At a time when the internet has become as invisible—and as indispensable—as electricity, the conversations that shape its future rarely make it into public view. Behind every email delivered, every website discovered, and every digital service accessed by billions, lies a complex, collaborative system of governance, standards, and shared responsibility. It is within this often-unseen layer that institutions like ICANN and Internet Society quietly define how the internet works—and who it serves.
This interview brings together two pioneers who have not only witnessed but actively shaped that evolution over decades. George Sadowsky, an inductee of the Internet Hall of Fame and a key force behind global internet capacity-building initiatives, joins Suchit Nanda, one of India’s earliest internet evangelists and a long-time contributor to the country’s digital journey. Their association spans more than thirty years—mirroring the arc of the Internet itself, from a niche academic network to a global public infrastructure.
Recorded at ICANN85 in Mumbai, this conversation goes beyond institutional definitions. It explores the philosophy of a multi-stakeholder internet, the early efforts to democratize access across developing nations, and the profound impact of enabling millions to not just use the internet—but build it.
From training the first generation of internet leaders in emerging economies to reflecting on the risks of misinformation and the promise of a more inclusive, multilingual web, Sadowsky offers a rare, ground-level perspective on how the internet became what it is—and where it may be headed next.
This is not just a retrospective. It is a reminder that the Internet, at its core, is a human system—shaped by those who choose to participate, question, and build for others.
Some edited excerpts:
SN: George, you and I, have known each other for a very long time- over three decades! As a background, can you share a little bit about what is ICANN85, and briefly, what’s ISOC?
GS: There is nothing brief about describing the structure of the internet management system, of which ISOC and ICANN are fundamental parts. One of the reasons that the internet works so well is because of the DNS or the domain name system. And that is if you know a person’s email address, then you can find them, you can write to them, no matter where you are and if you know the name of a website, you can you can find it wherever you are in the world.
As opposed to finding or trying to remember numbers, you remember names, such as, say “IDRC.CA”. That’s seven characters and it gets you to the IDRC in Canada, and you don’t have to remember anything else. The domain system is a decentralized database system. It depends upon the work of many, many people to function well. And it functions extraordinary well. It does its job well. ICANN is the de facto regulator of the DNS system. It’s an all-volunteer organization. It has no national or international status to speak of. Multi-sectors contribute to it. There are obvious agreements and disagreements and we work it out together. This is very important in governance and it includes governments, business, academic sector, the not-for-profit, civil society and it attempts to determine the set of policies which make the DNS run effectively and efficiently and serve the internet user community. Which is now 6 billion people and growing!
SN: That’s right. So that means if you’re on the Internet, you are in some sense, connected to and impacted by the policy or the decision making of ICANN.
GS: That’s right. And therefore in a sense, it’s also very important for anybody who’s on the internet who is concerned about the way the internet is going or evolving to participate in these processes. Or at least to be aware of them and to understand the importance of them and the fact that this is how the internet is being structured to serve their needs. I suspect if all 6 billion people on the internet decided to participate in ICANN, we wouldn’t be able to find a place – we might have to find a continent big enough. But it’s useful to understand the underpinnings of it.
Now, I say that with a bit of hesitation. Because the idea of having the internet fade into the background as infrastructure is really appealing. It’s a bit like you don’t have to know about where electricity is generated. What you have to know is that if you pull the switch, the light goes on. That’s infrastructure and it’s invisible to you until it fails – and then it becomes very important and very visible. So considering the internet as infrastructure isn’t a bad thing but realizing that a lot goes on behind the curtain is important.
SN: You’re right, so how is the ICANN different from ISOC and what was the role that you played in both these organizations?
GS: The Internet Society predated ICANN. The idea of the Internet Society was to raise money to fund the activities of the IETF, which is the multi-stakeholder volunteer run standards organization. The IETF helps the internet to function well. It’s the engineering task force where you agree upon protocols and standards so that everything works the way it’s supposed to work and is interoperable. But after ISOC was founded, it took an interest in other things too, including social, economic and policy affecting the internet as well as launching chapters in many countries that helped in solving local problems.
SN: And what was your role in both these organizations?
GS: Well in the ISOC I was on the Board for 10 years, but my primary association was by formulating the idea of having network technology workshops for people from developing countries- an all-volunteer job.
SN: Can you share more on this? What was the idea behind it and how did it come about?
GS: Yes. The idea behind it was to bring developing countries up to the same level as developed countries with respect to internet. So the free flow of information, the ability to access it anywhere in the world was a goal. We wanted to teach people in developing countries how to access the internet and then how to build their own internet structures. And I think by and large that’s been accomplished, although there are still areas of the world where internet access is problematic, we’ve by and large, achieved our goal.
SN: So this initiative took place in 1993, if I’m correct.
GS: Annually from 1993 to 2001. I remember Suchit, you were invited to the very first one in 1993 held at Stanford Univ., San Francisco, USA, along with INET’93 and again in INET’94 at Prague, Czech 1994. At these workshops, we brought people from developing countries and trained them. It was a week of training and then a week of attending the internet society conferences (INET) learning what the profession was doing and meeting with their counterparts in developed countries. In this area, networking is very important.
SN: Yes I remember the workshops and attending INET’93, INET’94 and INET’98. So are you in touch with the people who attended these workshops? Over the years how have they grown and do you look back with satisfaction that you were able to make it happen?
GS: Oh, very much so. A lot of satisfaction. Five of the people have become Ministers of Science or Telecommunication in five different countries. And many of the others have become leaders of one kind or another in various sectors in their own countries. They’re very visible and we’re very proud of that. You were there, and you went onto help build India’s Internet services.
SN: So was this the reason why, or at least one of the contributing reasons why George you were inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame?
GS: That was the primary reason. I am not a technologist of any depth, but apparently seemed to have brought a lot of people together and given them the tools that they needed. I’ve worked in 50 countries. And a lot of those countries, probably the majority of them, I worked in before the internet existed in the 1970s, helping them gain access to computers which is a prerequisite for going onto the internet. I think the magnification came through the attendance of people from developing countries to the workshops.
We think that we got students from every country except North Korea. I don’t know, may be some island communities in the Pacific we missed, but by and large I think we covered the developing world. And by the way, this was I should mention, a team effort. Sure. I admit that I was the instigator and did a lot of work on it, but there were a lot of other volunteers who helped.
SN: I’m sure with anything significant that happens there is one person who lead the show, instigate, support and handhold. This year ICANN85 is being held in Mumbai, how do you see that? Any special significance? And how do you perceive internet in India.
GS: Well, India I think I would not characterize today as a developing country, certainly not with respect to internet penetration. There are what a billion internet users in India, that doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re all proficient in how to get access and how to exploit the internet to its fullest, but that part is not true in any country. So I think India has come up to the level in technology of developed countries. And of course India was early in the computing field also. India in the 1970s had expertise in computing and over the years has built and create a fairly robust layer of technologists and people concerned about the effects of computing and networking on the larger society. Right? We were in Hyderabad with ICANN in 2016 and now Mumbai in 2026.
SN: That’s right.
GS: I was here in India in 1984, working for the UN, specking supercomputers for the CWPRS (Central Water and Power Research Station) in Pune. So there’s a strong analytic and technical thread in this culture that asserts itself in interesting ways. And so I think this is just a good place to be and it’s a place where there’s an enormous amount of entrepreneurism in technology and internet.
SN: It is said with good reason that the internet is sort of like the underlying layer on which a lot of other technologies are built whether it is AI or communications or e-services – we have some of the largest deployments of what we call Aadhaar, which is like personal identification system, then there is e-banking. So the number of people using the Internet in India is gigantic and lot of that is on IP or Internet.
GS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The internet is a carrier for so many different services and in particular the World Wide Web which is perhaps the major one at the moment, but there’s so much knowledge, so much information and it’s all accessible to anyone who is curious enough to find it. And that is a change in the world, a major change.
SN: So given that fact; I have two questions: What worries you about internet today and what excites you about the Internet today?
GS: Oh what worries me is the pollution of facts on the internet. The degree and the amount of misinformation and disinformation. Now misinformation and disinformation have been around for a long time, right, but the fact is that the internet is an amplifier of many things and it can be used to amplify these things, I worry about that. The losing of trust is very bad and that has nothing to do with the technology.
It’s really a reflection of the bad aspects of human nature. And of course the internet really, if you look at it, ‘the internet is us’. Right? So what excites me is that the playing field is level and we can now take advantage of all the intelligence and all of the curiosity of people wherever they are. We have so many problems in this world, we better get everybody who is capable of helping us to solve them and get into the business of helping. The best part is that the internet allows us to do that. The other thing is that we’re breaking down the barriers between cultures and languages in ways that have not been done before. And a lot of the prejudices that exist between races, between countries, between philosophies are now getting questioned in ways that they haven’t been before because we’re getting this giant mixing. You know, the US has been characterized as a society that incorporates other cultures. It’s a great mixing bowl. I think the world is going to look like that and I think that’s a good thing. The internet will play a significant part in that.
SN: Absolutely. Now, if you look at the future say five years ahead, and it’s always difficult to predict in areas that evolve so rapidly, but still, if you had to list out a couple of things that you think will grow rapidly, what would those be? It’s a question from a youth’s perspective. What should they be looking at or what should they be doing or what should they be focusing on to be able to ride this wave or participate in a bigger way?
GS: Oh, first of all, the internet and communications devices that use it are here to stay, so get used to it and learn to be proficient in it. Second, the effect of artificial intelligence, we don’t know what it is going to be and it’ll probably be very mixed and multi-dimensional. Understand it because if you don’t understand it, you’re likely to misuse it or be misled by it. So that’s a technology one has to understand.
SN: Fantastic. And now, what gives you the most satisfaction looking back at so many years that you spent in the in the journey of ISOC, ICANN, being on the boards and sort of getting to where we are today. What gives you the most satisfaction?
GS: The fact that our students have done well and that they have remained true to the purpose of taking what they learned and teaching others. It’s been an explosion and in that sense, we did the right thing. We invested a lot and we are getting so much more back from it. And you Suchit should mention that you’re one of them. Suchit, you should mention your own exploits in this too. I mean you’re one of the big successes. You know Vint (Cerf) has this saying, success has a thousand fathers. And failure is an orphan. Well you’re one of those fathers. I don’t know if there are a thousand of them. I don’t know India that well, but you’re in there in that list for sure.
SN: Thank you for your kind words. I was just there at the right time, at the right place. So in closing, two points that I would want you to dwell on would be to look at the inclusiveness of internet with local languages on internet happening in a big and systematic way which means, while earlier people who didn’t speak the English language were finding it hard, now it is not going to be so. They will interact in their own languages. And second is that I liked your point about the bandwidth being sort of a given which earlier was the differentiator between developing versus non-developing countries. Now we’re all moving onto other frontiers like space and IoT devices etc. How do you see this shaping up?
GS: Well, let’s take the first one. Vint Cerf, who is clearly a father of the internet has said in explaining some of the ‘what the internet looks like today’. He said the internet was a lab experiment and it escaped the laboratory and it was a lab experiment typically in the United States with some modest connection with the UK and a little bit with Japan. And so what did we do? We used the Latin alphabet and we built on that because we all understood it. I’m not “we”, we being the collection of people then, I wasn’t part of that. Everybody spoke English, right, and so English was used as the basis for communication. It was never thought that this would be the internet that it is today.
SN: So at one point of time in the past, we were worried about creating a haves- and haves-not by those who were having internet and those who didn’t have internet. And there was a sense that those who had the internet would have an unfair advantage to access the information or technologies. And we were leaving behind a large set of people simply because they couldn’t afford it or didn’t have access to it or they didn’t have the language interface. So I think some of those issues are being dealt with at ICANN and IETF.
GS: Yeah, but I wouldn’t use the word fair or unfair because that assumes a fairness as a metric which as you know, the universe isn’t fair. Right. Some people just ended up on a patch of land that had a hell of a lot of oil underneath. Others did not. As an example. And that could be water, it could be oil, some natural resource, it could be favourable climate for growing food. It levelled the opportunity.
SN: Ahh, that’s a good way to put it.
GS: Right. The opportunities weren’t there but once you level the opportunity, then whatever skills people have, curiosity or whatever the ability to affect change in their society, it gives them the opportunity to practice those skills. And if you can level opportunity I think that’s probably enough. You can’t level intelligence, intelligence is randomly distributed and every country has it. And the people who could exercise that intelligence but don’t have the opportunity are the people who were cut out previously. Putting the internet in the hands levels the opportunity. Say Ramanujan, you know Srinivasa Ramanujan the mathematician who worked with Hardy and so on and unfortunately came to an early end… suppose he had had the internet? I don’t know but he probably would have accomplished a lot more. So I mean there are little Ramanujans all around.
SN: I’m sure that there are many Srinivasa Ramanujans of today around us, and so if you were addressing a room full of young Indians, what would you say to them in respect to internet and technology, how would you guide them today? What would you say to them?
GS: Well, first I think I would say. Welcome to the world. It’s a big one. I don’t know if it’s the same opportunities or not, but the field of opportunities is increasingly level. Learn to live in it. Learn to exploit it. Learn to believe. Recognize that just because you’re Indian doesn’t mean you’re going to spend all your life in India. This is a worldwide labour market. You can compete anywhere. But on the other hand, all those other people anywhere can also compete in India. And so recognize that as you do your own career development. Follow your passion. Do your best regardless of anything. Get in the habit of doing your best. On the other hand, who am I to tell people how to live?
SN: Sure you can guide with your vast experience and outstanding achievements in life. I think this has been a lovely conversation with such deep insights and gems. Thank you George for taking the time out.
–George Sadowsky is a well-known expert in Internet and the use of information technology for social and economic development. Former ED of GIPI (Global Internet Policy Initiative). He founded and directed the Internet Society’s series of network technology workshops for students from developing countries. Sadowsky has worked in more than 50 developing countries and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of ICANN, and was a pioneer member of the Internet Society and a member of its Board of Trustees for seven years during its formative period. www.georgesadowsky.org
— Suchit Nanda (www.suchitnanda.com) is a pioneering figure in the history of the Internet and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in India and has consulted to many International organizations like IDRC, ORBICOM, UNDP-APDIP, UNESCO etc. He has been associated with Express Computer since launch and has served as Advisor on the Editorial Board. Suchit contributed articles and wrote on technology for Express Computer. He is CEO of Online Services, Advisor to Reliance Industries Ltd., Reliance Foundation, SAGE Foundation and associated with APNIC Foundation.