOIS system

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation, enforceable from May 25, 2018, put ICANN's contracts at odds with European privacy law. Those contracts required registrars and registries to collect domain owners' personal data and publish it through the public WHOIS directory. On May 17, 2018 ICANN's board adopted a "Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data" that limited public WHOIS output while still requiring the collection of full registration data. Marby called the underlying interim compliance model "the product of significant collaboration between the org and the community" and said the organisation could now work toward "a permanent solution".

On May 25, 2018 ICANN filed injunction proceedings in Bonn against EPAG, a German registrar in the Tucows group. EPAG had told ICANN that it would stop collecting administrative and technical contact information for new registrations because it believed doing so would violate the GDPR. "The ICANN org is committed to enforcing our contracts to the fullest extent the law allows and preserving the integrity of the WHOIS system," Marby said. The preliminary injunction proceedings went through several rounds between May and September 2018, including an immediate appeal and a plea of remonstrance before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne. ICANN published the filings and court orders.

The longer-term replacement for WHOIS, the proposed Standardized System for Access and Disclosure (SSAD), went through an "operational design phase" that Marby's organisation had created. The resulting assessment, published in January 2022, estimated that SSAD could cost up to $27 million to build, might not go live until 2027 or 2028, and could cost between $14 million and $107 million a year to run. Board members and community representatives questioned whether it would be used enough to justify that cost.

Contract extension and later tenure

On October 9, 2020 ICANN announced that its board had extended Marby's executive services agreement by two years, to May 23, 2024. Board chair Maarten Botterman said Marby had "excelled in reaching out and working closely with the community and Board". The board said the extension would provide continuity during the first years of its 2021 to 2025 operating and financial plan. Marby said he was "humbled by the Board's trust in me". The vote was not unanimous. According to Domain Incite, which drew on ICANN's later published rationale, one director voted against partly because of concerns about "the CEO's communication style", and another abstained on the grounds that a formal performance review should have come first.

In September 2021 the board gave Marby's organisation $9 million and 10 months to carry out an operational design phase for a second round of new generic top-level domains. Marby announced in a December 20, 2021 blog post that the work was beginning. Some groups, among them the Brand Registry Group, criticised the time the process was taking, about a decade after the previous application round.

At the virtual ICANN72 meeting in October 2021, Marby warned of what he called "a threat to the multistakeholder model and ICANN's role in the Internet ecosystem". He was referring to Russia's campaign to have its candidate elected secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union and to a Russian policy paper proposing greater government control over internet infrastructure. "Some of you would say: oh, we heard that before," he said. "But this time I would say it's a little bit different because I think that some of the positions we see there are more mainstream than they were only five years ago."

Resignation

ICANN announced on December 21, 2022 that the board had accepted Marby's resignation with immediate effect. Under the board's resolution he became a contractor to ICANN from December 22, 2022 through May 23, 2024, "which constitutes the remainder of his term pursuant to his Executive Services Agreement". The key terms of the consulting arrangement were redacted, and the board said there would be "some fiscal impact to the organization". Sally Costerton, a senior vice president, was named interim president and chief executive.

Board chair Tripti Sinha thanked Marby for "his leadership over the past six-and-a-half years". She credited him with the IANA transition and with creating the DNS Security Facilitation Initiative Technical Study Group, the Domain Abuse Activity Reporting project and the Coalition for Digital Africa. The ICANN announcement also listed leading the organisation through the COVID-19 pandemic, creating the operational design phase process, and 90 percent positive staff engagement survey responses in 2022. Marby said he was "keenly aware that these are long-term initiatives for which leadership continuity is essential. The next President and CEO will shepherd the next phase of this work." Domain Incite described the resignation as a shock and noted that his consulting term ended on the date his employment contract had been due to expire anyway. Neither ICANN nor Marby gave a reason for the timing of the resignation.

ICANN's board selected Kurtis Lindqvist, chief executive of the London Internet Exchange, as Marby's permanent successor on June 8, 2024. He took office in December 2024. As of November 2026, no public announcement of a new executive role for Marby had been found.

Leadership and management style

ICANN's board, both when hiring Marby and when he left, emphasised operational experience and engagement with governments. Crocker cited his "operational experience and understanding of the Internet ecosystem" in 2016, and ICANN's 2022 farewell credited him with "successfully engaging with governments around the world to protect ICANN and gain independence to create policies". In his 2016 Senate testimony, Marby said that "under my leadership, ICANN the organization is renewing its focus as a service and support organization to ICANN's community".

His approach to the Ukraine war showed a preference for working through existing bodies. When ICANN committed $1 million to support internet access in Ukraine in March 2022, Marby wrote that the organisation had "made the decision to partner with an organization that is already on the ground in Ukraine", because "contributing to an existing organization is a better option than creating our own tailor-made solution, especially when we do not have expertise in disaster recovery and crisis response work".

His style also had critics. At PTS, industry sources quoted by Ekot in 2015 called his management unprofessional and personal (see Controversies). At ICANN, one director's vote against his 2020 contract extension was partly attributed to "the CEO's communication style". A former ICANN director of global media affairs, Brad White, wrote in October 2022 that by the time he left in January 2021, media inquiries were routinely escalated to several senior executives, the legal department "and sometimes the CEO", and that the collective decision was often "to say nothing, if at all possible".

Major deals and strategic decisions

Refusal to disconnect Russia

On February 28, 2022, days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov asked ICANN to revoke the country-code top-level domains operated from Russia, arrange the revocation of SSL certificates in those domains, and shut down root servers located in Russia. Marby refused in a letter dated March 2, 2022. "ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working," he wrote. He said the globally agreed policies "do not provide for ICANN to take unilateral action to disconnect these domains", that root servers are run by independent operators, and that ICANN has no role in issuing SSL certificates. "Our mission does not extend to taking punitive actions, issuing sanctions, or restricting access against segments of the Internet, regardless of the provocations," the letter said. Domain Incite judged the response "broadly, if not unanimously, supported in the ICANN community". The Internet Society and RIPE NCC took similar positions. ICANN separately pledged $1 million to support internet access in Ukraine.

The .org sale

In November 2019 the Internet Society agreed to sell Public Interest Registry (PIR), the nonprofit operator of the .org domain, to the private equity firm Ethos Capital, and to convert PIR into a for-profit company. Under PIR's registry agreements, ICANN had to approve or withhold consent for the change of control by May 4, 2020. After asking three times for further information and receiving more than 30 letters from stakeholders, ICANN's board withheld consent on April 30, 2020. The decision was announced by Botterman as board chair. Marby sat on the board as an ex officio director by virtue of his office.

Operational design phase

ICANN's board credited Marby with creating the operational design phase, a step in which the organisation's staff assess the cost, feasibility and risks of policy recommendations from the Generic Names Supporting Organization before the board decides whether to adopt them. The first two uses of the process, for the SSAD WHOIS reform and for the next round of new generic top-level domains, both produced large cost estimates and drew complaints about delay from parts of the community.

Financial and market performance

ICANN is a nonprofit and has no share price. Its US tax returns (Form 990) disclose executive pay and organisational finances. According to Domain Incite's reporting of those returns, its revenue was about $163.9 million in the fiscal year to June 30, 2021 and $167.9 million in fiscal 2022, with net assets of $555.8 million and $539.9 million respectively at the ends of those years.

Marby's own reported compensation was:

• Fiscal 2019: $865,570.
• Fiscal 2020: $1,059,222, made up of $991,557 in reportable compensation and $67,665 in estimated other compensation. Domain Incite reported that this made him the first ICANN chief executive to be paid more than $1 million a year, ahead of predecessors Rod Beckstrom, Paul Twomey and Chehadé.
• Fiscal 2021: $977,540. The fall was largely due to about $94,000 less in bonus payments.
• Fiscal 2022: $1,050,755, including a base salary of $734,579 and a performance-related portion of $218,315.

In February 2021 the board gave Marby a 5 percent raise, effective that July. It said a third-party review had found his salary below the 50th percentile of chief executives at comparable nonprofit, general industry and high-tech organisations, and that he had received only one previous raise, of 3 percent in 2019. He remained eligible for an annual bonus of up to 30 percent.

Board memberships and outside roles

• Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC): vice chair, July to December 2013; chair, 2014; vice chair, January to June 2015.
• ICANN Board of Directors: ex officio member as president and chief executive, 2016 to December 21, 2022.

Controversies

Criticism at PTS (2015)

On June 10, 2015 Ekot, the news service of Sveriges Radio, reported widespread dissatisfaction with Marby in the Swedish telecoms industry. It cited two separate reports compiled that spring by industry companies, one written by the internet provider Bahnhof. One report described him as "a pronounced power person" who "totally lacks confidence among the telecom market's players". Bahnhof's chief executive, Jon Karlung, called for his resignation, saying the agency was run "in a rather amateurish and personal way". Anonymous sources told Ekot that Marby had threatened to ruin an industry representative's career and had threatened to reveal a colleague's personal secret. The telecoms journalist Mats Sjödin said that after he asked Marby about a staff departure, Marby took hold of his shoulder, told him "I can get really aggressive", and pushed him on the shoulder. Marby declined to respond to the allegations, and the PTS press office said he would not comment.

When ICANN announced his appointment in February 2016, the report drew renewed attention. At the press conference Marby said the allegations had come from executives of regulated companies at a time when PTS had just required them to invest more heavily in their networks. He said the PTS staff, board, union and the government had backed him, pointing to the extension of his appointment in late 2015.

Executive pay at ICANN

Marby's pay drew criticism from domain industry commentators. The 2021 raise was opposed by three directors, Avri Doria, Ihab Osman and Mandla Msimang, and passed 11 votes to three. According to the board minutes as reported by Domain Incite, Osman noted that Marby was paid more than the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the head of the American Red Cross and raised the optics of a raise during the pandemic. Doria argued that nonprofit salaries should weigh more heavily in the comparison. Botterman said that Marby's pay was "well below" ICANN's target percentile however the comparison was weighted.

Personal life

In 2016 Marby was married with three children. He moved with his family from Stockholm to Los Angeles when he joined ICANN. The 2022 Göteborgs-Posten profile, written while he led the organisation, described him cycling to work.

See also

• ICANN
• Fadi Chehadé
• Kurtis Lindqvist
• Cisco Systems

External links

• ICANN official website