PATRICK JONES’ TYPICAL DAYS at the office are never typical, and rarely in an office.
As senior director of security for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Jones supports the private nonprofit group’s work assigning and coordinating all Internet addresses around the world.
“It’s not a 9-to-5 day,” Jones said in November during a visit to the Wabash campus. “Sometimes I’m on the road, or I take the kids to school and come home and do calls. I may have calls with our headquarters in Los Angeles, or with a working group chair in Mexico City, or with staff in Egypt or some other part of the world.
“Last week, our group met in Toronto, in April were in Beijing, in July we’ll be in Durban, South Africa.”
Working for the organization that decides which Web addresses get seen on the Internet and being the gateway to the money and power that implies sometimes rouses controversy.
“It’s not necessarily easy—there are many hard-fought discussions and international challenges that have little to do with the Internet but that often reflect themselves in the conversations,” Jones said. “Politics, legal and law-enforcement challenges, business interests, concerns about terrorism: These things come up, and this is a forum where people can work through those issues the best that they can.
“We try to be this platform where people of diverse interests can come together and work through big problems.” ICANN was created in 1998 by a mandate from the U.S. government, and Jones’ interest in the organization and its work began soon after. In 2001 he was working as a law clerk at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis when, on his own, he created The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy legal information site, one of the first Web sites to provide legal information about domain name disputes.
“I would write up little stories about these cases and attorneys would find them and ask questions,” Jones said. He ran the site for six years, and his work caught the attention of ICANN.
“Once I got the job at ICANN, I sold the site off so it wouldn’t be a conflict of interest. After nearly seven years I’m now part of this growing executive team. I’ve been able to work my way up.”
Jones calls 2013 an exciting and challenging time to work for ICANN.
“The organization is working through a multiyear effort to grow the namespace from 315 top-level domains on the Internet to a point where, two years from now, we may have 700, 800, even 900 new top-level domains on the Internet.
“We are going from a dot.com world online to a world where addresses will include different languages, characters, and generic terms.”
Businesses will have a huge choice of domain names to use for their Web sites—.music, .hotel, .doctor, practically anything. In expanding the name choices, ICANN hopes to increase choice and competition in the marketplace, open opportunities for investment, and increase the number of online cultural, geographic, and linguistic communities.
“Because the Internet is global and everybody uses it, so many diverse interests rely on it to share information. It’s not something that can be government?driven.”
Jones speaks passionately about the work.
“I’m very fortunate in that I can do what I love, do something that I feel has a higher purpose,” he said. “This is more of a life we lead because we want things to be better.
“I have two young kids. I want them to be able to interact in a world where there’s a free exchange of ideas.
“My three-year-old’s favorite song is [the Beatles’] ‘Yellow Submarine.’”
Jones sang the chorus—“We all live in a yellow submarine.
“I think of the Internet as that yellow submarine, this thing that is full of wonder and opportunity. For them, it’s just there, but in reality it’s only there because people work hard and work together.”
Jones feels glad and called to be one of those people.
“I get to work with others from different cultures, see the world through a new lens. Each time you go to a new place, it changes you. The experiences I’ve had reinforce the beauty of a liberal arts education, because I feellike I’m open and just taking the world as it comes, applying what I learn to the work I do, and living a fascinating life.”